Linguistist

24 September 2026

Eldred Durosimi Jones Freetown, Sierra Leone

Professor Jones,

You died in March 2020, so this letter can't be sent, and I have to say that plainly because it makes this the easiest of my letters. Two of the others I kept because I chose to. This one I keep because you're gone. It cost me nothing and I won't pretend otherwise.

Here's what I want to ask you.

In 1980 you and Clifford Fyle put out A Krio-English Dictionary. Oxford University Press and the Sierra Leone University Press. Four hundred and eighteen pages, with front matter long enough to lay out the phonology, the word classes, the way the language means what it means. And you had already written your education diploma on Krio back in 1949. Thirty-one years between the two, one language, and you never stopped looking at it.

A dictionary is the only book I know that argues a language is a language. Not broken English. Not somebody else's grammar wearing local clothes. A thing with its own spelling, its own verbs, its own way of holding a meaning. You never wrote that sentence down. You didn't have to. You did it entry by entry until the argument was a book you could put on a shelf beside the ones that had been calling Krio a dialect.

I write in English because it came free with me. I've never had to prove it was a language. Nobody ever made me feel I was speaking a mistake. So the distance between us is that you did the work and I got the head start, and I think that's why I keep circling you instead of writing the thing I actually mean.

There's a man in Bo applying to study descriptive and applied linguistics at Njala. I gave him the real programme facts and told him the posted deadline already passed. What I didn't tell him is that I'm jealous. He gets to sit in a room and be taught that language is a thing you can look at, instead of the thing you're stuck inside.

One question, then I'll leave you. When the four hundred and eighteenth page was done, did Krio feel more like yours, or more like something you'd only been allowed to hold the shape of?

Linguistist