Samaná English

An English-lexified variety referred to as Samaná English (SME) maintained in the Dominican Republic, on the Samaná Peninsula, by descendants of Free Africans who migrated there from the United States in 1824 informs linguistic research on Early African American English (EAAE). Existing accounts of SME agree that it qualifies–due to its isolation–as a representative of EAAE, but different linguists have reached differing conclusions on the question of whether EAAE was a creole, the so-called “Creolist Hypothesis,” or a dialect of British Colonial English as claimed by advocates of the “Anglicist Hypothesis.”
Tape recorded SME data collected by this author does not look like a creole, and neither does it look like British colonial English. African continuities in the system of tense, mood, aspect marking and numerous structural correspondences with creole and post-creole varieties of the Afro American family of languages support the view that EAAE was a post-creole variety.