A Sociohistoric Examination of Afrogenesis

Afrogenesis is taken here to mean the belief that the English-based Atlantic creole languages originated on the West Coast of Africa. This paper shows that Afrogenesis, originally proposed in work by Hancock and by Smith, and now given a new lease on life by McWhorter, is at best highly dubious. The same is true of any single-source, diffusionist account of the similarities between the English-based creoles.