John C Rigdon

Liberian English Phrasebook and Dictionary John C Rigdon

This book is a first step to document a language which til this time has been entirely oral. Liberian English (Kolokwa) has been used for almost 200 years at least by the people of Liberia, but up until just recently it has not been recognized as a dialect of pidgin of English. The first academic studies of the language date back to the 1970's and although several academic papers have been written in the past 25 years, no one has taken the initiative to create a dictionary. The typical process in documenting an oral language is the translation of the Bible, but that has not been done yet in the case of Kolokwa. Gullah, which is a close sister-language has a New Testament which was completed in 2005. Jamaican Patois also now has a Bible translation, completed in 2012. While the number of native speakers of Gullah is probably less than 1,000 and Jamaican Patois has 3 million speakers, the estimates for Kolokwa speakers reach 1.6 million people.