The history of LibSE

LibSE is a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century African American English (AAE) that the immigrants brought with them. While the existence of features in LibSE has been used to show that putative innovations in modern African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have in fact been around for a long time, LibSE is not itself nineteenth-century AAE; it has had 175 years in which to undergo change from that “starting point.”

The political state of Liberia represents the legacy of an early nineteenth-century American attempt to solve an American problem by, quite literally, getting the problem to go away. The “problem” involved the status of free African Americans. They were American citizens, yet the discrimination against them everywhere in the US was so pervasive that many people held that they would always be subject to an inferior status. In 1816 white clergymen founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) in Washington, DC, and in 1822 the Society placed its first group of African American colonists in what was to become Liberia. The ACS had as its goal the founding of a colony in Africa where free people of color could enjoy the full privileges of freedom. Setting up such a colony – Liberia – proved extremely costly, and most of the funding actually came from Southern slaveholders who saw the presence in the US of free African Americans as a threat to the status quo. The connection between slaveholders and the ACS served to discredit the ACS among the free African Americans whom it most sought to recruit. The mortality rate among colonists during the Liberian scheme’s first two decades was “shockingly high” (Shick 1980: 27); news of this further dissuaded those with a choice from immigrating there. In the decades prior to the American Civil war, a majority of those who immigrated to Liberia had been slaves emancipated on condition that they immigrate.

Over the first 25 years of immigration to Liberia, the largest number of African Americans came from Virginia followed by Maryland and North Carolina. Subsequently, Georgia sent large numbers of immigrants and South Carolina as well (cf. Singler 1989). While the Settlers established communities along a 250-mile stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, from Robertsport in the northwest to Harper in the southeast, most of the colonists settled in Monrovia or in nearby communities along the banks of the St. Paul River. From the outset Settler politics and society were dominated by those who had emigrated from Virginia and states north of it.

A second population also arrived in Liberia in the nineteenth century, Recaptured Africans. They were individuals who had been on slave ships headed to the Western Hemisphere when these ships were intercepted by the US Navy. Almost all of them came from the Congo River; the Liberian term for Recaptured Africans is “Congo.” (This is the Liberian spelling, as illustrated by the name of a Monrovia neighborhood, “Oldest Congotown,” but the pronunciation is [kɔŋgɔ].) In all, more than 5700 Recaptured Africans were delivered to Monrovia, 4700 of them in or around 1860. The one numerically significant group of Recaptured Africans not from the Congo River region was a boatload of Yorùbá people from the Nigerian coast; upon arrival in Liberia, they were placed in Sinoe County.

Like the Settlers, the Recaptured Africans had no pre-existing ties to the indigenous population. They entered into the lower echelons of Settler society and became part of that group. Ultimately the term “Congo” came to be used to refer to the Settlers as a whole. While it carries a somewhat pejorative connotation, it is also by far the most common term used today to refer to the Settlers. In the same way, “Congo English” is the most common designation for what I term “Liberian Settler English.” As for specific Bantu elements or, representing a smaller presence, Yorùbá elements, I have never been able to identify any in Settler speech. That is not to say they don’t exist, only that my search has not uncovered them. In the discussion that follows of Settlers today and their language, the term “Settler” is meant to encompass Recaptured Africans as well.

The fundamental demographic divide in Liberia from 1822 onward has been that between Settlers and indigenous people. The Settlers perceived themselves as superior. They held that their westernness, with its Christianity and English literacy, endowed them with the right to rule.

In an 1860 Liberian Independence Day oration, the Cambridge-educated Episcopal priest the Rev. Alexander Crummell proclaimed:

Here, on this coast ... is an organized community, republican in form and name; a people possessed of Christian institutions and civilized habits, with this one marked peculiarity, that is, that in color, race, and origin, they are identical with the masses around them; and yet speak the refined and cultivated English language (1862: 9).

In his speech Crummell recalled that in an oration two years earlier he had

… pointed out among other providential events the fact, that the exile of our fathers from their African homes to America, had given us, their children, at least one item of compensation, namely, the possession of the Anglo-Saxon tongue; that this language put us in a position which none other on the globe could give us; and that it was impossible to estimate too highly, the prerogatives and the elevation the Almighty has bestowed upon us, in our having as our own, the speech of Chaucer and Shakespeare, of Milton and Wordsworth, or [sic] Bacon and Burke, of Franklin and Webster ... (1862: 9)

Crummell’s rhetoric embodies the Settlers’ assertion that their literacy in English endowed them with the right to dominate the non-English-speaking population. In modern times members of indigenous ethnic groups have asserted their right to participate in Liberian government, but they have never challenged the primacy of English.

From the arrival of the earlier Settlers to the present day, a discrepancy has endured between the Settlers’ language about language, specifically about written standard English, and their own command of English literacy and standard English. For, even by the most rudimentary criteria, only a minority of the early Settlers were actually literate. Not one of the colonists who arrived in the first few years of settlement had had even a “plain English education” (Family Visitory, quoted in the African Repository 1825: 236). A remark a generation later showed that there had been little change over the years: a Settler complained that among those who were newly arrived “[m]en of means … [are] exceptions … to the common rule, that is the no money, no A.B.C. men, that come directly from the plantation &c.&c.” (Liberia Herald August 2, 1854). Certainly Liberia in its early days featured a Settler intelligentsia, a handful of highly educated immigrants (cf. Singler 1976–1977). They were, however, so few in number that from the outset the Settlers found it difficult to establish and maintain schools for their children. Because their own children were not being well-educated, Settler leaders objected to missionary efforts to educate indigenous children. Nonetheless, the Settlers’ limited literacy and their difficulties in maintaining schools do not gainsay the central role in such key Settler institutions as government, religion, formal schooling, and the Masonic lodge.

The Settlers, occasionally with the timely support of a US gunboat, established their hegemony along the coast. As noted, they extended their control into the interior early in the twentieth century. Never more than 3% of Liberia’s population, the Settlers ruled Liberia until a military coup in 1980 placed Samuel Kanyon Doe, an indigenous Liberian, in power. Even though the 1989–1997 civil war and subsequent rebellions have not been simply or even primarily about the Settler-indigenous divide, that division remains a defining feature of Liberian politics and society.

The discussion of LibSE phonetics and phonology below, like most of my research on LibSE, focuses on the LibSE of Sinoe County, 150 miles down the coast from Monrovia. Founded by the Mississippi Colonization Society to be Mississippi in Africa, the Sinoe Settlers differed from other Settlers both in their provenance and in their post-immigration history. Far more than was true of other Settler communities, a significant number of people who immigrated to Sinoe came from large plantations (rather than small agricultural holdings or cities), and a far greater proportion came from the Deep South, particularly Mississippi and Georgia. Abandoned by the Mississippi Colonization Society almost immediately, the Sinoe settlements received far less support from the central government in Monrovia than did the other Settler communities. Moreover, Sinoe was the one cluster of Settler communities without a significant missionary presence in the nineteenth century. Taken together, the lack of government resources and the absence of missionaries mean that standardizing forces would have been weaker in Sinoe than elsewhere. Finally, except possibly for Maryland-in-Africa, nowhere else was Settler-indigene hostility so intense and so protracted. All of these factors appear to make Sinoe the likeliest stronghold in Liberia and possibly in the entire African American diaspora for the ongoing retention and transmission of the vernacular features that African American émigres had brought with them from the US.

In evaluating the speech of Sinoe Settlers, the impact of formal education upon an individual’s speech must be considered. In Sinoe as elsewhere in Liberia, the more schooling someone has, the less distinctively Settler the person’s speech will be, particularly in a formal setting such as a recorded interview. (Among the elders whose interviews form the Sinoe Settler corpus, five had at least begun secondary school, six had completed fourth, fifth, or sixth grade, and three had had no formal education to speak of.) Strictly speaking, within the Sinoe corpus, a speaker’s occupation was a more consistent indicator of a speaker’s style in an interview, with teachers least likely to use distinctively vernacular Settler features, that is, even less likely than non-teachers who had had more extensive formal education. For all speakers, but for teachers most of all, the question arises as to the extent to which they controlled and used two varieties, one the in-group Settler English, the other a variety that was less distinctively Settler.

Within Sinoe, there is a political – and linguistic – distinction between the county seat, Greenville, and settlements up the Sinoe River. In modern times Greenville is perceived as everyone’s county capital, but upriver settlements like Lexington, Louisiana, and Bluntsville are recognized as “belonging” to the Settlers. Thus, the speech of the upriver Settlers shows much less accommodation to the speech of non-Settler Liberians. A further point in considering the LibSE of Sinoe County is its relationship to the LibSE of the rest of the coast. The rest of Liberia’s Settler English has been studied very little; however, what seems to show up is that the difference between Sinoenians and non-Sinoenians is more quantitative than qualitative. On limited evidence, then, it is usually the case not that Sinoe Settlers use a greater number of distinctive features (here, distinctively American, and, usually, distinctively African American) than other Settlers, but rather that they use them more often. At the same time, there may be some instances in which non-Sinoe Settlers use standard-like features that Sinoe Settlers do not. For example, because Sinoe Settler speech shows a strong preference for CV syllables, the grammar blocks contracted forms of will, e.g. I’ll; non-Sinoe Settlers, on the other hand, do use I’ll and the other ’ll contractions.