Krio Tongues, British Blooms: How Sierra Leonean Creole Shapes My Black British Experience
Subheading: As the daughter of Sierra Leonean parents, Adama Juldeh Munu looks at how diaspora languages reflect the evolving nature of Black heritage and identity in the United Kingdom and beyond.
This article was originally published in Black Ballad with slight changes.
Kushe (Hey!)
Oona Kushe (Hello everyone), How de bodi? (How are you?), I de talk pan Krio (I am speaking Krio) seems like an appropriate way to start this article. It’s quite novel because I normally write and speak in Standard British English. But there’s something powerful in being able to go beyond the literary boundaries I’ve often been confined to in the professional sense and honour a language that is part of my heritage and identity. The language that I speak of is Krio or Sierra Leonean Creole. It is one of the fourteen languages spoken in Sierra Leone, a country that is home to various ethnic groups including the Krio, Fulani, Mandinka, Temne, Sherbro, Wolof and Mende peoples. It is why I like to call Sierra Leone ‘West Africa in miniature’ because of the pull of these various influences from West Africa and the Black Atlantic.
Along with English, Krio is a lingua franca of this small West African country, which borders Guinea-Conakry, Liberia and the Atlantic Ocean — a central part of the story as to how it came about. Krio is generally understood to be the native language of the Creole or Krio people of Sierra Leone, an ethnic group made up of the descendants of repatriated Africans who settled in Sierra Leone during the latter years of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and were a prominent group under the country’s British colonial administration. They are mainly comprised of the descendants of African-Americans who had fought on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War, who were brought to England, and later became known as the Black Poor of London, the Jamaican Maroons who were deported to Nova Scotia in 1796 after a revolt, and were later transferred to Sierra Leone in 1800. They also include the descendants of Liberated Africans from countries across the west coast of Africa who arrived on slave ships intercepted by British forces, settling in places such as Freetown and Waterloo, where my paternal grandmother lived until she passed away.
There is an argument that Krio can also be traced back to a core creole spoken along the Upper Guinea Coast in the 1600s before the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which is why there are similarities across the pidgins and creoles spoken in West Africa. As Malcolm Awadajin Finney explains, “There is evidence of British settlement on the Upper Guinea Coast and written reports of interaction, including intermarriages, between Europeans and Africans during this period. Products of the intermarriages — referred to as Mulattos — became the first creole speakers. Creoles in the Americas partly originated from this original creole… which was transmitted to the Americas by slaves transported by English and Dutch traders.”
Since 1983, International Creole Day has been observed on October 28 annually, to celebrate creole languages across various countries and communities including Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and communities like Louisiana Creoles in the United States. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a creole is “a type of language that developed from a mixture of different languages, and which is now spoken by a group of people as their first language.” Linguists like Salikoko Mufwene say that English should also be seen as a creole because it evolved from several languages like Old Norse, French and Latin. This may also apply to other European languages such as German. However, creole also has a specific cultural meaning, especially in the African diaspora, where it refers to a blend of African and European languages that formed during trade and colonial interactions.
Echoes of the diaspora
Because Krio is an English-based creole, I didn’t find it difficult to pick it up when I heard it spoken by my parents at home. In some ways, it is pretty simple to understand because its grammar and sentence structures are not quite unlike Standard British English. For instance, wetin na yu nem (what is your name?), kam na mi os, (come to my house) and how di day bin go? (how was your day?).
Perhaps one of Krio’s most intriguing aspects is how some words are based on Old English sayings like mekes (make haste) or (be quick), or yu know say me na gentry (You know that I am posh or ‘bougie’). The fact that’s the case suggests an ossification of histories and cultures that I can appreciate as a Black Briton of Sierra Leonean heritage. And this extends to the connection Krio has to the languages of kin-communities on the continent and in the diaspora.
Nigerian Pidgin has similar words and phrases to Krio such as na so? (Is that so?) and wetin? (What?). Clifford N. Fyle and Eldred D. Jones said the word krio comes from Yoruba a kiri yo (we go about aimlessly full/satisfied) meaning, “Those who habitually go about paying visits after church service”, as the Krios are cited as having been known for that. Likewise, there are Yoruba words in Krio such as juju (magic) and aseobi (clothing of the family) which are coordinated outfits normally worn during festive events like weddings. Krio also has some substantive French and Portuguese influences. Boku (a lot of) mirrors the French term beaucoup de which means the same thing. Or the word sabi, as in I sabi yu sista (I know your sister), comes from the word savoir (to know) and is also used in Nigerian Pidgin.
Krio also shares similar words and phrases with Jamaican Patois like pikin/pikin dem which like pikni comes from the Portuguese word pequeno which means ‘little’. This is used to describe a child/children or a thing. Additionally, there are phrases like aw, di tin dem (how are things going?) and komot as in oos side yu komot? (where are you coming from?).
Between ‘ init’ and ‘nyam’
While Krio has significantly shaped my linguistic experience, equally impactful has been the use of Black British English as a native South Londoner. This has become especially interesting in recent years, with more being said about Black British English online.
It is a form of English influenced by the linguistic and cultural heritage of Britain’s Black Caribbean and African communities. It emerged primarily within Black communities in the United Kingdom, especially in urban areas like London, Birmingham, and Manchester, due to migration from the Caribbean and, later, Africa from the mid-20th century until the present day. This variety of English has a unique linguistic style shaped by languages like Jamaican Patois and West African languages, as well as Standard British English.
It’s sometimes referred to as Multicultural London English which has gotten some pushback from within the Black British community. In her article on the interconnectedness of Black Atlantic languages, creole polyglot and creator of The Black British English Podcast, Ife Thompson says that it (Black British English), “follows the globalised pattern of African descended communities creating and using language as a form of resistance and cultural retention….new words and phrases created by Black British speakers like doing up, moving mad, bare, buff, peak, peng, clocked, pagan, gassed and the lexicology goes on. Black British people by engaging and speaking in Black British English they are preserving and furthering ancestral linguistic practices against the imperialist reach of white mainstreamed English.”
Fundamentally, Black British English is speech that, like elsewhere in the diaspora, reflects how our heritages, ethnicities, and histories are in constant conversation with each other, and with our present-day environments, as it was for our ancestors. It is not unlike the exposure many of us had to African American Vernacular English through Black America’s dominance of films, music and fashion, that today has us saying bae, hatin’ and chile. We have assumed words and mannerisms that all the while were and are Black American, still flow to our tongues, allowing us to speak in a way that is new and deeply connects us to the richness of the African diaspora.
This connection took on deeper meaning when I realised, years later, that one of the first Fulani words I learned outside my home was spoken by Jamaican friends at school in their patois. That word is nyam (eat/to eat). This shared term, a testament to African cultural retention during and after chattel slavery, exemplifies how Black Atlantic communities in particular are in constant conversation. And for as long as Black Britishness continues to become a more distinctive ethnicity and cultural community in the UK, we will continue to weave our narratives in language, rhythm and tradition, celebrating our distinctive and shared histories, ‘giving life’ to new words, as we’ve always done.
