@Samori Toure is there any known Arabic or Mande influence on Ebonics/AAVE?
Not Arabic, because they only used Arabic for trade just like the Chinese or the Russians or whomever use English for trade. However, a linguist named Matt Schafer insists that the Mande influence is where we get the Southern accent and other words that are now part of the English language.
"... My first insight into the possibility of significant Mandinka content in the Southern accent occurred in one memorable conversation in Ziguinchor during 1972 with Buli Drame, the Mandinka from Suna Karantaba who guided me to the four villages I emphasized in studying Pakao. We proceeded to converse in French and he asked where I was from. After I told him, he slowly repeated after me, "St. Simons Island," pronouncing the words with such a strong Southern drawl that a chill ran up my spine. After years at college and graduate school away from the South, my own Southern accent had mostly disappeared. Yet Buli pronounced these and [End Page 351] other English words with a strong, seemingly perfect Southern accent, certainly an accent of the Georgia coast where
Africanisms of The Gullah Dialect and
Drums and Shadows both suggest a strong Mande influx and influence. One can debate how much a coastal Georgia accent resembles variable accents elsewhere in the South, but the accents of Charleston and coastal South Carolina and Georgia, spoken by both slaves and elite whites, were established before much of the inner deep South was settled.
This is not to say that a British accent or accents from African groups other than the Mande are not also present in certain Southern accents. Several informants from the 1930s in
Drums and Shadows, from different ethnic groups as far south as Congo, a long way down the coast from Mande groups, note a strange system in which red flags were used, often hoisted onto slave ships anchored close to shore, as a method for attracting and capturing themselves or other unsuspecting children.
81 Because these informants would have come from the very end of U.S. slave importation from Africa,
Drums and Shadows perhaps implies this wildly random tactic was employed in the latter stages of the trafficking, as demand continued, but African importation into the U.S. had become illicit and, as Kyuk notes, many Congo were imported into Georgia. Buyers during the illegal era clamored for slaves, and slavers were so desperate they would resort to any measure, including red flags, to get captives on board regardless of ethnicity. After 1808 the old system of ethnic preferences in the slave trade began breaking down.
In any event, after that conversation with Buli I began to visualize and hear a heavy Mandinka content in the Gullah accent and thus in the "Southern accent" with all its variety. Pollitzer's slave importation demographics above favoring the Mande regions of Senegambia, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast during the middle period (1749-87), and his literal analysis of Turner's
Africanisms, showing the collective importance of Mande groups in Gullah speech, tends to support the idea of a predominant Mandinka and Mande content in the Southern accent, with the various other accents layered in (even without Mandinka informants identifying additional words, or the concept that the Mande influenced nearby ethnic groups in West Africa). Accent follows the vocabulary and demographics consistent with a Mande preference in Charleston and Georgia.
In various locales in South Carolina and Georgia, slaves so outnumbered white people, it is inconceivable for white English not to have been influenced by a West African accent. Turner noted some sections of South [End Page 352] Carolina where black families outnumbered white families twenty to one.
82 Thomas Spalding's grandson, the ex-Confederate Captain Charles Spalding Wylly, wrote that the ratio on Sapelo Island was one hundred slaves to one white person, and asserts that these slaves had close, family-like relationships with their owners, implying close, verbal exchanges. "I have so often referred to the slave that I think it may gratify curiosity to tell in what manner these men and women fresh from Africa would with any safety be taken into the life of the family where in all probability there were not three white men to three hundred of their own race."
83 Parrish notes there were 4,000 blacks and only 700 whites in Glynn County in 1845.
84 A visitor to South Carolina in 1737 found the area more resembled "a negro country" than one settled by "white people," while the first federal census of 1790 established that 43% of South Carolina population were black slaves, compared to the national average of 18%. While the slave population in America declined to 13% (4,000,000) in 1860, South Carolina's slave population the same year had risen to 57% with even higher concentrations in the influential low country.
85
Slave purchasers in the low country slightly preferred Mande not just for their rice farming knowledge and other factors, but once Mande came in sufficient numbers, they could communicate with the Mande slaves
already working on plantations. Implying this possibility, Captain Wylly wrote a fascinating memoir detailing a training system for African slaves that is chilling for its racism and deculturization, suggesting a highly non-random process concerning the ethnic groups of slaves, at least for his grandfather, Bilali's owner. Wylly thought he provided a veritable linguistic blueprint for how the African-born slaves were gradually taught English. However, in so doing he inadvertently explains how a Mande accent might very well have entered Southern English, especially through the slave drivers, who were often African born leaders among the slaves, in charge of training the newly imported slaves.
After the African slaves were bought in the Charleston market, "the newly purchased were transferred at once to the plantation. Here always would be found a number of men and women acquired in former years who belonged to the same race, frequently of the same tribe and speaking the same dialect, or at least capable of making themselves understood." The African-born slaves were then assigned in groups of ten to a "driver" or leader "chosen for his ability to command and his fluency in speech."
86 [End Page 353]...".
"...Spalding had about 400 slaves at any one time, and during his lifetime gave over 1000 slaves, and the lands they worked on, to his two surviving sons and four married daughters, disseminating the linguistic influence and west-Africanized accent of his system into the Georgia coast and the South, presumably alongside a number of similar examples from other plantations.
88
Despite slavery's hodge-podge mixing of ethnic groups from Africa, evidence of a Mande preference among the Gullah finds additional support in the memoir of Sapelo Island's Gullah, or more correctly, Geeche writer Cornelia Bailey, who uses styles of basket-making, "Mende ring shout dancing," linguistic and other evidence to conclude that the Mende from Sierra Leone were a strong ethnic component of the heritage of African-Americans living on Sapelo Island. What Cornelia's people called "fanners"— shallow, flat baskets used for threshing rice—the Mende call
fantas.
89...".
Project MUSE - Bound to Africa: the Mandinka Legacy in the New World
"... Turner allows us to glimpse the process of Africanized thinking and culture seeping into Southern English and from there into mainstream American English. He forces us to go back and take a second look at American English, and start asking deeper questions about its African content. One west African linguist who has done this was David Dalby, among the earliest to point out that the widespread traditional Mandinka usage of "OK" mirrored its similar usage as one of the most characteristically American words in existence. Therefore, Dalby suggests, the very American expression "OK" must have seen usage first among Mandinka slaves in the South, who passed the expression on to the rest of us.
54
In my fieldwork in Pakao, I found the Mandinka expressions
OK,
OK kuta and
OK kuta bake (OK, very OK and very, very OK) to be widely used.
55 The Mandinka signature on this expression, accenting heavily the second syllable, and often using the expression with the common Mandinka words
kuta and
kuta bake, help convince me this is not some absorption from twentieth-century America, but rather a descendant of the African precursor to U.S. usage. Even if a telegraph operator helped put the expression into common usage in America, then the expression could have been reinforced by usage among Mandinka slaves and their descendants, in the kind of cultural convergence already discussed above for
mansa and
massa. Turner himself does not single out "OK" as one of the Gullah expressions. It was so common he may not have thought to include it.[End Page 344]
However, Turner's discussion of the west African syntax in Gullah speech patterns provides a model for thinking about a west African derivation for other expressions commonly associated with Southern English. The widely used "y'all" may be another example of a cultural convergence, in this case between the English "you all" and the Mandinka "
al," meaning "you all," or "y'all" and often followed by a verb. Thus the Mandinka say
al ta for "Y'all go" or "Y'all git." They say
al ku for "Y'all wash" and
al jinan for "Y'all come down here." See this latter expression in Kadri Drame's account of Deskaleri the Mysterious.
56 The Mandinka also use
fo as their word for "for" in the sense of "until," for example, "I went fo the house" as in Southern diction. In his tale about "The Bwa or Cannibal-witch, Kadri Drame says that djinns "can only harass someone until [
fo] their time of death has come."
57 Fo also would be an example of a cultural convergence. Several of the Mandinka legends in
Djinns, Stars and Warriors also use quotations one after another in rapid fire, preceded by "he said/says" or "I said/say," which was also a feature of Southern storytelling that I heard growing up.
X
The little known ante-bellum memoir of Ophelia Troup Dent of Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation in Glynn County near Brunswick, Georgia, tells us that her slaves used "My little aunt" to address a wet-nurse of presumably lesser importance and age, and "My big aunt" to address the main female house servant... "
"...In addition to "Mom Betty," th
e Dent slaves used expressions like "My Big Aunt" and "My Little Aunt;" would they have also said, "my big brother" or "my little brother" or "my big sister" or "my little sister?" Such expressions are in wide use in Southern English. Both Ophelia Troup Dent and her slaves seem to have used "big" and "little" to distinguish kin on the basis of relative age and importance. This was done among the Pakao Mandinka to distinguish between older and younger brothers, sisters, and other relatives with the widely used kinship terms koto or doko, (older or younger sibling). Pakao Mandinka also usually preface their use of kinship words with "my" (n), as in nba or nbama for "my mother" or nkoto for "my big sister, or "my big brother" or ndoko for "my little sister" and "my little brother." "Little" and "big" are west Africanized ways of translating "younger" and "older.""
