The Fulfulde/Pulaar Provenance of Jaav (“Jive”)
Zola Sohna
August 2021
 

Africanisms in Diasporic languages are important markers of cultural continuity and cultural resistance in the Transatlantic Holocaust. While research of Africanisms in the languages of the United States southeast seacoast, South/Central America, and the Caribbean is extensive, there is little preexisting research on veritable lexical Africanisms in the language of the Native Black American population of the United States mainland (extramural to the southeast seacoast and Louisiana) – as lexical Africanisms among this particular segment of the Native Black American population of the United States are generally thought to be negligible, if not non-existent. However, in this study, I will demonstrate that the language spoken by this segment of the Native Black American population is, in fact, endowed with a great many Africanisms of Fulfulde/Pulaar origin. By providing an analysis of the complex meanings of lexical items as attested by Native Black American informants and comparing these lexical items with 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century texts of the Fulfulde/Pulaar language – with a particular focus on the source language’s complex system of radicals/root-stems and affixes – I will demonstrate that there is, in fact, a prodigious body of veritable Fulfulde-/Pulaar-derived words and phrases existing in the language of the Native Black American population of the United States mainland that negates the myth of African lexical scarcity in the language of Native Black Americans and connotes cultural continuity and cultural resistance.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005492
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Oct 13, 2020
keywords: jive, africanisms, fulfulde, pulaar, pular, creole, native black american language, black american, aave, aav, semantics, morphology
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