An American Indian pidgin in a Top 20 song
I heard a Native American pidgin in an old Top 20 song today!
Or I was hearing a creole of French that’s native to Louisiana!
Or it was an amazing but believable African linguistic fossil!
“Iko Iko”.
We’ve got language contact all over the place in North America. Just have to have the ears for it!
Advertisements
Doesn’t sound Louisiana creole to me. Could be a fossil of something from across the Atlantic but my first bet would be Mobilian Jargon. Yako in various forms is the demonstrative, yakko nenak, tonight, yakko tanap, this side. These from Drechsel 1996. The Choctaw had MJ as its lingua franca. http://www.southernanthro.org/downloads/publications/SA-archives/2008-dreschel.pdf.
The wiki entry iko iko brings together a lot of readings of these lines, but no one with any knowledge of Mobiian Jargon (that person would not be yours truly) has weighed in.
Kimball apparently supports the Mobilian Jargon idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iko_Iko#Linguistic_origins
I must have been speed reading. Missed the ref to Kimball. Page 249 of Drechsel shows only what is in the wiki article, so if they are right, all we have is a tag in MJ. But it turns out that everyone and his cousin knows Iko-iko. My cajun music playing uncle, once in a Seattle cajun band called “How’s Bayou?”, even has it as part of his repertoire, so he wrote me the other day.