Merico or Americo-Liberian is an English-based creole language spoken until recently in Liberia

Liberia

Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...

 by Americo-Liberian

Americo-Liberian

Americo-Liberians are a Liberian ethnicity of African American descent. The sister ethnic group of Americo Liberians are the Sierra Leone Creole people who are of African American, West Indian, and liberated African descent...

s, descendants of the Settlers, freed slaves and African-Americans who immigrated from the southern US between 1819 and 1860. It is distinguished from Liberian Kreyol language

Liberian Kreyol language

Kreyol is an English-based creole language spoken in Liberia. It is spoken by 1,500,000 people as a second language . It is historically and linguistically related to Merico, another creole spoken in Liberia, but is grammatically distinct from it...

 and from Kru

Kru

The Kru are an ethnic group who live in interior of Liberia. Their history is one marked by a strong sense of ethnicity and resistance to occupation. In 1856 when part of Liberia was still known as the independent Republic of Maryland, the Kru along with the Grebo resisted Maryland settlers'...

, and may be connected to Gullah

Gullah language

Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people , an African American population living on the Sea Islands and the coastal region of the U.S...

 and Jamaican Creole

Jamaican Creole

Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois or Jamaican, and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English-lexified creole language with West African influences spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. It is not to be confused with Jamaican English nor with the Rastafarian use of...

.

The original Settlers numbered 19,000 in 1860. By 1975 the language was partly decreolized

Decreolization

Decreolization is a hypothetical phenomenon whereby over time a creole language reconverges with one of the standard languages from which it originally derived...

, restricted to informal settings, and deprecated even by its speakers.

Grammatical features

Plurals are unmarked, as in rak "rock","rocks", or marked with a -dẽ suffix

Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...

, as in rak-dẽ "rocks". The verb expressing "to be" is sʌ, as in shi sʌ smo "she is small", but adjectives may be used without it, as in hi big "he is big". Verbs are not inflected for past tense.

Separate particles are used to indicate some verb tenses:

• ẽ for negation (ai ẽ æs di chææ "I didn't ask the child"),
• dɘ or lɛ for continuing action (hi dɘ spiish "he is talking at great length", shi lɛ kræ "she is crying"),
• wu for future (wi wu kã "we will come"),
• dõ or nõ for completed action (de dõ go dædɘdwe "they have gone that way", lilpis nõ lɛf "not a little piece was left")

The pronouns include:

Subject: ai/a, yu/yɔ/yo, hi/i, shi, wi, de/dẽ

Object: mi, yu, hi/hĩ, hɔ, wi/ɔs, dẽ

Possessive: mʌ/mi, yu/yo, hi/i, shi/hɔ, ou, dɛ