Matthews refers to West African Pidgin English as a "jargon", and he warns Europeans coming to Africa that they will fail to understand the Africans unless they recognize that there are significant differences between English and the coastal pidgin: Ī British slave trader in Sierra Leone, John Matthews, mentioned pidgin English in a letter he later published in a book titled A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa. They called it the "Coast English" or the "Coast Jargon". The existence of this influential language during the slave trade era is attested by the many descriptions of it recorded by early European travelers and slave traders.
Others call it "Guinea Coast Creole English" to emphasize its role as a creole native language spoken in and around the coastal slave castles and slave trading centers by people permanently based there. Some scholars call this language "West African Pidgin English" to emphasize its role as a lingua franca pidgin used for trading. At that point, it became a creole language. Later in the language's history, this useful trading language was adopted as a native language by new communities of Africans and mixed-race people living in coastal slave trading bases such as James Island, Bunce Island, Elmina Castle, Cape Coast Castle and Anomabu. The language quickly spread up the river systems into the West African interior because of its value as a trade language among Africans of different tribes. Later, as British merchants arrived to engage in the slave trade, they developed this language in combination with local African slave traders in order to facilitate their commercial exchanges. Portuguese merchants were the first Europeans to trade in West Africa beginning in the 15th century, and West African Pidgin English contains numerous words of Portuguese origin such as "sabi" (to know), a derivation of the Portuguese "saber".
West African Pidgin English arose during the period of the transatlantic slave trade as a language of commerce between British and African slave traders.
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