Talk:Liberian English

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 January 2020 and 22 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jacob.ronkin.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:32, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Relation to Krio

How similar to this is Krio? Scott Free (talk) 01:52, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Spelling

Does Liberian English use the American spelling or British spelling?

Yes. Newspapers will speak of Firestone growing rubber to produce tyres, and Brownie Samukai's title is Minister of Defence, but they'll sometimes use spellings such as "-er" rather than "-re". It tends to be more British (I'm guessing that it's because the original settlers had a low literacy rate, so a lot of the written English with which they interacted was produced in the surrounding British colonies) in spelling and grammar, but the vocabulary is more American, if I remember rightly. Nyttend (talk) 20:54, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Can you find sources on this? Because currently it's not in the article. — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  14:57, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Sources on what? Sources for my whole comment? If so, the answer's no; I'm sorry. (1) My answer is derived from my own reading in Liberian sources, primarily newspapers and government documents, and not from secondary sources. (2) Most of the documentation in question is print resources to which I no longer have access, unlike in 2012 when I was working with them frequently. (3) If you mean something else, let me know. Nyttend (talk) 16:53, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

PS, there's some online, but Liberian online presence was profoundly affected by the Ebola virus epidemic in Liberia — in particular, several of the major newspapers (my preferred sources for both news and Liberian English) stopped updating their websites. I can point you to Warren d'Azavedo's Some terms from Liberian speech, although this is somewhat older (it predates the PRC), and the target audience is Peace Corps workers in the bush counties where native languages like Kpelle, Vai, or the Mande languages dominate and English is secondary, not people working in major towns like Monrovia and Harper where Liberian English dominates. Nyttend (talk) 17:02, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

PPS, Mr. Guye, see OCLC 12586679, a post-1980 text that's specifically linguistic, although again it's aimed at the Peace Corps, not linguists. Since your userpage says that you're in Minnesota, I checked WorldCat for holdings closest to the Twin Cities, but unfortunately the closest libraries that own it are U of WI, U of IA, Northwestern U, U of IL, U of KS, and MI State U. Try ILL? Or would you like me to request it? Nyttend (talk) 17:10, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

@Nyttend: No, that's fine. You don't need to request that. It's just that I came to this article primarily to find info on Liberian spellings, but I didn't find it. Thank you for your detailed answer. — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  17:16, 28 September 2017 (UTC)