How Language Influenced Civil War in African American History (Essay Sample)

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How language influenced civil war in African American history
Introduction
The development of the African American language for the former slaves played a major role during civil wars in the liberation of the blacks. The civil war marked a historical event of the African American in the liberation of their freedom and end of slavery. The commonly shared features among African American in their language enabled them to communicate and understand each other thus creating a common goal which was fighting for their freedom. Through the common developed language during the civil war period, the African American people expressed the meaning of their culture through sacred and secular rites, ceremonies, rituals, art, music, dances, personal adornment, celebrations among other social-cultural customs and practices. The purpose of this paper is to provide an argumentative research on how the developed African American language influenced the history of the civil war era.
Development of common language during the civil wars played major roles in the perception of grievances of the African American group members, mobilization of the rebels, and enabling the government to accommodate the demands from the rebels. The American former slaves originated from different regions with Christianity and Muslims forming the largest group. The Christian religion was formed by individuals from different tribes which were living in the United States as captives thus activating their conflict toward the whites. “The occurrence of civil war was as a result of ethnic grievances with different researchers presenting their diverse arguments toward formal, encompassing approaches to ethnicity, drawing no distinction between its key dimensions such as language, religion, caste, or race”, (Bormann, Cederman, and Vogt, 2016). From the era of World War II, the historians associate civil wars and ethnic conflict with language with the costly communicated or learned language having a higher representation in the conflict statistics of the African American.
“For the first generation of African enslaved in the colonies, language accommodation and acculturation were a necessity for their survival in the Western world”, ("NPS Ethnography: African American Heritage & Ethnography", 2011). Different African slaved had a varying degree of language competence in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch depending upon their origin. The bilingualism existed as a result of trade concomitant with Portuguese in the mid-fifteenth century. The development and advancement of trade between the West Africans and the Dutch, French, and English enabled the traded slaves to understand and speak some European languages. The development of pidgin language between the slaves and their masters was due to lack of understanding during communication processes and the language used words and meanings from different languages allowing the participants to communicate.
Language development among the slaves played a major role during civil wars whereby the African American could communicate clearly with fellow slaves and also be in a position to negotiate with their bosses and the government. In this era of civil wars, the African American developed a civil war language which enabled them to acquire compilation of slang, nicknames, military jargon and terminology, idioms, colloquialisms, among other terminologies and expressions that were used during the civil war in America. Language development enabled the readers and modern scholars to learn and understand the origin and meaning of terminologies civil war terms.
The African Americans came up with runway advertisements which indicated the slaves with distinctive language characteristics, identifying the slaves with their language proficiency. Language difference among the slaves and between the slaves and their bosses or slave owners created a conflict arising from discrimination and failure to understand the given orders. By the time of the liberation of the African Americans, the slaves had already learned the understandable language such that they could understand the need to fight for their rights. During the civil wars and emancipation of the slaves, the most important step the African Americans managed to take was learning English, preparing them to participate in developmental programs such as politics, state economy, and religious leadership among others. Direct interaction of the slaves with the Native Americans and the Indians enabled the descendants of the African American to develop and speak fluent English. “Aside from shared enslavement, in the early settlement of the Southern colonies, the culture of African and American Indian intertwined in complex ways, with the Afro-Indian communities born of intermarriage between enslaved African men and enslaved Indian women” ("NPS Ethnography: African American Heritage & Ethnography", 2011). Such intertwined children grew into a superior individual in the American society in both economic and political capacities as they had a proficient understanding of the native language, playing a major role in the American civil war and liberation of African American in United State.
Although linguistic coverage had a greater impact on the outb