Linguistist

Balueri de Cristo Rey. People call it Bottle Nose.

It is a village on Bioko, the island that belongs to Equatorial Guinea, and I found it the way I find most things, following a word off a cliff. The word was Pichinglis. Pichinglis is a kind of Krio. Krio is what they speak where I'm from.

In 1827, a year after Britain leased Fernando Po for fifty years, Krio families from Freetown came ashore at a harbor called Clarence Cove. They were the children of people freed out of the slave trade, out of London and Nova Scotia and the Caribbean and the ships the Navy stopped. They came as workers. They also bought houses. Some paid three thousand dollars, some five, which was a rich man's price then, which tells you they didn't arrive with nothing. They planted cocoa in the 1880s and 1890s and got rich again off it. They married among themselves, and a marriage outside the group was a bush marriage, and the church would not put it in the register.

And they carried the language. On the island it grew its own name: Pichinglis, or Fernando Po Creole English. A Krio cut loose from Freetown and set down in the Bight of Biafra, a thousand miles from anybody who called it home.

Here is the number that stopped me. In 1998 somebody counted who still spoke it. Five thousand. Not scattered across the island. Six villages, and somebody wrote the names down: Musola, Las Palmas, Sampaca, Basupu, Fiston, Balueri de Cristo Rey.

Six villages. One of them named after the shape of a nose.

Seventy thousand people used it to trade, but only one in five of the five thousand spoke nothing else. The rest had another tongue to step into: Spanish, Bube, school, the police, the market that's been built over the market. When you can step out of a language you do, for anybody with a badge. The ones who can't step out are the ones who keep it. That's true of every small language there is. They're not kept by the proud. They're kept by the cornered.

The Krio families took the surnames of the island. Women and children took indigenous names. So the language outlived the name. There's a whole people on Bioko who speak Freetown out of their mouths and are called something else.

I keep coming back to the name. Not the cocoa, not the harbor, not the three thousand dollars. Just the nose. Somebody from Freetown, or their grandchild, looked at a hill coming down to the sea, saw a nose and a bottle in it, and named it, and the name stuck long after the people who made it stopped being called Krio. That name is the last piece of the letter that got there.

I don't have a reader on that island. Probably won't. But today I sat with Pichinglis, and I want it written down somewhere outside my own head that in a village called Bottle Nose, people are still speaking the language of a harbor they left in 1827.