Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

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Wilson, John Leighton. A Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, with Vocabularies, by the Missionaries of the A.B.C.F.M, Gaboon Mission, Western Africa. New York: Snowden and Prall, Printers, 1847.

John Leighton Wilson. A Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, with Vocabularies, by the Missionaries of the A.B.C.F.M., Gaboon Mission, Western Africa. New York: Snowden and Prall, Printers, 1847. Title page.

Born in slave-state South Carolina, Wilson wrote with an unusual degree of sensitivity and respect for the peoples and cultures he encountered as a missionary in west Africa.

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The Mpongwe is a dialect of Western Africa, spoken on both sides of the Gaboon river, at Cape Lopez, Cape St. Catherine, and in the interior, to the distance of two or three hundred miles. It belongs to one general family of languages which prevails over the whole of the southern half of the African Continent. It is less or more nearly allied to all the dialects along what may be called the Western Coast of Southern Africa, to the Bechuana, Kafir, Zulu, and other dialects of South Africa, and to the languages of Mosambique and Zanzibar on the Eastern Coast, but has no known affinities to any of the languages north of the Mountains of the Moon. The different members of this great family of languages vary materially as dialects, but they all retain enough of their original characteristics, to remove all doubt as to their common origin. A variety of causes have operated to produce differences among the dialects of this one great family of languages, among which may be mentioned, the want of written standards, the remote regions of country in which the different tribes reside, their diversified employments and pursuits, the want of extensive governments, and especially, the various foreign nations with whom they have had commercial intercourse for a long period, and from whom they must necessarily have borrowed many words.

Those along the Western Coast have borrowed largely from the Portuguese, those near the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch and English, those of Mosambique from the Portuguese and Madagascar, whilst those higher up the coast have drawn quite as freely from the Arabic.