The response was unprecedented, as thousands of African Americans boarded ships in eastern cities and migrated to Haiti. Most of the immigrants arrived during the fall of 1824 and the spring of 1825. More continued moving back and forth in later years but at a slower rate.[3]
Between 1859 and 1863, another immigration campaign brought new settlers to the island but at a fraction of the number in 1824 and 1825. Those who originally settled in Samaná were fewer than 600 but formed the only surviving immigration enclave.[4][5]
Survival
While more than 6,000 immigrants came in 1824 and 1835, by the end of the 19th century, only a handful of enclaves on the island spoke any variety of the antebellum Black Vernacular. They were communities in Puerto Plata, Samaná and Santo Domingo. The largest was the one in Samaná that maintained church schools, where it was preserved.
Enclaves across the island soon lost an important element of their identity, which led to their disintegration. Samaná English withstood the assaults in part because the location of Samaná was favorable to a more independent cultural life. However, government policies have still influenced the language's gradual decline, and it may well now be an endangered language.[6][7][8]
^Tagliamonte, Sali Anna (1991). A Matter of Time: Past Temporal Reference Verbal Structures in Samaná English and the Ex-Slave Recordings. Ottawa, Canada: Université d'Ottawa. OCLC33327596.
^DeBose, Charles E. (1983). "A Dialect That Time Forgot". Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 47–53.
