Trinidad Yoruba
From Mother-Tongue to Memory
Publication Year: 1996
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.
Published by: The University of Alabama Press
Contents
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pp. v-
Acknowledgments
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pp. vii-ix
This book comes into print at a time when the Afrocentric and multicultural perspectives are increasingly gaining ground in the academy. This work, while not a product of the present phase, is however the outcome of revisionist approaches by indigenes...
A Note on Ethnonyms
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pp. xi-
There is as yet no satisfactory term by which to refer to all persons of African descent. Negro is negatively value loaded. The issue becomes more problematic because this book treats of both continental Africans and their diasporan descendants of varying generations...
Orthographic Guide
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pp. xiii-xiv
In setting out both Yoruba and Trinidad Yoruba, present Yoruba orthographic conventions have been largely followed. However, the $ of Yoruba orthography is retained in Yoruba language contexts, but is converted to sh in passages of continuous English...
Phonological Symbols
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pp. xv-xvi
Abbreviations
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pp. xvii-xviii
Introduction
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pp. 1-14
In the anglophone Caribbean, historiography has moved to embrace documentation and analysis of the lives and social conditions of the poor and underprivileged only within the last two decades. Before then, history concerned itself largely with official...
Part One: The Yoruba of Trinidad: Historical Background and Sociolinguistic Behavior
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pp. 15-95
1. The Yoruba and Transatlantic Slavery
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pp. 17-33
This chapter outlines the political and cultural history of the Yoruba-speaking peoples and the nature of their involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. These historical outlines are offered to indicate by comparison the subsequent containment and decline...
2. First-Generation Trinidad Yoruba Society
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pp. 34-53
No census lists the relative numerical strength of post-Emancipation (1838) African nationalities, but the 1813 Register of Slaves does provide such evidence for the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century.1 This shows 41.2 percent coming from the...
3. Language Attitudes of Second- and Third-Generation Africans
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pp. 54-72
The culture-forms of the second generation were strongly permeated by creolisms. The alienation of first-generation Africans in a creole society produced in them "a certain secretiveness" toward even their own children. Africans therefore...
4. Residual Language Domains: Names and Ritual
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pp. 73-95
"Priority of settlement with accompanying adherence to the land is by far the most powerful factor in determining how long a ... language will persist."1 This contention is borne out by the fact that it is native American toponyms that have persisted...
Part Two: Trinidad Yoruba: Linguistic Structures
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pp. 97-169
5. Phonology
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pp. 99-115
6. Syntax
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pp. 116-139
7. Lexicon
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pp. 140-169
For the sake of manageability, and also in order to identify the most relevant and functional areas of vocabulary retention, this examination of the TY lexical repertoire will be confined to the items that carried conscious semantic content for users. Among...
Part Three: The Dialectics of Obsolescence and Creolization
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pp. 171-213
8. Language Recession within a Creolized Context
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pp. 173-187
In terms of speaker competence, TY displays the wide proficiency range typical of moribund languages receding in speaker affiliation, functional domain, and stylistic register. This language recession has come about partly as a result of language...
9. Creolization Processes in Broader Perspective
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pp. 188-213
Although this study in the main addresses an instance of language obsolescence, there is an existential sense in which death resists finality. This ontological perspective finds corroboration not only in the interdependence of life and death in nature but...
Appendix: Trinidad Yoruba Lexicon in Alphabetical Order
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pp. 215-235
Notes
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pp. 237-256
References
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pp. 257-274
Index
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pp. 275-279
E-ISBN-13: 9780817383183
Print-ISBN-13: 9780817355821
Page Count: 300
Publication Year: 1996
