A deeply informed Afrocentric view of language and cultural retention under slavery.
Maureen Warner-Lewis offers a comprehensive description of the West African language of Yoruba as it has been used on the island of Trinidad in the southern Caribbean. The study breaks new ground in addressing the experience of Africans in one locale of the Africa Diaspora and examines the nature of their social and linguistic heritage as it was successively retained, modified, and discarded in a European-dominated island community.
AcknowledgmentsA Note on EthnonymsOrthographic GuidePhonological SymbolsAbbreviationsIntroductionThe Yoruba of Trinidad: Historical Background and Sociolinguistic BehaviorThe Yoruba and Transatlantic SlaveryFirst-Generation Trinidad Yoruba SocietyLanguage Attitudes of Second- and Third-Generation AfricansResidual Language Domains: Names and RitualTrinidad Yoruba: Linguistic StructuresPhonologySyntaxLexiconThe Dialectics of Obsolescence and CreolizationLanguage Recession within a Creolized ContextCreolization Processes in Broader PerspectiveAppendix: Trinidad Yoruba Lexicon in Alphabetical OrderNotesReferencesIndex
Maureen Warner-Lewis is professor of African-Caribbean languages and orature at the University of the West Indies, Mona. She is the author of four books, including Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture.