Maroon Spirit Language
The Jamaican Maroons who live in the mountainous interior of Jamaica have preserved a ritual language which, according to linguists, resembles the West African Pidgin English that was spoken along the coast of West Africa centuries ago during the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Maroons' ancestors were runaway slaves who created free settlements in the interior of Jamaica and managed to hold on to their freedom for generations. Today, the Maroons speak Jamaican Creole in their daily lives, but they have also retained a ritual language that they call "Deep Patois" which is used during their "Kromanti Play," a ceremony in which the participants are said to be possessed by their ancestors and to speak as their ancestors did centuries ago. Linguists call the Deep Patois "Maroon Spirit Language" (MSL), and they point to many conservative phonological and grammatical features in MSL that are not found in modern Jamaican Creole. Some of these features are still present, though, in related creole languages, such as Sierra Leone Krio spoken in West Africa and Sranan Tongo spoken in Suriname in South America. MSL has a number of English-derived words, such as waka ("walk"), dede ("dead"), and aksi ("ask"), in which an extra vowel is added at the end. During the 18th century, Africans often added an extra vowel to the end of English words when they took them into West African Pidgin English. Since words in African languages usually end in vowels, this gave the English words a familiar form and made them easier to pronounce.
Read more about this topic: West African Pidgin English
Famous quotes containing the words spirit and/or language:
“We cannot be any stronger in our foreign policy—for all the bombs and guns we may heap up in our arsenals—than we are in the spirit which rules inside the country. Foreign policy, like a river, cannot rise above its source.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)
“Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints—the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk—we think we’re using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we’re its slavish agents.”
—Harry Mathews (b. 1930)