Africatown English: Early History and Developments

Africatown English is a linguistically unstudied variety spoken in an Alabama community with a remarkable history, founded after the Civil War by the survivors of the last slave ship to land in America. Study of the early dialect has recently become possible due to the publication of Barracoon (2018), a non-fiction novel-length text by Zora Neale Hurston comprised mainly of her representation of Kossula, an Africatown founder. I first verify Hurston’s representation of American Southern Black English in Mules and Men (2008 [1935]) to argue that the features she portrays can be drawn on as contingent linguistic evidence of spoken features, then contrast the two texts to determine the features Hurston portrayed as distinctive in the speech of Kossula. From this heuristic list of twenty-eight features, twelve are selected for analysis in audio recordings of interviews from later in the 20^th century. The twelve features are coded across eleven interviews from 1979 and eighteen interviews from 1999, including descendants of the Africans, people raised in Africatown, and a comparison group of Black Mobilians with no connection to Africatown. Six features are found to show traces of distinctive usage in 1979, and one in 1999. In contrast to many previous sociolinguistic studies, in Africatown the shift away from early language features coincides not with a loss of culture, but with a cultural renaissance and renewed sense of local pride in the Africatown story and heritage.