How Language Evolves: The Fusion of Cultures

You travel to Spain for a vacation, but you need to finish an assignment and don’t have a computer. You are staying at a hotel, and you have three hours before the assignment’s due. The problem? You barely know Spanish, and definitely don’t know how to ask for a “computer”. So, you ask the receptionist: “Donde ‘computero’?”  Thankfully, even though the receptionist doesn’t know a lick of English, she understands you and points you to a room in the corner where you finish your work on the ‘computero’. Turns out, that's exactly how the actual term in Spanish (“computador”, not “computero”) came to rise. After the creation of the computer in the United States, due to the rapid spread of ideas, it took little time for the Spanish to develop a Spanish word for the new technology.

In this way, new dialects are largely developed from fusion of old ones. English as we know it today in America is full of words that originated across different cultures. Take this sentence for example: “The Chimpanzee ate a jumbo sized yam”. In reality, the word “Chimpanzee” comes from the Congolese language Vili in the 19th century. The word “yam” comes from a West African Language known as Fula, also in the 19th century. The word “jumbo” comes from the Swahili coast during, you guessed it, the 19th century. Now you may ask, how the hell did the word for an oversized monkey come into everyday English? 

Let’s explore the time period during which the above linguistic evolutions took place. In the Americas, due to the rapid pace of globalization, the desire for raw materials was higher than ever to increase production of luxury goods. Rulers of states, in an attempt to fulfill their hunger for unimaginably high margins of profit, required a source of cheap labor to harvest these raw materials. After the Spanish took over much of the present day United States, they enlisted tens of thousands of Native Americans to grow sugar, tobacco, and more. However, with the rise of industrial nations, such as the United States (which took the place of the Spanish in North America), the growing demand for cotton surpassed every industry in the world, giving rise to the Atlantic Slave Trade during the 17th and 18th centuries. Millions of slaves were imported from all parts of Africa (mainly West Africa and the Swahili Coast). So what does all of that have to do with the creation of new languages? 

Well, with the enslaved individuals, came the language of the enslaved. Hundreds of different tribal languages came from Africa. However, when they got there, their orders were given in a foreign language: English. Slaves got together to try and understand their captors’ languages, piecing together their own languages and the little fragments of their captors' languages. Guess what? The Congo was one of states with the highest number of slaves exported, with the Swahili Coast close behind. Bits of Congolese here, and Swahili there were pieced together with old English to form the hearty stew of the English we know today.

However, fragments of different languages aren’t only present in the stereotypical English we speak today. Take for example this sentence: “She gon’ holler at her cousin to pick her up ‘cuz she finna go to the store but she ain’t got no whip”. For starters, this sentence is packed with words from African American Vernacular English (AAVE). While there are so many other dialects such as Geechee and Gullah, which were crucial to the understanding of the formation of a new dialect, AAVE captures the rich history of the fusion of languages best. AAVE evolved as a mixture of native African languages with English. Many terms in the above AAVE sentence are not normally seen in normal English. Here’s the list of these terms and their definitions: “ ‘gon” means “going to”, “holler” usually means to “scream”, “finna” means “fixing to” or “intending to”, “‘cuz” means because, “ain’t” means “is not”, and finally, “whip” means a “car”. Most importantly, what really matters is how these words came to be. For the sake of time, let’s use one example: “whip”. Captors of the enslaved skilfully wielded whips to discipline slaves, and when cars were introduced, they increased the ability to move around nimbly, so the word “whip” was used for “cars”. What is interesting about this sentence is that 300 years ago, nobody would have understood what it meant, thus showing how language evolves through a fusion across various languages and cultures