European expansion from the fifteenth century produced much writing on, and sometimes in, non-European languages that served a broad array of imperial interests. Most European ventures into what one scholar has termed “colonial linguistics” were based on investigations among speakers of native tongues in the regions in which those speakers normally resided, twining language studies with observed “native” cultural qualities and setting out territories of colonial interest defined by local language and culture. Fewer colonial linguists ventured into plural societies to study the linguae francae of trade and labor that enabled communication across broad cultural and language differences, in part because such zones were considered dangerous and unstable, or lacking in mother tongues. Fewer still elected destinations of forced migration such as slave societies or freedmen's towns and villages to examine the mother tongues of persons who had come coercively from afar, though many such settings in certain periods offered a rich menu of languages for study. Those interested in the linguistic characteristics of slave societies tended to concern themselves more with the emerging European creoles, languages they could more easily understand than the native tongues of slaves or the contact languages of non-European provenance that sometimes coexisted with or preceded widespread use of European creole speeches in such locations. Today, most linguistic studies in the former slave colonies are focused exclusively on European creoles. Even recent monographs on African culture in the Americas only mention the speaking of African languages in passing, though language is a fundamental element of culture and linked in key ways to the continuity of ethnic ideas and practices. Together with the relative paucity of colonial documentation on slaves' lives and languages, the sited and topical hierarchy of colonial linguistics continues to powerfully structure historical studies of language in the former slave colonies.