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The grammar of Black English basilect1 [in the United States] is so similar to that of certain other Afro-American varieties of English that the temptation to look for historical connections has been irresistible to the small band of linguists who have interested themselves in the problem. But the most immediate solution which suggests itself - direct influence from the African languages spoken by the slaves - proves to be too simple and is made to seem unlikely by the language-mixing practices of the slave dealers. The conventional suggestion of the dialect geographers - that dialect forms were taken from widely scattered areas of the British Isles to form Black English - is even less likely in view of dialect leveling, a very well-known phenomenon in migration which means that even the white residents of colonial America did not speak or transmit British "regional" dialects.2
For the mixing of African language groups, we have the evidence of statements like that of slave ship Captain William Smith in 1744:
As for the languages of Gambia, they are so many and so different, that the Natives, on either Side the River, cannot understand each other; which, if rightly consider'd, is no small Happiness to the Europeans who go thither to trade for slaves ... I have known some melancholy Instances of whole Ship Crews being surpriz'd, and cut-off by them. But the safest Way is to trade with the different Nations, on either Side the River, and having some of every Sort on board, there will be no more Likelihood of their succeeding in a Plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel.3
Smith's statement can be matched by the statements of John Atkins and others of the same period.4 It may be noted that, among other things, they document the lack of such language mixing in the early slave trade. Thus, language mixing developed later, after some of the crews had learned the hard way that the Africans did not welcome being enslaved. It therefore seems entirely probable that some of the slave ships contained relatively homogeneous linguistic groups. In some cases the circumstances of slave trading brought further mixing after the arrival of the slaves to the New World. But some slave buyers learned to prefer...