"Some Scholars contend that the African American vernacular bears the vivid imprint of the African languages spoken by slaves who came to this country in waves from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries."(Rickford, 2000, p.129)
The seventeenth century
- "The successful English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607." ( Rickford, 2000. p. 131)
- "A dozen years later, the Jamestown settlers acquired twenty Africans as indentured servants." (Rickford, 2000, p. 131)
- "As in naturalistic, unschooled second-language learning everywhere, Africans arriving in America in the seventeenth century might have transferred words and other features from their native languages, and simplified or generalized features of the target language." (Rickford, 2000, p. 132)
- "New creole languages based on English had begun to emerge - Jamaican Creole in Jamaica and Sranan in Suriname." (Rickford, 2000, p. 132)
- Pidgin language - "When speakers of different languages come into contact with one another, they may develop a simplified variety of the socially dominant language to communicate with one another." (Rickford, p. 132, 2000)
- Creole - "If that pidgin is acquired and used as a native language ( for example by slave children born on the plantation)." (Rickford, 2000, p. 132)
World Pidgins
The eighteenth century
- "Throughout the eighteenth century, the proportions of blacks in the American colonies increased steadily, as did the numbers who were brought directly from Africa." (Rickford,2000, p. 134)
- "The blacks increasingly learned their English not from whites, but from other blacks, who may have been speaking highly vernacular dialects themselves; this reflects the process of language acquisition and the influence of African languages." (Rickford, 2000 p. 134)
- "During the War for Independence, fought between 1776 and 1783, thousands of slaves, attracted by promises of freedom, fled to ( and sometimes fought for) the British side. " (Rickford, 2000, p. 137)
- "Many slaves and ex-slaves settled in Nova Scotia after the war, some eleven hundred of them moving on from there to Sierra Leone, where they found Freetown in 1792. The descendants of these diasporic African Americans in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone and Liberia would be recorded by linguists in the latter half of the twentieth century, and their speech used to reconstruct the nature of the African American vernacular of the late eighteenth century." (Rickford, 2000, p. 137)
- "Insofar as wide linguistic variations existed, eighteenth-century African America was much like the African America of today, although the sociohistorical circumstances shaping the variations were quite different." (Rickford, 2000, p. 137)
Many years had passed between the arrival of Europeans to Africa and 1795, the time this image was engraved. The Portuguese, who had explored much of the coast of western Africa under the sponsorship of Prince Henry, landed along the shores of the Senegal River 350 years earlier.
The nineteenth century
- "U.S. slave populations underwent massive increases from seven hundred thousand in 1790 to nearly four million in 1860." (Rickford, 2000, p. 138)
- "Domestic slave trade spread the black vernacular westward, in a pattern that would be repeated and accelerated in black migrations from the South in the twentieth century." (Rickford, 2000, p.138)
- "Domestic slave trade also broke up the black family, as mothers, fathers, and children were often separated from each other in the profit making fervor that drove the nineteenth-century domestic slave trade." (Rickford, 2000, p. 139)
- "The War of 1812 with Britain led to further emigration of blacks to Canada and to a lesser extent the West Indies." (Rickford, 2000, p. 139)
- "In the 1820s and 1830s, colonization movements resulted in the emigration of thousands of blacks to Samana and other parts of the Dominican Republic and, in even greater numbers, to Liberia." (Rickford, 2000, p. 139)
- "Analyses of modern-day Samana English and Liberian English have become, in the last decade and a half, important indicators of what the black vernacular may have been like in earlier times." (Rickford, 2000, p. 139)
- "The Civil War between North and the South began in 1861.Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 offered freedom to all slaves in rebellious Confederate states in January 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 constitutionally abolished slavery everywhere in the United States." (Rickford, 2000, p. 139)
The twentieth century
- "World War I increased the need for labor in northern industries at the same time that it caused a precipitous drop in European immigration- from one million in 1914 to a fourth of that in 1916 and a tenth in 1918." (Rickford, 2000, p. 141)
- "Throughout the twentieth century, especially before the civil rights struggles and legislation of the 1960s, what blacks encountered both in the South and in the "promised land"- the North and the West- was discrimination in jobs and unions, segregation in housing, and distinct inequalities in education." (Rickford, 2000, p. 142)
- "The negatives of history in 20th century of black people are real, and they explain the existence of seething "oppositional identity" that anthropologist John Ogbu finds alive and well in the African American community. That attitude in turn fuels the continued existence and development of the African American vernacular- Spoken Soul." (Rickford, 2000, p. 144)
World War I Picture: African-American World War I Soldiers Arriving Home