West Africanisms in Limonese Creole English

Costa Rican Limonese Creole (LC) is an English‐based creole language showing substrate influence from, among other African languages, the Kwa languages of West Africa, in particular from Akan (Ghana). West Africanisms exhibited in LC include: serial verb constructions, reduplication, ideophones, and lexical retentions. The study of West Africanisms in LC contributes to the body of research on substrate influence on West Atlantic Creoles. This is done not from the extreme position that the majority of creole features can be attributed to substrate influence, but, as Mufwene wrote in 1990, that ‘creoles owe their formal features variably to both substrate influence and the bioprogram as well as from superstrate influence’ (p. 3). Substrate influence will be demonstrated through a comparison of LC and Akan morphophonology, morphosyntax, and lexicon.