While specific artifacts have changed, structural components of African culture remain in the lived-experiences of African Americans through linguistic tradition.

That something of the African backgrounds of black Americans survived is not difficult to argue despite intense efforts to prove that blacks were incapable of cultural retention because of slavery. No displaced people have ever completely lost the forms of their previous culture. The specific artifacts may differ from those employed in a prior time, but the essential elements giving rise to those artifacts are often retained and produce substantive forms in the new context. It is my contention that black Americans retained basic components of the African experience rather than specific artifacts. To seek the distinctive retention of African words in black America as Turner, Herskovits, and Romeo Garrett attempted to do is to search amiss. What they sought to do is an interesting, provocative, and valuable addition to our knowledge, but it is not convincing from the standpoint of cultural survivals. It is cast in too narrow a mold and often depends on the continuity of specific words from several ethnic regions of Africa. Although African lexical items may be found limited supply among African-Americans, they do not make the argument for a more general retention of African linguistic behavior applicable to most black Americans. What my research suggests is that combinations of classes of sounds, units of meaning, and syntax behaviors are to be considered in regard to survival rather than concentrating on any single one of these factors or on simple lexical characteristics. Earlier writers seem to have preferred African lexical discoveries in African-American language; they are, after all, easily identifiable phenomena. But the relationship between African languages and African-American speech behaviors can be more clearly ascertained on a primary level in the “communication style” of the person. While this concept is difficult to define, it means simply the verbal and nonverbal behavior patterns that distinguish one person from another. Even whole groups may be distinguished in such a manner. On a secondary level, there are observable relationships in the substantive social fabric of language behavior—proverbs, riddles, dozens, call-and-response. The combination of communicative styles and “folkloristic modalities” constitutes an approach to the sense of a language. It is this sense of language in African-Americans that is uniquely more African than European, other factors aside. This is not a rejection of linguistic structure, inasmuch as I hope to demonstrate that certain structural matters underscore my basic thesis.