Cracking the Code: The Confused Traveler's Guide to Liberian English

John Mark Sheppard

Description

"Cracking the Code: The Confused Traveler's Guide to Liberian English" is the brainchild of John Mark Sheppard, who moved with his family from the United States to Liberia when he was just three years old. He learned Liberian English as a second language as he spent his childhood and teen years immersed in the Liberian culture. After college in the United States, John Mark returned to Liberia and began a more formal study of Liberia's history, customs and languages. In this truly fascinating book, John Mark combines his training in linguistics with an extensive knowledge of the language he has grown to love. Besides the more than one thousand helpful explanations of specific words or phrases, "Cracking the Code: The Confused Traveler's Guide to Liberian English" includes a fascinating history of the people groups and languages of the region, a pronunciation guide, a list of Liberian proverbs and practical, how-to-avoid-embarrassing-yourself advice for Westerners.

Sujets

• Travel
• West
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456612030
• Langue: English

Extrait

Cracking the Code:
The Confused Traveler’s Guide
to Liberian English
 
 
By John-Mark Sheppard
 


CRACKING THE CODE:
THE CONFUSED TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO LIBERIAN ENGLISH
Copyright © 2012 by John Mark Sheppard.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
 
[e-mail]
 
Published by Sheppard’s Books, USA
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1203-0
 
Non-fiction
1. English Dictionaries – Liberian English
2. Li berian Languages – Liberian English
 
Sheppard , John Mark, 1982-
 
Cover photo and art by Heidi Sheppard
 


Dedication :
 
For Sara, the love of my life. Thank you for your support
and patience as I kept saying “It’s almost done!”
 
See? It’s done!
 
Introduction
Many a Westerner who first finds that he will be working in Liberia is thrilled to learn that English is the official language of the country. Rather than toiling with a tongue-twisting language such as French, Swahili or Amharic, our traveler looks forward to instant communication in his mother tongue. However, shortly after being hit with an over-powering blast of heat and humidity as he steps off the climate-controlled plane, he is struck by an even more startling reality; he can understand almost nothing of the language being spoken around him! “Are they even speaking English?” he asks himself incredulously.
As he settles into his new home our traveler grows more familiar with the Liberian accent and starts to pick up words here and there, but there are many words he has never before heard. And many words he does recognize are used in incomprehensible ways. As he settles in to his new role he wonders why it is that Liberians do not speak “real English.” He may even make it his mission to correct the speech of everyone around him. This of course has little effect other than alienating would-be friends. Rather than truly getting to know the very people he came to work with, he retreats into the safety of the ex-pat “ghetto” where everyone speaks like he does.
Is there another alternative? Is it possible to truly understand and communicate in Liberian English without spending decades in the country? It most certainly is! If you have ever wondered why Liberian English is the way it is, and have wanted to “crack the code,” this book is for you. It has often been said that you can never truly understand a culture until you speak the language. Those who take the time to learn to understand and even speak Liberian English find it to be a rich medium of communication. They are able to build strong friendships and understand Liberian culture at a deeper level then they ever thought possible.
 
My Story
 
I personally have been greatly enriched by the relationships I have had with Liberians throughout the years. As the son of missionaries to Liberia, I was first exposed to Liberian English at the tender age of three. Some of my earliest memories are from the mission station where my family lived in Nimba County. There as I explored with my friends, the sounds and cadence of Liberian English became forever imprinted in my mind. When Liberia broke out in civil war my family moved to Côte d’Ivoire to help the Liberian refugees living across the border. Although we would travel to the United States every few years for furlough, the majority of my growing-up years were spent around Liberians.
Despite all the civil unrest going on around us, the memories of my childhood in Africa are overwhelmingly positive. Swinging from vines into rivers, raising a veritable menagerie of exotic pets, exploring the rainforest, and fishing in rivers and creeks with homemade poles alongside my Liberian friends are memories I will cherish forever.
Later, after graduating from college I returned to Liberia to work in the field of community development. By this time I had been away from Africa for several years and my Liberian English had grown rusty. I could see immediately that making a conscious effort to brush up on the language would have immense benefits. I began compiling a list of Liberian English words based on conversations with Liberian friends and acquaintance; scribbling new words in notebooks and odd scraps of paper as I went about my work. At the same time I worked on improving my accent. Foreigners wanted to know how I was able to speak like that – how I was able to “crack the code.”
That wordlist became the core of this dictionary. In my never-ending quest for new words for this project, I made use of several long out of print resources. I am heavily indebted to Warren d’Azevedo’s 1967 work “Some Terms from Liberian Speech” which was revised and expanded by Michael Gold in 1997. NYU professor John Singler also published numerous papers on Liberian English that have proved to be helpful references.
Liberian English is constantly evolving and many words in these pre-civil war works are no longer widely used, and thus were not included in the dictionary. Many new words have also entered the Liberian vocabulary. Liberian English is entering the information age and many Liberians are using such online media as Facebook and Internet forums to communicate. I was able to find many new words through these websites. Any unfamiliar words gleaned from these sources were verified with Liberian colleagues. To my friends like Ansu Konneh, Koffa Swen and especially Jackson Gbah, who helped me in this work, I owe a debt of gratitude.
 
A Brief History of English in Liberia
Common wisdom has it that freed slaves from the United States first introduced the English language to Liberia. Indeed the English spoken in Liberia more closely resembles American English than do the other English-based creoles spoken in the former British colonies of West Africa. However, careful historical research shows that English was spoken in the region that is today Liberia long before the first American settlers arrived in 1821.
In the 15 th century the Portuguese began exploring West Africa for the purpose of trade. Other European traders followed in the 17 th century, including the Dutch and the British. Europeans knew what is today the Republic of Liberia as the “Pepper Coast” because of the abundance of melegueta pepper. Spices were in high demand at the time, along with slaves who were needed to work the plantations of the New World colonies. Intertribal warfare along the Pepper Coast provided a steady stream of human cargo for the transatlantic slave trade and, sadly, slaves were exported even after Liberia was formed as a republic and slavery was officially banned.
 

Kru Pidgin English
Born on British merchant vessels during the colonial era, Kru Pidgin English was spoken as a second language by many until recently in Grand Kru County. Men from the coastal Klao and Grebo tribes, known collectively as the “Kru”, were hired by the British to work in their colonies in West Africa, and even as far as the Caribbean and Central America. Today Kru Pidgin English is only spoken by a handful of elderly people, as this dialect has been largely replaced among the younger generations by Liberian Vernacular English. It shares many features in common with the Krio spoken in Sierra Leone.

 
By the time the African-American settlers arrived in Liberia the British had been actively trading along the Pepper Coast for over 150 years. The first settlers found a large number of indigenous people who had already learned English through trading contacts with the British. A white missionary named Jehudi Ashmun who oversaw the activities of the early settlers remarked, “Very many in all the maritime tribes, speak a corruption of the English language.” 1
This “corruption of the English language” referred to by Ashmun is known today by scholars as West African Pidgin English. A pidgin is differentiated from a creole language in that a pidgin has no mother-tongue speakers. Being a basic version of English with a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary, Pidgin English was easily learned as a second language by African traders and deck hands on British vessels. In Liberia, this form of English was developed by coastal Kwa-speaking African sailors and became known as Kru Pidgin English . Related pidgins became widespread in West Africa especially in the British colonies of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria.
 

Settler English
Also known as “Congo English,” this dialect is spoken by the descendants of the freed slaves who founded the Republic of Liberia. Settler English can be heard today mainly in isolated upriver settlements in Sinoe County. The dialect has little influence on the non-settler population, and some aspects of Settler English are stigmatized by speakers of Liberian Vernacular English.

 
The freed slaves who founded the republic of Liberia brought with them other forms of English. The goal of the early Americo-Liberian leaders was to populate their new republic with educated blacks from the U.S. who spoke Standard English. The elite ruling class was made up of people with a mixed racial heritage, many of whom had received a university education. Like the Europeans of the 1800s, the Americo-Liberians sought to subdue the peoples of the African interior with the colonial trinity of civilization, commerce and Christianity. Essential to all of this was the adoption of the English language. In the settlers’ minds, their possession of the English language elevated them above the “savage” tribes of their new land. One Rev. Alexander Crummell remarked in an oration given on Liberia’s independence day in 1860,
 
[T]he 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