Samaná English

Samaná English (SE and SAX) is a variety of the English language spoken by descendants of Black immigrants from the United States who have lived in the Samaná Peninsula, Dominican Republic since 1824. Members of this enclave are known as the Samaná Americans. The language is a relative of the Antebellum Black Vernacular English with variations unique to the enclave's history in the area. In the 1950 Dominican Republic Census, 0.57% of the population (about 12,200 people) said that their mother tongue was English.[1]

Immigration

The majority of the SE speakers trace their linage to immigrants that arrived to the Peninsula in 1824-5. During this time the island of Hispaniola was all Haiti and its president was Jean-Pierre Boyer. The immigrants responded to an invitation for settlement that Jonathas Granville delivered in person to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and New York City. Abolitionists like Richard Allen, Samuel Cornish, Benjamin Lundy and Loring D. Dewey joined the campaign. The response was unprecedented as thousands of people from the U.S. boarded ships at eastern board cities and migrated to Hayti, the way Haiti was spelled then. The bulk of the immigrants arrived during the fall of 1824 and spring of 1825. More continued moving back and forth in the coming years, but at a slower rate. Between 1859 and 1863 another immigration campaign brought new settlers to the island, but at a fraction of what came in 1824-5. Those who originally settled in Samana were fewer than 600, but this group formed the only surviving immigration enclave.[2][3]

Survival

While more than six thousand immigrants came in 1824-5, by the end of the nineteenth century only a handful of enclaves on the island spoke any variety of the Antebellum Black Vernacular. These were communities in Puerto Plata, Samaná and Santo Domingo. The largest was the one in Samaná that maintained church schools where the SE was preserved. During the Trujillato, however, the government began a systematic policy of Hispanizing the entire Dominican population. This meant that church schools where English of the BV was taught were eliminated and its usage was discouraged. Enclaves across the island soon lost an important element of their identity and this led to their disintegration. The Samaná English withstood the assaults in part because the location of Samaná was favorable to a more independent cultural life. However, these government policies have still influenced the language gradual decline, which at this moment may well belong to an endangered language list.[4][5][6]

Nature

The language is variously described a creole language, or a dialect of English. It is similar to that of Caribbean English Creoles spoken by the English speaking Caribbean, especially Turks and Caicos and Bahamian Creole.

The Ethnologue

The 15th edition (2005) of the Ethnologue dropped the SE from its list of languages, but linguists still consider it a separate language variation.

Notes

  1. ↑ Irma Nicasio; Jesús de la Rosa (April 1998). "Historia, Metodología y Organización de los Censos en República Dominicana: 1920-1993" (PDF) (in Spanish). Santo Domingo: Oficinal Nacional de Estadística. p. 44/131. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 May 2014. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
  2. ↑ Hidalgo, Dennis R. (2003 (2001)). From North America to Hispaniola. Mt. Pleasant, Michigan: Central Michigan University. pp. 1–50. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ↑ Miller, Floyd J. (1975). The search for a black nationality : black emigration and colonization, 1787-1863. Urbana: University of Illinois. pp. 132–250. ISBN 0252002636.
  4. ↑ Tabliamonte, Sali Anna. . (1991). A Matter of Time: Past Temporal Reference Verbal Structures in Samaná English and the Ex-Slave Recordings. Ottawa, Canada: Université d'Ottawa.
  5. ↑ DeBose, Charles E. (1983). "A Dialect That Time Forgot". Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 47–53.
  6. ↑ Davis, Martha Ellen (2007 LXIX, Vol. XXXII, Núm. 119). "Asentamiento y vida económica de los inmigrantes afroamericanos de Samaná: testimonio de la profesora Martha Willmore (Leticia)" (PDF). Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación 32 (119): 709–734. Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links