The Atlantic

The interaction and merging of populations, languages, cultural traditions, and economic modes in the Atlantic basin from the 16th century onwards epitomizes the recent trajectory of the world in which Europe forged its version of modernity, with its constitutive elements of asymmetrical globalization, castism-racism, genocide, forced labour, large-scale labour migration, industrial capitalism, and the destruction of older social institutions and kinship systems, the ‘melting of solids’ (Bauman 2013). But the Atlantic world has also seen the rise of an equally modern counter-project, the syncretic and subversive culture of ‘métisage’ (Glissant 1997) constructed by enslaved and colonized African- , Indigenous- , and Asian- descended peoples of the Americas. A whole range of linguistic varieties emerged from these interactions. Among these, the Afro-European creole languages of the Atlantic combine the linguistic lineages of their progenitors in particularly interesting ways. Tectonic demographic shifts In the near future and far-reaching socio-economic changes underway in Africa will escalate the importance of the Atlantic as a crossroads of language contact, and a site for the emergence of new languages, speech styles, and plurilingual practices.