The Sierra Leonean Creole or Krio is an English-based creole language that is the lingua franca and de facto national language spoken throughout the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Krio is spoken by 96 percent of the country's population, and it unites the different ethnic groups in the country, especially in their trade and social interaction with each other. Krio is the primary language of communication among Sierra Leoneans at home and abroad,Thompson, V. A. D. (2013). The Transformation of Freetown Christianity, 1960–2000. Doctoral Dissertation, University of London. and has also heavily influenced Sierra Leonean English.Saidu Bangura, 2015 A Roadmap to Sierra Leone English: A Sociohistorical and Ecological Perspective, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, PhD thesis, p. 124, 222, 232-242. The language is native to the Sierra Leone Creole people, or Krios, a community of about 104,311 descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, United States and the British Empire, and is spoken as a second language by millions of other Sierra Leoneans belonging to the country's indigenous tribes. English is Sierra Leone's official language, and Krio, despite its common use throughout the country, has no official status.
Overview
The Krio language is an offshoot of the languages and variations of English brought by the Nova Scotian Settlers from North America, Maroons from Jamaica, and the numerous liberated African slaves who settled in Sierra Leone.
All freed slaves—the Jamaican Maroons, African Americans, and Liberated Africans—influenced Krio, but the Jamaican Maroons, Igbo, Yoruba and Akan Liberated Africans were the most influential. It seems probable that the basic grammatical structure and vowel system of Krio is an offshoot of Jamaican Maroon Creole spoken by the Maroons, as there are well-documented and important direct historical connections between Jamaica and Sierra Leone. The language was also influenced by African American Vernacular English while the majority of the African words in Krio come from the Akan, Yoruba and Igbo.
As an English-based creole language, the Sierra Leone Krio is distinct from a pidgin as it is a language in its own right, with fixed grammatical structures and rules. Krio also draws from other European languages, like Portuguese and French, e.g. the Krio word /, which means wealth or to acquire wealth, is derived from the Old French word 'gentry', and the Krio word , which means 'child', indirectly comes from the Portuguese word meaning 'small' and often used to mean children in Portuguese.
In Sierra Leone, the Krio Language is spoken by people with different degrees of fluency, as well as regional changes to the Krio. Many of the speakers of Sierra Leone Krio live in or close to the capital city, Freetown. As of 2007, there were close to 350,000 individuals who spoke Krio as a primary language. Even more individuals were using it as a main language for communication purposes in the country as a whole.
Language origins One theory suggests the early roots of Krio go back to the Atlantic slave trade era in the 17th and 18th centuries when an English-based "pidgin" language (West African Pidgin English, also called Guinea Coast Creole English) arose to facilitate the coastal trade between Europeans and Africans. This early pidgin later became the lingua franca of regional trade among West Africans themselves and likely spread up the river systems to the African interior. After the founding of Freetown, this preexisting pidgin was incorporated into the speech of the various groups of freed slaves landed in Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1855. The pidgin gradually evolved to become a stable language, the native language of descendants of the freed slaves (which are now a distinct ethnic and cultural group, the Creoles), and the lingua franca of Sierra Leone.Fourah Bay College, Freetown: Guide to Krio, (held at SOAS Univ. of London Library, 195?
Language usage
Krio usage in Sierra Leone Most ethnic and cultural Creoles live in and around Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and their community accounts for about 15% of Sierra Leone's total population (Freetown is the province where the returned slaves from London and Nova Scotia settled).Simon Schama: Rough Crossings, London, 2007 However, because of their cultural influence in Sierra Leone, especially during the period of colonial rule, their language is used as the lingua franca among all the ethnic groups in Sierra Leone.
Krio speakers abroad The Sierra Leone Creole people acted as traders and missionaries in other parts of West Africa during the 19th century, and as a result, there are also Krio-speaking communities in The Gambia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, and Guinea.A. Wyse: Krios of Sierra Leone, London (1989) As a result of Sierra Leone Creole migratory patterns, in the Gambia, the Gambian Creoles or Aku community speak Krio. The Fernando Po Creole English language of Equatorial Guinea is also largely a result of Sierra Leone Creole migrants. A small number of liberated Africans returned to the land of their origins, such as the Saros of Nigeria who not only took their Western names with them but also imported Krio words like sabi into Nigerian Pidgin English.
Language revival During the period of colonial rule, Sierra Leoneans (particularly among the upper class) were discouraged from speaking Krio; but after independence from the United Kingdom in 1961, writers and educators began promoting its use. In the 1960s, Thomas Decker translated some of Shakespeare's plays into Krio, and composed original poetry in the language. In the 1980s, the New Testament was translated into Krio. Beginning with the involvement of Lutheran Bible Translators,Link to dedication report Krio-language translations of the New Testament and Old Testament were published in 1986 and 2013.
While English is Sierra Leone's official language, the Ministry of Education began using Krio as the medium of instruction in some primary schools in Freetown in the 1990s. Radio stations now broadcast a wide variety of programs in Krio. Sierra Leonean politicians also routinely give public speeches in the language.
Classification Krio is an English-based creole from which descend Nigerian Pidgin English and Cameroonian Pidgin English and Pichinglis. It is also similar to English-based creole languages spoken in the Americas, especially Jamaican Patois (Jamaican Creole), Sranan Tongo (Surinamese Creole), Bajan Creole and Gullah language, but it has its own distinctive character. It also shares some linguistic similarities with non-English creoles, such as the French-based creoles of the Caribbean.
Phonology Krio contains seven monophthongs in its inventory of vowels, all of which can be nasalized. Most nasal vowels occur in words derived from English, in cases where an oral vowel precedes a nasal consonant. The nasal consonant is deleted and the vowel is nasalized. Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Vowels FrontCentralBackCloseClose-midOpen-midOpen
Krio has three diphthongs: , , and .
Consonants
There are 24 phonemes in the consonant inventory of Krio.
BilabialLabiodentalLabial–velarAlveolarPalatalVelarUvularPlosivevoicelessvoiced Fricativevoicelessvoiced ⟨r⟩AffricatevoicelessvoicedMedian Lateral Nasal Consonant cluster reduction is a common process in phonology. It is typically applied to lexical items in English containing two or more consonants in a row including an initial s. Some examples include:Finney, Malcolm. 2007. Universal and substrate influence on the phonotactics and syllable structure of Krio. In Huber, Magnus & Velupillai, Viveka (eds.), Synchronic and diachronic perspectives on contact languages, (Creole Languages Library Series 32), 23–42. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Krio wordEnglish meaning 'split' 'street' 'straight' 'spit' 'spread' 'stop' Replacing a fricative with a stop, known as stopping substitution, is also common in words of English origin. Some examples include: Krio wordEnglish meaning 'them' 'brother' 'thanks' 'heavy' 'devil' 'teeth' There is also evidence of the influence of West African languages in the presence of the labial-velar plosives /kp/ and /gb/, as in:
Krio wordEnglish meaning 'frog' 'medicinal herb' 'show of force' 'completely finished' Krio is a tonal language and makes contrastive use of tone in both African and English words. Examples of minimal pairs of words distinguished by tone patterns are:Finney, Malcolm. 2004. Tone assignment on lexical items of English and African origin in Krio. In Escure, Genevieve & Schwegler, Armin (eds.), Creoles, contact and language change: Linguistics and social implications, 221–236. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. LL (low-low) LH (low-high) HL (high-low) HH (high-high) 'skin-irritating herb' 'go away' 'a young boy' 'a barber' 'a type of drum' 'a baby or a doll' 'girlfriend or attractive young woman' 'elder brother or older male relative' 'brother' 'a Catholic priest' 'father' ‘God’ 'someone from the countryside' 'a country'
Orthography Krio uses the Latin script but without Qq and Xx and with three additional letters from the African reference alphabet, Ɛɛ (open E), Ŋŋ (eng), and Ɔɔ (open O). Three tones can be distinguished in Krio and are sometimes marked with grave (à), acute (á), and circumflex (â) accents over the vowels for low, high, and falling tones respectively but these accents are not employed in normal usage.
The complete alphabet with digraphs:
+ Krio alphabet Krio letter or digraph Example word English meaning A, a water Aw, awnow Ay, ay eye B, balready Ch, chchew D, dexpensive (< dear) E, elate Ɛ, ɛhelp F, ffirst G, ggoat H, hHarry I, ilittle girl, small female child J, jjump K, kcountry L, llive (being alive) M, m/to move N, nknock Ny, nynew Ŋ, ŋsing O, oto work Ɔ, ɔborn, give birth to Ɔy, ɔyjoy, happiness P, pfriend R, rrain S, ssoft Sh, shshame, to be ashamed T, tsteal (< thief) T, tdifficult, hard U, uwoman V, vvote W, wwalk Y, yyellow Z, zthe letter 'z' Zh, zhpleasure
Grammar The particle is appended after a noun to mark the plural, e.g. ('woman'): singular plural
Verbs Verbs do not conjugate according to person or number, but reflect their tense. Tense, aspect and mood are marked by one or more tense or aspect markers. The tense markers are 'bin' for the past tense and 'go' for the future, the absence of either shows the present tense. Aspect is shown by (from English 'done') for perfective and (cf. English 'there', Yoruba , ) for imperfective. Infinitive is marked by (from English 'for') and conditional by a combination of and . Tendency is marked by and /.
The verbal paradigm is as follows:
Krio form Verb tense infinitive present simple (unmarked) present progressive perfect perfect progressive future simple future progressive future perfect future perfect progressive past simple past progressive past perfect past perfect progressive conditional conditional progressive conditional perfect conditional perfect progressive tendency , negative tendency
The hortative is marked by (from English 'let'), e.g. ('let's go'), ('let's talk') and the optative by (from English 'make'), e.g. ('let your kingdom come'), ('let your will be done').
Interrogatives The following interrogatives can be used:
Krio wordEnglish meaning who what when where why which how much/many
In addition, like many other creoles, a question can be asked simply by intonation. E.g. ('are you going?') vs. ('you are going'). Additionally the question particles and / can be used at the start or end of the phrase respectively.
Pronouns There is no distinction between masculine and feminine in any person and, unlike Standard English, there is a second person plural form. However, there are the hints of nominative, accusative and genitive cases.