Read Parts I & II

Transitory properties of the original language:

What emerges from this inversion is more than a problem of technology or credibility; it is, in fact, a deeper misunderstanding of how the breath of language moves in and out of postcolonial bodies. The suspicion directed at African-English fluency—whether from institutions, peers, or machines—rests on the mistaken one-dimensional assumption that language is static, singular, and rooted in a standalone entity within a clearly identifiable body, bounded by a recognised border, and exclusive to a specific cultural pattern. That assumption falls apart, for example, when we consider how African speakers have historically used language to navigate power dynamics, safety, and other complexities of belonging.

The same built-in linguistic features that identify drafts as ‘AI-ese’ because of their formal register, elevated vocabulary, and precise syntax were never regarded as signs of artificiality.  More than anything, they indicate adaptive responses that cross contexts while managing communication risks, creating a refined style that fosters greater creativity in the speaker. In fact, for African and diasporic speakers, language has always been a risk-sensitive practice. Mastery over language involves knowing when to sharpen speech to make an impact, when to soften it, when to perform fluency, and ultimately when to withhold speech altogether. A culture of speech developed at the marketplace, was observed at gatherings of kin, and taught through folktales, clan customs, and mythologies. An indigenous cultural process that is perhaps lost in the West today, represented only through the collection of Greco-Roman mythologies and art (but I digress).

However, in this discussion, the diasporic Afro-descendant communities in the Caribbean and North America clearly demonstrate this logic. Creole, Patois, Jive, Ebonics, and Nigerian Pidgin, as explored below, did not arise from linguistic confusion or cultural dilution. Instead, they developed from forced contact with the languages of dominant powers, through plantation economies, colonial administration, urban segregation, and labour migration. Basically, they are evolving practices that operate beyond the strict limits of a fixed code of expression, ultimately driven by adaptive needs rather than phonetic accuracy. They arose from settings where power imbalances required a new form of communication without consent. Therefore, even within these colonial and postcolonial contexts, African speakers continue to reinvent how they use the languages available to them across different situations. Formal English in the classroom, strategic English at work, intimate language at home, and so on. Even silence, at times, becomes a language too.

Within these contexts, fluency can easily negotiate authority, and a precisely delivered speech can penetrate guarded access, while a polished accent can open doors that would otherwise remain closed. What is today seen as an ‘unnatural grammatical habit’ often remains the legacy of historical conditioning. Therefore, to understand why fluency is so readily mistaken for inauthenticity, we must go beyond questions of correctness and authorship and instead explore the transient nature of language itself—how meaning, register, and identity shift when speakers inhabit more than one linguistic world simultaneously.

So to speak of transitory linguistic properties is to reject the idea that language belongs neatly to one place, one body, or one identity. For many African-English speakers, language has never stood still. It has always shifted registers in response to authority, intimacy, danger, and ambition. This is precisely where the comparison with monolingual norms becomes revealing. Monolingual speakers tend to experience language as anchored. One dominant register. One centre of gravity. Any deviation is interpreted as an error or affectation. By contrast, bilinguals and polyglots experience language as relational, in which meaning adjusts to the audience, syntax bends to purpose, and vocabulary expands or contracts depending on the risk. Here, the speaker never moves away from authenticity; authenticity itself becomes situational.

Yet this mobility attracts suspicion and unsettles systems that rely on fixity to classify people. Institutions, likewise, algorithms prefer stable identities and predictable patterns. They need stability in order to function; this need for stability was historically designed without the movement of Black folk in mind. In this regard, institutions are more political than rigid. Here lies the conflict: the fluidity of Black language constructs clashes with non-Black language institutions that operate under the expectation of stabilising linguistic rules and boundaries.

An expectation that is disrupted when African-English speakers move fluidly across academic, professional, and colloquial registers. The speaker becomes harder to place. Harder to categorise. Harder to discipline. This explains why transitory language is so easily misread as artificial in the age of AI. Hence, systems trained on static representations of ‘good English’ struggle to interpret linguistic queerness as human. The machine fails to recognise what history produced: a speaker trained to navigate multiple linguistic worlds simultaneously, with an expanded vocabulary.

The danger extends beyond misrecognition, lying comfortably in a bed of reductions. When transitory language gets flattened into ‘AI-ese,’ its political and historical dimensions vanish. They transform into a kind of fluency that lacks the joy of embedded memory, an intelligence that is truly artificial; without a body. What remains is style without struggle. The very flexibility that once enabled African speakers to survive colonial systems now becomes the basis for new forms of digital suspicion.

The Creativity of Black Speech:

If transitory language unsettles institutions and algorithms because it refuses fixity, then its most legible evidence appears not in abstract theory but in the languages forged under pressure. The movement described above did not remain an internal practice of individual speakers; it crystallised into collective linguistic forms shaped by history, survival, and adaptation. Across the African diaspora, entire speech systems emerged in response to the need to navigate power asymmetries without linguistic consent—languages that stabilised through motion rather than stillness. To understand why fluency today is misread as artificial, we must briefly examine these languages as evidence that movement itself can generate structure, intelligence, and coherence, despite being framed as deviations from a norm.

Creole, Patois, Jive, Ebonics, and Pidgin English do not merely illustrate transitory phenomena; they have socially and culturally institutionalised themselves as part of Black linguistic heritage. As shown in this video, these tongues carry the grammar of maternal survival, the rhythm of play and negotiation, and the discipline of multilateral mobility. It is here—within these languages born in motion—that the politics of legibility becomes most visible, and where the false opposition between authenticity and fluency finally collapses.

Creole languages, so often dismissed as “broken” European tongues, demonstrate how coherence stabilises through transition. They borrow lexical items from colonial languages while preserving rhythm, syntax, and semantic logic grounded in African linguistic traditions. Creole unsettles the belief that purity precedes legitimacy, while proving that fracture can generate structure—and that movement can produce rule-governed language systems.

Patois and Ebonics extend this logic into post-slavery and diasporic contexts. They function as meticulously well-layered cultural registers, rather than fixed codes. Speakers shift between them and ‘Standard English’ depending on audience, risk, and purpose. This movement—commonly labelled as a form of code-switching—reflects mastery shaped by historical constraint. Yet institutions repeatedly misread this flexibility as inconsistency or lack of competence, an absence of intelligence. However, the problem here lies in the expectation of fixity, not in the speech.

Jive foregrounds another dimension: speed, play, and resistance. Its improvisational structure resists capture, and its rapid lexical evolution protects meaning from surveillance while reinforcing collective identity. Jive exposes a recurring tension: where what moves quickly is easily dismissed as unserious, and what resists stabilisation is marked as illegible. 

Nigerian Pidgin English offers perhaps the clearest example of transitory design and the conflicts and tensions such languages face. Pidgin emerged as a bridge to the ethno-linguistic divide within Nigeria’s post-colonial infrastructure. It prioritises function and adaptability over prestige and formality, which is why it is looked down upon in certain spaces despite its social usefulness to the Nigerian people. A perception that stems perhaps from the lingering legacy of colonial elitism, revealing how power continues to determine linguistic value rather than clarity and intelligence. Once more, this brings back Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital and highlights the central tension at the heart of this piece — lived legitimacy vs institutional recognition. 

Nigerian Pidgin is widely recognised in practice, acknowledged by institutions outside Nigeria such as the BBC, featured on lists of the world’s most widely spoken languages, studied by academics, and, most importantly, used daily by millions of Nigerians as a primary means of communication. It flows effortlessly through politics, media, art, film, music, and everyday conversation, serving as a shared linguistic foundation across diverse communities and borders. In every practical sense, it functions as a people’s language, an undisputed cultural heritage of the country and the African continent.

However, this lived legitimacy does not translate into formal recognition. The Nigerian state has not granted Pidgin official status, nor has it integrated it within institutional frameworks. It is largely absent from school curricula, lacks standardised dictionaries, and rarely appears in official documentation or state communication. Its widespread use coexists with structural neglect.

This contradiction prompts a deeper question about language itself. If a language organises social life, bears culture, and facilitates large-scale communication, what then determines its legitimacy? What is required for a monarch to be considered royalty? Is it the titles, crowns or the people’s recognition? Who has the authority to validate recognition? Does recognition need institutional approval to be deemed ‘real’? In this sense, Pidgin reveals the limits of formal recognition. Precisely because its strength lies in mobility, its resistance to being fixed, codified, or confined—qualities often associated with transient languages.

The question, then, remains open: is institutionalisation the condition for legitimacy, or does it risk reshaping the very attributes that confer such power on these transitory languages?

Conclusion.

So far in this essay series, I have argued that the problem is not Black people’s eloquence, excess, or fluency but the racialised conditions under which language is received. From colonial classrooms to contemporary algorithms, English has never journeyed alone.  It has always arrived with expectations about who should speak it, how, and for what purpose. What today seems like suspicion toward ‘big words’ is not an intellectual reaction to difficulty or density, but a continuation of an older unease with Black linguistic authority that exceeds its prescribed limits. It’s a sentiment that I have shown traces back to the colonisation of African cultures.

Analysing this sentiment from a historical perspective — from colonial schooling to diasporic code-switching, from Creole to Pidgin — demonstrates that Black speech has long been shaped by movement. Under pressure, Black English speakers learned, adapted, and bent the language, tailoring it to their style of expression. Fluency, in this sense, is not excess but survival refined into style. What institutions repeatedly misinterpret as inconsistency or artificiality is, in fact, the residue of historical navigation across power, risk, and belonging.

Furthermore, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, Black English speakers are once again placed in a situation where they must adapt and refine AI to fit their style, or risk being misunderstood, which could further damage Black intellectual property. Addressing this issue is a pressing and urgent concern, as AI models trained on elite archives and colonial remnants can easily label as ‘unnatural’ the very registers they have learned from. In doing so, AI distorts Black linguistic expression into ‘neutral’ intelligence while still continuing to control Black speakers themselves. Therefore, this repeats an old pattern of injustice in a digital form.

The original version of this series first appeared as a long read on Substack. Follow Anthony for more insights.