لخّصلي

The practice of transporting cheap black labour from western Africa to the New World was begun by the Spaniards in the 16th Century, and it had been also used by the Portuguese, Dutch and French, but it was adopted in earnest by the British in the early 17th Century. The British had established numerous outposts in the Caribbean (dubbed the “West Indies” by Columbus out of the conviction that he had reached the spice islands of the Indies, or Asia, by a western route), and had developed a whole trading empire to take advantage of the tropical climate of the region. The labour-intensive work on tobacco, cocoa, cotton and particularly sugar plantations required large numbers of cheap workers, and the Atlantic slave trade triangle (Britain - West Africa - Americas) was developed to supply it, although soon a demand also grew for household servants. The numbers of African slaves in the America alone grew from just twenty in 1619 to over 4 million at the time of the American abolition of slavery after the Civil War in 1865 (the British had abolished the slave trade earlier, in 1807). The slaves transported by the British to work in the plantations of the American south and the islands of the West Indies were mainly from a region of West Africa rich in hundreds of different languages, and most were superb natural linguists, often speaking anywhere between three and six African languages fluently. Due to the deliberate practice of shipping slaves of different language backgrounds together (in an attempt to avoid plots and rebellions), the captives developed their own English-based pidgin language, which they used to communicate with the largely English-speaking sailors and landowners, and also between themselves. A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between people with no language in common. Verb forms in particular are simplified (e.g. “me go run school”, “him done go”, etc), but adjectives are also often used instead of adverbs, verbs instead of prepositions, pronouns are no inflected, etc. The resulting strippeddown language may be crude but it is usually serviceable and efficient. Once established in the Americas, these pidgins developed into stable creoles, forms of simplified English combined with many words from a variety of African languages. Most of the African slaves made landfall at Sullivan Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, and even today Gullah can be heard in many of the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. Gullah is an English-African patois (the name is possibly derived from the word Angola), thought to be remarkably unchanged from that spoken by African slaves two or three centuries ago. Gullah and similar “plantation creoles” provided the basis of much of modern Black American English, street slang and hip-hop, but interestingly it also significantly influenced the language and accent of the aristocratic white owners, and the modern English of the southern states.