Merico or Americo-Liberian (or the informal colloquial name "American") is an English-based creole language spoken until recently in

Liberia Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean ...

Americo-Liberians Americo-Liberian people or Congo people or Congau people in Liberian English,Cooper, Helene, ''The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood'' (United States: Simon and Schuster, 2008), p. 6 are a Liberian ethnic group of Afr ...

, descendants of original settlers, freed slaves, and

African Americans African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

who emigrated from the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

between 1821 and the 1870s. It is distinguished from Liberian Kreyol and from

Kru KRU was a Malaysian pop boy band formed in 1992. The group comprises three brothers, namely Datuk Norman Abdul Halim, Datuk Yusry Abdul Halim and Edry Abdul Halim'. Apart from revolutionising the Malaysian music scene with their blend of pop, ...

, and may be connected to Gullah and Jamaican Creole. The original settlers numbered 19,000 in 1860. By 1975 the language was partly decreolized, restricted to informal settings.

Grammatical features

Plurals are unmarked, as in "rock", "rocks", or marked with a

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...

, as in "rocks". The verb expressing "to be" is , as in "she is small", but adjectives may be used without it, as in "he is big". Verbs are not inflected for past tense. Separate particles are used to indicate some verb tenses: * for negation ( "I didn't ask the child"), * or for continuing action ( "he is talking at great length", "she is crying"), * for future ( "we will come"), * or for completed action ( "they have gone that way", "not a little piece was left") The pronouns include: * Subject: /, //, /, , , / * Object: , , /, , /, ' * Possessive: /, /, /, /, ,

References

Americo-Liberian people English-based pidgins and creoles of Africa Languages of Liberia Languages attested from the 19th century {{pidgincreole-lang-stub

Grammatical features

See also

References