Other varieties of English in Liberia: Pidgins

The earliest references to “English” along the coast of what is now Liberia date from the very beginning of the eighteenth century. Over the next century the use of “English” grew so much that, in the 1820’s when the Settlers landed and founded their city of Monrovia, the missionary Jehudi Ashmun reported that “very many in all the maritime tribes, speak a corruption of the English language” (African Repository, Nov. 1827: 263). The “corruption” was undoubtedly pidgin English, the ancestor of today’s Vernacular Liberian English (VLibE). (This term, with a slightly different reference, comes from Hancock 1971.) The following quotation illustrates this early pidgin. Attributed to King Jo Harris, a Bassa chief, it appeared in an 1834 article in the Monrovia newspaper, the Liberia Herald:

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 gentleman. (Liberia Herald, quoted in the African Repository 1834, 10:123–124; parenthetical assistance in the original)

The Settlers quickly came to dominate the region and established the independent nation of Liberia in 1847. While the new Liberian government claimed large areas of the interior, it initially took no steps to enforce the claim, and the Settlers them-selves remained near the coast. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did the government send its troops – the Liberian Frontier Force – into the interior to establish control. VLE was the language of the Frontier Force and of the laborers at the Firestone rubber plantation (begun in 1926); the alternative terms ‘Soldier English’ and ‘Firestone English’ for the VLE of the interior reflect the role that these two groups of men played in the pidgin’s dissemination.

As noted, the Settlers themselves remained on the coast. The linguistic consequences of the interaction that took place between them and the indigenous people on the coast were overwhelmingly unidirectional, with the language of the powerful – LibSE – influencing the language of the dominated – VLE – but not itself being profoundly influenced in turn. Thus, while the pidgin had at first been a local variety of the pidginized English that developed along the West African coast more generally, the influence of LibSE upon it caused it to diverge sharply from pidgin English in the rest of West Africa.

Today VLE is the language of most English-speaking Liberians. It is unique among West African Englishes in that it fits the creole continuum model (DeCamp 1971; Singler 1984, 1997). The massive displacement of Liberians from 1989 onward as a consequence of civil war has thrown together people with no Niger-Congo language in common; the circumstances have promoted the use of VLE not only inside Liberia but also outside it, in refugee camps and communities.

In addition to VLE, there is or, more accurately, was a second pidgin English. Kru Pidgin English (KPE) was the language of “Kru sailors,” the Klao and Grebo men who worked on board European vessels along the African coast from at least the beginning of the nineteenth century onward. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, “Krumen” also held low-status jobs in British colonies, most numerously on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) but also Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The pattern quickly emerged whereby males who had grown up in monolingual villages would, at the age of fifteen or so, join a work group headed by an older individual from the village. The group would then travel to its working place and remain for a growing season (in the case of cocoa plantations in the Gold Coast), a year, or a few years before returning home, where they would remain for a comparable period of time. An individual would repeat this pattern on a regular basis until he was 45 or so, at which time he would cease making such trips. Research carried out in a Klao village shows that, for the most part, the Krumen had had little contact with Settlers, and there is little evidence of Settler influence upon KPE, or vice versa (cf. Singler 1990). Changes in maritime practice and, especially, the removal of the British colonial presence have eliminated a role for Krumen in Ghana and elsewhere. As a result, as old Krumen die, their pidgin is dying out. VLE has made inroads into the Klao and Grebo villages that had provided the British with Krumen; thus, if the children and grandchildren of the old Krumen are acquiring a pidgin, it is VLE, not KPE.