There was fly before dog ear get [a] sore: Vernacular Liberian English vis-à-vis early African American English and still earlier West African Pidgin English

John Victor Singler, New York University¹

From the very beginning into the modern era, the cornerstone of the Settlers’ assertions of a right to rule was their contact with Western institutions, especially Christianity, literacy, and the English language (cf. Singler 1977). An ongoing American missionary presence reinforced a link between Christianity and English, specifically American English. Further, in the twentieth century, close political ties between the United States and Liberia provided an ongoing American presence in Liberia, from troops during World War II to large numbers of Peace Corps volunteers and American aid workers during the Cold War.

Manifestations of an American presence in Liberia have been there from the beginning—in, for example, such Settler place names as Philadelphia and Louisiana. In recent times, visual evidence of the American connection has included leftover New York City police uniforms on Monrovia police officers, old US mail boxes, and the fact that virtually everyone wears doka fleh, i.e. second-hand clothing imported from the US.

With this American backdrop and the Settlers’ ongoing championing of their American roots, including their resolute monolingualism in English, it is perhaps inevitable that outsiders—and even many Liberians—assume that the English that Liberians speak is American in origin. The quote from Wikipedia in (1) as of October 21, 2006, reflects that belief.²

1. 
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberian_English, as of October 21, 2006
   

When a mangy dog has a sore on its ear, flies seemingly come out of nowhere to get to it. However, we know that they didn’t really come out of nowhere. In a similar bit of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning, many people assume that the Settlers introduced English to Liberia. In fact, a variety of it was already in place when they arrived. Jehudi Ashmun, the white missionary in charge of the first group of Settlers, wrote back to America: “very many in all the maritime tribes, speak a corruption of the English language” (African Repository, Nov. 1827:263) At another time he wrote: “A . . . facility which few pagan tribes [elsewhere] offer to the American Missionary, is to be found in the circumstance, that every head man around us, and hundreds of their people speak, and can be made to understand our language without an interpreter” (quoted in Gurley, 1835: Appendix, p. 30). (For a discussion of the context of Ashmun’s remarks, see Singler 1977.)

In this paper I will set out the evidence that a general West African English-lexifier pidgin was already in use along the coast when the Settlers arrived and, further, that it is this pidgin that forms the basis for the Vernacular Liberian English that constitutes English for most Liberians today. Prior to doing this, however, I will map the current distribution of English-lexifier varieties in Liberia.

1. Liberia’s Englishes

The early work on classifying Liberia’s English was done by Ian Hancock in the 1970's (Hancock 1971, 1974, Hancock & Kobbah 1975). In Hancock & Kobbah eight English-lexifier varieties in Liberia are posited, Standard Liberian English and seven others. In Singler (1997), I reduce the number of varieties from eight to the four presented in (2):

2. The four English-lexifier varieties of Liberia (Singler 1997)

Standard Liberian English

Liberian Settler English (LSE)

Kru Pidgin English (KPE)

Vernacular Liberian English (VLE)

I argue that this reduction is not merely desirable but is necessary to reflect the configuration that exists. Crucially, I apply to Liberia the creole continuum model originally articulated in DeCamp (1971) (cf. also Bickerton 1975, Rickford 1987), with the difference that in Liberia it is more properly termed a “pidgin continuum.” Simply stated, one can carve separate identities for Standard Liberian English, Liberian Settler English, and Kru Pidgin English. Everything that is left–which is the English of the overwhelming majority of Liberian speakers of an English variety–can be arranged along the Vernacular Liberian English continuum, all the way from “deep” pidgin to a vernacular Liberian version of International English.

It is appropriate to make a terminological observation concerning Liberia’s English-lexifier varieties. In the rest of anglophone West Africa, a distinction is made between English and such restructured English-lexifier varieties as Pidgin in Nigeria and Cameroon or Krio in Sierra Leone. This is not the case in Liberia, where the word “pidgin” is essentially unknown. Rather, in Liberia it’s all just English. I examined over 75 hours of tape-recorded Liberian speech, mostly sociolinguistic interviews, to see how Liberians referred to the English-lexifier varieties that they speak. In all, I found two references to particular types of English that Liberians speak and 78 simply to “English.” No matter how pidginized a Liberian’s English is, to Liberians it’s English. The sentences in (3) and (4), from elderly men, illustrate the point.

3. … ef i as mi, da les da a tak s,

if you ask me that English that I talk emph

yu teki a k frm ngl.

you think I come from England

‘If you ask me, the very English that I was speaking, you would think I came from England.’ (Kru Pidgin English speaker, Grand Kru County)

4. d fe ta wi goe marovia, d tan wi no hia

the first time we going Monrovia the time we no hear

gli s, wi wasa t f lma.

English emph we past-imperfv talk for Loma

'The first time we went to Monrovia, when we didn't speak English at all, we were speaking Loma.' (Vernacular Liberian English speaker, Lofa County)

To return to the four varieties outlined in (2): as its name suggests, Standard Liberian English is simply the Liberian version of standard English. I discuss each of the other varieties below.³

5. The 3sg independent possessive pronoun hisn

Most of the land here was hisn.

6. liketa, meaning ‘almost,’ most often used with verbs involving death

Yet we were children, we were not serious at that time, for the loss of our brother, but our ma liketa die behind him.

7. The future perfect marker be done, a feature of African American English

You be done crack you palm kernel, everything, then you make you palm butter and set it down.

'(By that time) you would have cracked all your palm kernels, and then you would make your palm butter [a stew made from palm nuts] and set it down.'

The Settlers as a whole (whether they speak LSE or not) constitute five per cent or less of Liberia’s population. A surprising feature of the distribution of LSE is that, because western education in Liberia plays an integrative role, those LSE speakers whose speech is the most strongly North American are those with the least education. In contrast, those LSE speakers whose speech is most likely to resemble that of non-Settler Liberians are those who have had western education. Up to a point at least, among the Settlers, the further you’ve gone in school, the more likely your English is to show at least some of the pidgin features that I outline below.

Kru Pidgin English. A second Liberian variety is Kru Pidgin English (KPE). It is—or, more accurately, was—the pidgin of “Kru sailors” and migrant workers. The Kru Coast, the southeastern portion of Liberia's coastline and the region at the core of the Kru mariner tradition, has a history that for much of the last two centuries (especially in the nineteenth century) was largely distinct from that of the rest of Liberia. In the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the Krumen took a whole range of jobs, working as far down the African coast as South Africa, and even crossing the ocean to work on sugar plantations in Trinidad and on the various efforts to build the Panama Canal. However, by far the most important of their labor migrations were to the British colonies of West Africa, especially Nigeria prior to World War I and the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) after that war. The end of the colonial era largely signalled the end of the “Krumen” tradition of migration. The number of surviving “Krumen” is dwindling. The English of the their children and especially that of their grandchildren, if they are acquiring it in Liberia, is the Liberian English spoken by most other people, described below.

Vernacular Liberian English. As indicated above, apart from the comparatively small number of speakers of LSE and the few remaining speakers of KPE, Liberians who speak an English-lexifier variety speak what I term Vernacular Liberian English (VLE). Some form of VLE is spoken by most Liberians. Moreover, the recent war and consequent massive displacement of people greatly added to the spread of VLE: large numbers of people suddenly found themselves in situations where they had to deal with other Liberians who didn’t speak the same Niger-Congo languages that they did.

As indicated above, VLE constitutes s a pidgin analogue of the creole continuum (Singler 1984, 1997, DeCamp 1971). At its furthest from International English, i.e. at what creolists call its basilect, it is a full-blown pidgin, with a panoply of recognizable Atlantic pidgin and creole features, e.g. lack of gender in the pronominal system, the use of postposed den to mark the plural, and so on. In the section that follows, I discuss the likely provenance of individual VLE features.⁴

Where did VLE come from? I answer that in terms of individual features, beginning with phonology. The features that characterize basilectal VLE phonology can be linked, again and again, to Liberia’s Niger-Congo languages. Often, the relevant phenomenon constitutes a larger West African areal phenomenon; however, when the phenomenon is one that all of Liberia’s Niger-Congo languages share, to look outside Liberia for the source is decidedly unparsimonious.

In Singler (1996, 2000) I argue that Optimality Theory is especially well-suited for the treatment of pidgin/creole phonology: the constraints are universal, the input comes from the lexifier language, and the constraint rankings come from speakers’ first languages. In those articles, I illustrate this with the treatment of coda consonants in the VLE basilect. The phenomena in Table 1 attest to this more generally. For each of these phenomena, the L₁ influence is clear and powerful–and it manifests itself via particular constraint rankings.

Table 1: Elements of VLE phonology whose source is transparently the speaker’s L₁

In this table, the phenomenon is underlined, and the Liberian Niger-Congo treatment of the phenomenon is presented in italics

Segmental processes

replacement of /, / by /t,d/

no Liberian N-C language has /, /

VLE: /t,d/ are usual; however, among acrolectal speakers // occurs in onset position

VLE: i. in word-initial position: using [r] where English has [l] or vice versa is highly stigmatized; stereotypically the reversal is associated with Mande and Atlantic speakers from the northern interior

VLE: ii. elsewhere in the word: non-stigmatized, common

replacement of alveo-palatal affricates by alveolar fricatives word-initially⁵

several Mande languages lack alveo-palatal affricates

VLE: the phenomenon is characteristic of basilectal VLE speakers whose first language is Mano or Gio (both Mande languages); this substitution is stigmatized.

VLE: /sC/ simplification is an older phenomenon that is now highly stigmatized ((10) below contains an 1834 attestation of top for stop)

VLE: categorical simplification in VLE at the phonological level. If /l/-obstruent, the obstruent remains. If two stops, the non-alveolar one remains: kt becomes k, pt becomes p. If fricative-stop or stop-fricative, the fricative remains

VLE i. deletion. r has disappeared phonologically from coda position, l appears in coda position with extreme infrequency, VN sequences tend to appear on the surface as a nasalized vowel, especially if N is alveolar. The more basilectal the speaker, the less likely an obstruent is to occur on the surface in coda position. Fricatives are more likely than stops to occur on the surface (except possibly bilabial stops).

VLE ii. paragoge (for verbs only; cf. Singler 2000, with reference to preservation of the Minimal Word Constraint in Loma); basilectal interior VLE speakers whose first language is Mande place a non-low front vowel (usually a mid vowel) after a coda C

tone

all Liberian N-C languages have both grammatical and lexical tone

VLE: the distinctive use of tone is limited to some (but not all) lexical items of African provenance

Once one leaves the area of phonology, establishing the provenance of a VLE feature ceases to be so straightforward. Often elements from disparate forces combine. The 2pl pronoun is a case in point. Every one of Liberia’s Niger-Congo languages but also LSE and its parent variety African American English distinguish between 2sg and 2 pl The 2pl form in VLE, y, comes from LSE which brought it from America, specifically from yall. But Liberian languages use the 2pl pronoun in places where African American English does not, for example with greetings and leave-taking expressions and with imperatives. If one is leaving a group of people, even if one has only been talking to one of them, Liberian etiquette requires the use of the plural, as in (8).

8. y, ba.

you-pl, (good)bye.

‘Good-bye (to everyone present).’

(9) shows the use of y with an imperative, specifically with the verb s, ‘send.’

9. le te y g f , y s e.

little thing you-pl get for us, you-pl send it

y do sn e, wi sete da.

you-pl don’t send it, we sitting down.

‘Whatever you (pl.) have for us, send it to us. If you don’t send it, we’ll get by (i.e. we won’t take any action).’ (VLE speaker, Monrovia)

Huber (1999:76) refers to that variety as a jargon rather than a pidgin. For Bakker (forthcoming), the difference between jargon and pidgin is largely a matter of degree of stability and extent of variation. He states, “A jargon is the set of individual ways of communicating with people without a common language.” The level of regularity that shows up along the West African coast by the end of the eighteenth century suggests that by that time a pidgin was in place, specifically a trade pidgin. It is evident that this variety was widespread along the Grain Coast, i.e. Liberia, when the Settlers arrived, as attested to be the quotes from Jehudi Ashmun cited above.

Examples from Liberian newspapers of the 1830’s, given in (10) and (11), illustrate the pidgin of the day as spoken along the Grain Coast:

10. I savey: you man for governor, tell governor, him send one punch rum for dash we (meaning kings)[;] top, tell him send two punch one for me King Jo Harris, me one, and tother for dash all country gentlemen. [Liberia Herald, quoted in African Repository, 1834:123-24; parenthetical assistance in the original]

11. … now pose war done, what I go do for git money? I can git slave for work my farm? I can git plenty oomon (women)? Pose no war, I must put kinjar (a kind of wicker basket) my back all same slave. I get plenty oomon: ebery time I send all my friend. I say here you wife. [Liberia Herald, April 15, 1836; parenthetical assistance in the original]

Just how much of modern VLE comes from this earlier West African Pidgin English is clear from an examination of Huber’s 1999 study of the origin and development of West African Pidgin English, a source to which I now turn. To draw on Huber’s work, one needs to discuss his methodology. In the work under discussion, a chapter of his book on Ghanaian Pidgin English, Huber’s primary concern lies in determining which features in modern West African Pidgin English came from an earlier Pidgin and which were introduced from Sierra Leonean Krio. He follows a methodology first developed by Clark (1979) for use in the South Pacific and later refined by Baker (1987, 1999) for use in the Pacific and then the Atlantic. The procedure is this: the researcher examines all manner of historical record in search of attestations of the speech varieties in question. The focus is on “innovations relative to, or significant deviations from, the varieties of English in Great Britain” (Huber, p. 77), and the researcher records the date and place of each attestation. Those working in this framework assume as a rule of thumb that an item has ordinarily been part of the spoken language for at least fifty years before it makes it into print. Through this method Huber has constructed a chronology for more than 100 features. He has achieved this by examining a vast set of sources, stretching from the seventeenth century to the present. Further, he has set up a schema of attribution for a given feature, given in Table 2:

Table 2: The classification of features found in West African Pidgin English (WAPE) and Krio (from Huber 1999:106)

Class	The feature “originated” in	Attestation
1	Krio	pre-1850 Krio, but post-1850 or unattested in WAPE post-1850 Krio, but earlier than in WAPE or unattested in it
2	WAPE and Krio	pre-1850 WAPE and pre-1850 Krio
3	WAPE	pre-1850 WAPE, but post-1850 or unattested in Krio post-1850 WAPE, but earlier than in Krio or unattested in it

Huber’s investigation yields a range of conclusions regarding the relationship of Krio to West African Pidgin Englishes; of Western Hemisphere creoles, especially Jamaican Patwa and Gullah, to Krio; and even of Pacific Pidgin Englishes to West African Pidgin Englishes. I will not concern myself here with those issues. Instead, I will use Huber’s work to establish something of the age of VLE.

Huber presents a list of 53 “lexical and functional” items, providing details as to the earliest attestations of their use across West Africa and assigning them to one of his three classes. In Table 3 I present these items, divided not only by Huber’s classes but also by the items’ status in VLE.

Table 3. Lexical and functional items (from Huber 1999:83-86)

(K before a date in the Class 2 column indicates the earliest Krio attestation predates the earliest WAPE attestation; where there is no K before a Class 2 item, the earliest WAPE attestation predates the earliest Krio attestation. In the case of chigger, the earliest attribution for both Krio and WAPE is 1884.)
Class 1 items found Class 2 items found

in modern VLE in modern VLE

1882 bra ‘brother; respect term’ 1773 book ‘written material, literacy’

1882 broke ‘break’ 1795 catch ‘get (in trouble), have’

1882 enty NEG question particle K1884 chigger ‘chigoe’

1841 hungry ‘hunger’ 1773 copper ‘money’

1841 pikin ‘child’ K1820 for true ‘truly, indeed’

1840 potapota ‘mud’ 1786 fufu ‘boiled, pounded starch’

1907 self ‘even’ (emphatic) 1678 grigri ‘charm, witchcraft’⁶

1858 soso ‘only, nothing but’ 1773 one time ‘at once, suddenly’

1858 (so)te ‘until’ (intensifier) 1686 palaver ‘speech, trouble’

1902 sweet ‘tasty, agreeable’ K1817 plenty ‘many, very, a lot’

1686 sabby ‘know, understand’

Class 3 items found 1726 too much ‘very, a lot’

1938 boku ‘abundant’ K1822 what for ‘why’

1884 born ‘give birth’ 1807 wowo ‘silly, ugly, worthless’

1682 chop ‘eat, food’

1600 dash ‘gratuity’

1699 juju ‘charm, witchcraft’

1905 small(-small) ‘(a) little’

Class 1 items attested Class 2 items attested

in earlier VLE but now in earlier VLE but now

no longer present no longer present

[none] 1773 all same ‘as, like’

1773 by and by ‘soon’

Class 3 items attested 1807 fash(ion) ‘manner, way’

in earlier VLE 1721 grande ‘big’

but now no longer present 1791 piccaninny ‘child; small’

1825 look ‘see, find’ 1795 suppose ‘if’

1787 tief ‘steal’

1807 tother ‘other’

Class 1 items apparently never Class 2 items apparently never

attested in VLE attested in VLE

1840 bobo ‘little boy’ 1773 no more ‘merely’

1830 bubby ‘breast’ 1807 lilly ‘little’

1834 nyam ‘eat; food’

1840 nyanga ‘vain, pride’

1911 sissy ‘sister, girl’

1840 titty ‘little sister, young girl’

1834 yai ‘eye’

1858 yerry ‘hear’
Class 3 items apparently never

attested in VLE

1886 blant ‘belong’

1785 bob ‘palaver; advise’

Class 1 items found in VLE Class 2 items found in VLE that

that might have entered it from have entered it from Liberian

Liberian Settler English (these Liberian Settler English (these

are words found in African these are words found in African

American English) American English)

1845 chuck (as juke) ‘pierce’ [none]

1840 tote ‘carry’

Class 3 items found in VLE

that might have entered it from

Liberian Settler English (these

are words found in African

American English)

[none]

Huber makes comparable lists for items in three areas of the grammar: what he calls “copular space,” the verb phrase, and the noun phrase. I present these as Tables 4a-c.

(K before a date in the Class 2 column indicates the earliest Krio attestation predates the earliest WAPE attestation; where there is no K before a Class 2 item, the earliest WAPE attestation predates the earliest Krio attestation.)

Table 4a. Grammatical items: “copular space” (from Huber 1999:79)

Class 1 items found Class 2 items found

in modern VLE in modern VLE

1882 de(y) (loc. cop)⁷ 1785 be (equa. cop)

Class 3 items found 1773 0 (attrib. cop)

in modern VLE

[none]

in earlier VLE but now in earlier VLE but now

no longer present no longer present

[none] 1795 live (for) (loc. cop)

in earlier VLE but now

no longer present

[none]

attested in VLE attested in VLE

1820 (s)tan like ‘be like’ (equa. cop) K1820 (s)top (loc. verb)

1840 (na) na NP (equa. cop)

1882 na verb_i pro verb_i (verb foc)

attested in VLE

[none]

Table 4b. Grammatical items: the Verb Phrase (from Huber 1999:80-81)

in modern VLE in modern VLE

1855 de, di (prog.) 1807 go (fut)

1855 kin (habitual) 1773 for (infinitive) 1785 done (complet.) Class 3 items found 1686 no (preposed neg)

in modern VLE 1807 pass (comparative)

1836 kin (ability)⁸

1857 say (complementizer)

Class 1 items attested Class 2 items attested

in earlier VLE but now in earlier VLE but now

no longer present no longer present

[none] [none]

Class 3 items attested

in earlier VLE but now

no longer present

1879 live (for) (prog.)

Class 1 items apparently never Class 2 items apparently never

attested in VLE attested in VLE

1882 for (modal) 1785 been (past, ant)

1969 blant (habitual)

1882 clause-final done (complet.)

1858 make (causative, imper.)
Class 3 items apparently never

attested in VLE

1884 fit (to) V (ability)
Class 1 items found in VLE Class 2 items found in VLE that

that might have entered it from have entered it from Liberian

Liberian Settler English (these Liberian Settler English (these

are words found in African these are words found in African

American English) American English)

[none] [none]

that have entered it from

Liberian Settler English (these

are words found in African

American English)

1886 never (neg complet.)

Table 4c. Grammatical items: the Noun Phrase (from Huber 1999:81-82)

Class 1 items found Class 2 items found

in modern VLE in modern VLE

1882 we(y) (relativizer) 1815 one ‘a’ 1786 anaphoric pronoun

Class 3 items found 1785 NP₁ NP₂ (poss)

in modern VLE K1820 (h)im ‘his, her’

[none] 1800 he ‘his, her’

1785 we ‘us’

1786 dem ‘ they’

1807 dem ‘their’

Class 1 items attested Class 2 items attested

in earlier VLE but now in earlier VLE but now

no longer present no longer present

[none] 1785 preposed dem (def/dem)

1721 me ‘I’

Class 3 items attested 1791 me ‘my’

in earlier VLE but now 1795 (h)im ‘he, she’

no longer present

1884 NP₁ pro NP₂ (poss)

Class 1 items apparently never Class 2 items apparently never

attested in VLE attested in VLE

1882 una ‘you, your (pl)’ 1785 preposed dem (pl)

1858 na (loc prep)

Class 3 items apparently never

attested in VLE

[none]

The distribution of features by Huber’s classes is significant for VLE. Specifically, there is a difference in the likelihood of attestation in VLE between those items with a WAPE provenance and those with a distinctly Krio provenance. As the tables in 5 show, most items with a WAPE provenance–either items shared with Krio (Class 2) or items whose provenance is exclusively WAPE (Class 3)–also show up in VLE: the rate is 88% for lexical items (29/33) , 87% for grammatical ones (26/30). On the other hand, for those features whose provenance is strictly Krio, i.e. Class 1 without Class 2, the number drops off sharply, down to 56% for lexical items and all the way down to 29% for grammatical ones.

Table 5a. Rate of attestations: Lexical and functional items listed in Huber (1999)

Class	VLE attestations	Total number of items	% of attestations
1 Krio	10	18	56%
2 WAPE/Krio	22	24	92%
3 WAPE	7	9	78%

Table 5b. Rate of attestations: Grammatical items listed in Huber (1999)

Class	VLE attestations	Total number of items	% of attestations
1 Krio	4	14	29%
2 WAPE/Krio	21	24	87%
3 WAPE	5	6	83%

The difference in rates of attestations for Krio/VLE between lexical and functional items, on the one hand, and grammatical ones, on the other, no doubt arises from the fact that it is comparatively easy to introduce lexical items but more difficult to introduce grammatical ones, particularly if what one is introducing is in fact an integral part of a system.⁹

In that regard, it is appropriate to look more closely at VLE vis-à-vis other West African Pidgin Englishes. If one just went by Tables 3 and 4, one might think that VLE is simply, say, Nigerian Pidgin spoken with a Liberian accent. Yet that is obviously not the case. Apart from the phonological differences (with VLE’s especially strong avoidance of coda consonants), there are often lexical differences so that the same word may have evolved in different ways in the two varieties. For example, in modern VLE (as used by Liberians as opposed to expatriates), the usage of dash, originally ‘a gratuity, to present,’ is now restricted to commerce, e.g. in the market. It still refers to ‘a gratuity,’ but it is one in the direction of seller to buyer. A marketwoman might dash a fifth eggplant to a customer who has contracted to buy four, but she would not dash a commerce inspector who wanted to see the license she knows to be out-of-date. Him she would give “cold water.” Similarly, while sabi continues to mean ‘to know’ in Liberia, it also means ‘to be stingy.’ As the Liberian proverb has it, “Sabi man die careless way.”

With reference to the continuum model referred to early on, its applicability to VLE sets Liberia apart from such countries as Nigeria and Cameroon relative to their Pidgin Englishes. A point regarding the VLE continuum is that, the further a VLE lect is from English, the more it has in common with other West African Pidgin Englishes. Moreover, as a general rule, the further a VLE lect is from English, the fewer the American features that it will possess.

This is not to say that Americanisms have made no inroads into VLE. I have already made reference to the second-person-plural pronoun y (from ‘yall’). To this can be added such features as the African American Vernacular English continuous auxiliary steady (cf. Baugh 1983) and the habitual auxiliary d, long disappeared from African American Vernacular English but—as d--still very much a part of Gullah.
Americanisms in VLE

12. The continuous auxiliary stdi (< steady)

w a go tu sku, w d tia bit mi, a r, m.

when I go to school when the teacher beat me I run man.

a r, a (bi) stdi hale.

I run I be aux hollering

‘When I’d go to school, when the teacher beat me, I would run, man. I would run, I’d be hollering nonstop.’ (VLE, elicited example from a Monrovia speaker)
13. The habitual auxiliary d (cf. the Gullah imperfective auxiliary d)

hi d bn awa le ko  sl e.

he aux burn our little coal and sell it.

‘He makes charcoal and sells it.’ (VLE speaker, Monrovia)

To these grammatical elements can be added a long list of lexical items. While most of these are elements that the Settlers brought with them and were then acquired by indigenous Liberians in contact with them, there are some lexical items of more recent vintage that reflect the American presence during World War II and subsequently. These include such VLE terms as zoot [zut] ‘to dress up, to be stylish’ and fat domino ‘a corpulent person whose name one does not know (not used in direct address).’

However, while recognizing the provenance of all the Americanisms from y to zoot, we should not be misled: these, even y, constitute latterday additions to the pidgin that the African American settlers came upon when they took up residence on the Grain Coast in 1822.

Baker, Philip (1987) Historical developments in Chinese Pidgin English and the nature of the relationships between the various Pidgin Englishes of the Pacific region. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2, 163-207.

Baker, Philip (1999) Investigating the origin and diffusion of shared features among the Atlantic English Creoles. In Philip Baker & Adrienne Bruyn (Eds.) St. Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles (pp. 315-64). London: University of Westminster Press.

Bakker, Peter (forthcoming) Pidgins as a separate class. In Silvia Kouwenberg & John Victor Singler (Eds.) Handbook of pidgin and creole studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Baugh, John. (1983) Black street speech: Its history, structure, and survival. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bickerton, Derek (1975) Dynamics of a creole system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, Ross. (1979) In search of Beach-la-Mar. Towards a history of Pacific Pidgin English. Te Reo, 22, 3-64.

DeCamp, David (1971) Toward a generative analysis of a post-creole speech community. In Dell Hymes (Ed.) Pidginization and Creolization of Languages (pp. 349-370). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gurley, Ralph Randolph (1835) Life of Jehudi Ashmun. Washington: J. C. Dunn.

Hancock, Ian F. (1971) Some aspects of English in Liberia. Liberian Studies Journal, 3, 207-13.

Hancock, Ian F. (1974) English in Liberia. American Speech, 49, 224-229.

Hancock, Ian F., & Piayon E. Kobbah. (1975) Liberian English of Cape Palmas. In J. L. Dillard (Ed.) Perspectives on Black English (pp. 256-71). The Hague: Mouton.

Huber, Magnus (1999) Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Liberia Herald. (1834, 1836).

Rickford, John R. (1987) Dimensions of a creole continuum: History, texts, & linguistic analysis of Guyanese Creole. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Singler, John Victor (1977) Language in Liberia in the nineteenth century: The Settlers' perspective. Liberian Studies Journal, 7, 73-85.

Singler, John Victor (1984) Variation in tense-aspect-modality in Liberian English. Unpublished PhD dissertation, UCLA..

Singler, John Victor (1996) An OT account of pidgin phonology: Coda consonants in Vernacular Liberian English. In Jan Johnson, Matthew L. Juge, & Jeri L. Moxley (Eds.) Proceedings of the twenty-second annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 375-86). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Singler, John Victor (1997) The configuration of Liberia's Englishes. World Englishes, 16, .205-31.

Singler, John Victor (2000) Optimality Theory, the minimal-word constraint, and the historical sequencing of substrate influence in pidgin/creole genesis. In John H. McWhorter (Ed.) Current Issues in Pidgin and Creole linguistics (pp. 336-51). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Singler, John Victor (2004a) Liberian Settler English–phonology. In Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W Schneider, Clive Upton, Rajend Mesthrie & Kate Burridge (Eds.) A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 1: Phonology (pp. 65-75). (Topics in English Linguistics, ed. Bernd Kortmann & Elizabeth Closs Traugott.) Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Singler, John Victor (2004b) The morphology and syntax of Liberian Settler English. In Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W Schneider, Clive Upton, Rajend Mesthrie & Kate Burridge (Eds.) A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax (pp. 71-89). (Topics in English Linguistics, ed. Bernd Kortmann & Elizabeth Closs Traugott.) Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tonkin, Elizabeth. (1971) Some coastal pidgins of West Africa. In Edwin Ardener (Ed.) Social anthropology and language (pp. 129-55). London: Tavistock.