Local plant names reveal that enslaved Africans recognized substantial parts of the New World flora

Significance Enslaved Africans had to familiarize themselves with the American flora, which was largely alien to them, to survive. The process of species recognition, knowledge acquisition, and replacement has hardly been documented. We compared 2,350 Afro-Surinamese vernacular plant names with those vernacular plant names used in western Africa for botanically related taxa. Sixty-five percent of the Afro-Surinamese plant names contained European lexical elements, but among Maroons, descendants of escaped slaves, more than 40% of the vernaculars showed strong resemblance in sound, structure, and meaning to African plant names for related taxa. The greatest correspondence was found among plant names from Gabon and Angola, the main areas where the Dutch purchased their slaves. Our paper shows that Africans recognized substantial parts of the American flora.