Língua Geral de Mina: A picture of the linguistic history of enslaved Africans in Brazil

Abstract

This paper deals with the linguistic history of enslaved Africans in Brazil. One analyses Língua Geral de Mina (LGM), a Gbe language documented in Brazil during the mining economy (18th-century). The main argument is that even in the colonial context that Gbe variety brought from Mina Coast retained its characteristic morphosyntactic features, such as reduplicated attributive adjectives and inherent complement verbs, that were analyzed in this paper. After exposing the theoretical framework, one shows the ecological factors (MUFWENE, 2001; 2008) that contributed to the vitality of LGM in Brazil, e.g., the ethnolinguistic homogeneity of Gbe people, the socioeconomic structure of the mining area, and the social networks that were created by the enslaved Africans in Minas Gerais. One includes some linguistic data in the discussion in order to emphasize that LGM was a language used in the social interactions in that region. In this sense, one argues that languages are devices that are used by the speakers in order to achieve their objectives.