Krio language : Ask Biography

Home | Language | Krio language

Sierra Leone Krio is the lingua franca and the de facto national language spoken throughout the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Krio is spoken by 97% of Sierra Leone's population and unites the different ethnic groups in the country, especially in their trade and social interaction with each other. Krio is the primary language of communication among Sierra Leoneans at home and abroad. The language is native to the Sierra Leone Creole people or Krios, (a community of about 300,000 descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, United States and United Kingdom), but it is spoken as a second language by millions of other Sierra Leoneans belonging to the country's indigenous tribes. English is Sierra Leone's official language, while Krio, despite its common use throughout the country, has no official status.

The Krio language is an offshoot of the language brought by the Nova Scotian Settlers from North America, Maroons from Jamaica, and the numerous liberated African slaves who settled in Sierra Leone.

The vocabulary of Krio is derived primarily from English, while its sound system, grammar and sentence structure are heavily influenced by at least 12 African languages, including aspects of the Yoruba language of Nigeria. Krio's standard greeting, kushe, for instance, is derived from the Yoruba greeting è kú işé ("greetings on your work"); the krio word "pan", meaning (on top of/doing something), descends directly from the Jamaican patois word "pon", meaning the same thing; the krio expression "chaka-chaka", meaning (messy/untidy), also descends from Jamaican patois. This is because some of the freed slaves were from the West Indies, and in particular Jamaica (Jamaican Maroons).

All freed slaves—the Jamaican Maroons, African Americans, Nova Scotian Settlers, Sierra Leone Liberated Africans—influenced Krio, but the Jamaican Maroons, Nova Scotian Settlers, and Yoruba Liberated Africans were the most influential. The basic English structure of Krio is an offshoot of the English spoken by the Nova Scotians, while some of the African words in Krio come from the Yoruba language spoken by liberated Yorubas.

Krio is distinct from Pidgin English as it is an English-based creole language but more of a language in its own right, with fixed grammatical structures and rules. Krio also draws extensively from other European languages, namely Portuguese and French, e.g. the krio word "gentri/gentree", which means wealth or to acquire wealth is derived from the Old French word "gentry".