We know that non-European languages have had an impact on the English language:
How the Native American's influenced the English language | The New European
And perhaps the most frequent word in English, now used in most other languages, had its origin in West African languages:
Peter Trudgill: How everything became okey dokey | The New European
This is the original piece of research from the 1970s:
O.K., A.O.K. and O KEBy David Dalby
Jan. 8, 1971
Further investigation has revealed forms similar to O.K. not only in the 19th century black English of Jamaica and Surinam, and in the black Gullah speech of South Carolina, but in numerous West African languages: Two examples are Mandingo o ke “that's it” or “certainly” (also “do it”) and Wolof waw kay “yes indeed.”
The fact that indigenous forms resembling O.K. occur widely in West Africa, in areas from which forced immigration to America took place until the Civil War, made it easier for them to become established in the New World. It is also significant that the popularization of O.K. in New England should have taken place in the period when an increasing number of refugees from Southern slavery were arriving in the North.
An Afro‐American origin for O.K. accounts for its arrival in American English in a more straightforward way than any previous explanation, and also explains why its derivation has for so long been obscured. The ridicule with which black English has been unjustly treated for over 300 years, and the resulting failure to recognize its important place in the history of the language, has led schol ars to underestimate its influence on the development of American English.
Thus it was that investigators could be led as far away as Greece and Finland in their search for the derivation of O.K., without even considering the possibility of an origin in Black America.
Although the most notable, O.K. is only one of over eighty American isms with a probable African origin. A remarkable fact is that a large number of these items should be traceable to the same two West African languages, Mandingo and Wolof. Standard etymological dictionaries have so far recognized only a few of these Americanisms as ultimate African isms, but it is significant that a high proportion of them, like O.K., should have been of hitherto disputed or unknown origin.
O.K., A.O.K. and O KE - The New York Times
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