The exportation and diaspora of restructured varieties of the English language through Granville Sharp’s philanthropist move to (re)settle the Black Poor in London and consequently other people like them in the Americas to Freetown 227 years ago was not only a salvation and civilizing mission but was also meant “as a potential utopian frontier of the mind and soul: a new beginning, in which humanity could rectify its past sins” (Bledsoe 1992: 186). This new beginning, therefore, has direct links to the existence of the English language with its divergent dialects in its new ecology in Freetown, the ‘Province of Freedom’. This new society and its new linguistic property, English, which has attracted some language enthusiasts (Spencer 1971; Jones 1971; Holm 1989; Pemagbi 1989; Fyfe 1991; Conteh-Morgan 1997; Huber 1998, 2004; Montgomery 1999) should be seen as a contact-induced variety considering the linguistic diversity of the settlers’ Englishes and their co-existence with speakers of other languages (African) in varying circumstances in a society in which different people and a plethora of languages (have) existed side by side in especially two important phases: settlement (1787-1850; 1808-1863) and colonization (1808 & 1896). The existence of the English language in Sierra Leone is basically due to the spread of Christianity and Western/European Education. Just as in other English-using (West) African countries, at independence in 1961, English remained as the official state and administrative language, and, as the language of instruction with social, political and economic consequences in Sierra Leone. 

Regarding the object of the study, the English language in Sierra Leone, we observe that the linguistic community under examination, Freetown, presents a perfect example of the spread of European languages in the world and the ensuing indigenization that they have been made to undergo.  This is due mainly to the fact that European languages came into contact with indigenous languages in these countries and are subsequently (re)shaped according to the linguistic experience of the people that use them as second and official languages. For our theoretical framework, we consider Weinreich’s ([1953] 1968), Selinker’s (1972), Kachru’s (1976; 1996), Thomason and Kaufman (1988), Mufwene’s (2001) and Schneider’s (2007), among others, in our analysis of Sierra Leone English features in a bid to answer the following questions:

1)      What role did Freetown play to the birth of West African English and the English lexified Pidgin and Creole languages in West Africa and beyond?

2)      What language policies have been implemented so far with regards language and education?

3)      Can the use of English in Sierra Leone, then, be free from contact-induced language change given the fact that most educated users/speakers of English have, at least, one indigenous language of Sierra Leone as a mother tongue?

To answer these questions, this paper has five interrelated objectives:

a)      a critical look at the people who were settled in Freetown as they co-existed with one another and with the indigenes of the Settlement;

b)      the structure of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Freetown society in relation to the people and their use of language;

c)      an analysis of the varieties of the English language brought and used by the Freetown Settlers taking into account the other languages spoken in Freetown;

d)     the role of the Freetown settlement and Sierra Leoneans to the birth, development and spread of not only West African English but also English lexified Pidgin and Creole languages in West Africa and beyond; and,

e)      an appraisal of the sole use of European Languages in Africa as languages of instruction (English in this case) in detriment of the local languages and the resulting linguistic consequences with a focus on Sierra Leone. 

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