Krio Language Post

Post by Lara

30 October 2012

I’ve already written two language posts for the language that we haven’t even come close to mastering, but we haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Krio aside from peppering Krio words and phrases into our other posts. For the sake of my language-loving friends, here’s a bit about the most spoken language in Salone.

The fun part of learning Krio in training was figuring out where Krio and English overlap and noting that often, the English words that made their way into Krio are quite outdated now.  For instance, “I am angry” is “A de veks” [I am getting vexed].  “You are bothering me” is either “Yu de distob mi” [You are disturbing me] or “Yu de hombog mi” [You are humbugging me].  Flip-flops are called “half backs” or “slippers”.  A motorbike is called a Honda, no matter who made it.  Instead of braiding, they plait hair here [“plant” in Krio].

To go along with the somewhat outdated words that populate Krio vocabulary, there are a number of cases where Krio just doesn’t seem to offer the same range of description that English does. For instance, the acceptable answers to “How are you?” are “Thank God” or “Fine”.  If you’re doing really well, then you say “fine” with a lot of enthusiasm or you say it twice [“A fayn fayn!”]. If you’re not so great, you say “fine” slower and with less enthusiasm, or you say something like “Thank God small small,” [“small small” being “a little bit”].  There are two degrees of temperature that we know of: warm and cold. If it’s 110 degrees in the shade, the sun is warm. If the neighbor boy is about to put his hand on a boiling hot pot, you slap his hand and say “It’s warm!”  When we go out to a bar that only runs its generator several hours per day, we have to remember to ask what drinks are cold (“Us kayn kol drink yu get?”).  Also when it rained last night and it’s only 74 degrees outside and you put a sweater on before going out to start breakfast, you say “A fil kol” (“I feel cold”). 

Even though Krio doesn’t have the range of vocabulary that we’re used to in English, it still offers a wide range of ways to make a point come across, depending on your voice tone, body language, etc.  It took us a lot of time to come to understand this as we learned the language and culture, and that involved several frustrating incidents that in hindsight had more to do with misunderstanding than anything else. For instance, I used to get vexed with my host family (isn’t that fun—vexed!) because they always seemed to be ordering me around—telling me to come inside to get out of the rain, telling me to sit here, telling me what kind of shoes to wear with my outfit, etc. It turns out, though, Krio does not require one to say “please” in most cases.  Just saying something in a soft and quiet tone of voice is enough to count as polite.  In fact, “please” [“duya”] is only used when you are asking for a favor- such as asking a seller to lower the price of a good.  My Sierra Leonean friends and colleagues have commented on several occasions that Kevin and I say “please” and “thank you” excessively by their standards.  It’s a tough habit to break, but I honestly hope that I can hang onto that habit for the next 2 years, because I know that if I were to adapt to the Krio way of asking politely, most Americans would find me rude. 

Another fun Krio thing: double words exist all over this language, and they mean different things.  For instance, “small small” is how you say “a little bit” or “little by little”.  “Fayn fayn” is “very good” or “very pretty” depending on context, and “bad bad” is “really bad”—but just like in English, it can be a positive thing (i.e. “I want that purse really bad!”) From my market day post you may remember “bay bay” [“buy buy”] which I translated as “shopping”. When you say you’re going to go “bay bay”, you are saying you’re going out to buy numerous things, rather than going to buy rice or beans and return home.  Similarly, “waka” is “walk”, and if I say I am going “waka”, that means I’m going walking somewhere specific. When you double the verb and say “A de go waka waka” you’re saying “I’m going to go walk around” [sidenote: “waka waka” is pronounced exactly the same as Fozzie Bear’s catchphrase, and I think of it every time someone talks about going walking around].  I’ve also heard “mix mix” when talking about shaking or stirring something up while cooking, “krach krach” [“scratch scratch”] for itchy bug bites or rashes, and “kot kot” [“cut cut”] to mean cutting something up very small. 

Krio is a very fun language to learn, and also a fun language to know, since it can help us get around not only in Salone but other West African countries and numerous Caribbean countries where similar Creole languages developed.  The only downside to learning Krio thus far is that after 4 months of trying to learn Krio and also adapting our own English vocabulary to be understandable to Krio speakers, we feel like we’re losing our grip on English.  There is no “us” in Krio—only “we”…so sometimes we’ll find ourselves saying things like “he didn’t tell we when he wants to meet”.  We tend to describe little things as “small small” now, and we sometimes make negative sentences by just adding “no” [“I no want to go to Bo next weekend”].  We’re trying to minimize the damage, but we’ve got about 23 months to go.  So to our high school English teachers as well as our grammar-stickler friends (cough cough…Diane, Rachel, Patrick…cough cough), we apologize in advance if our English skills deteriorate while we’re here!