Touching the past : studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents

This paper considers reported speech of slaves in court records from the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. It constitutes some of the earliest evidence of slaves' language anywhere, and shows that the early slave community on the island of St Helena spoke a creoloid, as well as non-standard Southern English. Nothing is known about the personal history of the slaves apart from some of their names. These names are analysed, and by comparison with name-usage in eighteenth-century London, it is concluded that they betray contemporary British attitudes to slavery. Thus, data is presented o.