Creole language

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A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that originates seemingly as a nativized pidgin.[1] This understanding of creole genesis culminated in Hall's[2] notion of the pidgin-creole life cycle. While it is understood that creoles have certain grammatical similarities to each other and, arguably, not languages that they are derived from,[3] no theory for explaining creole phenomena has been universally accepted. The relationship between pidgins and creoles and their similarities means that the distinction is not clear-cut and the variety of phenomena that arise to create pidgins and creoles are not understood very well.[4] Likewise, efforts to articulate grammatical features (or sets of features) that are exclusive to creoles have been unsuccessful thus far.[citation needed]

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[edit] History of the concept

The term creole comes from French créole, from Spanish criollo, and from Portuguese crioulo, stemming from the verb criar ('to breed') from the Portuguese, or creare from Latin ('to produce, create').[citation needed] The term was coined in the sixteenth century during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade and the establishment of European colonies in the Americas, Africa, and along the coast of South and Southeast Asia up to the Philippines, China, India, and in Oceania.[citation needed]

The term "Creole" was originally applied to people born in the colonies to distinguish them from the upper-class European-born immigrants. Originally, therefore, "Creole language" meant the speech of those Creole peoples.

As a consequence of colonial European trade patterns, many creole languages are found in the equatorial belt around the world and in areas with access to the oceans, including the Caribbean as well as the north and east coasts of South America, western Africa and in Mauritius. The majority of creole languages are based on European languages with substrate elements from Africa, although some creoles (such as Sango) show little to no contact with European languages. There is a heated dispute over the extent to which substrate features are significant in the genesis or the description of creole languages.[5]

According to their external history, four types of creoles have been distinguished: plantation creoles, fort creoles, maroon creoles, and creolized pidgins.[6] As to their internal history, there are two preconceived assumptions:[citation needed]

  1. Creoles exhibit more internal variability than other languages
  2. Creoles are simpler than other languages

Because of the generally low status of the Creole peoples in the eyes of European colonial powers, creole languages have generally been regarded as degenerate, or at best as rudimentary dialects of one of their parent languages. This is the reason why "creole" has come to be used in opposition to "language" rather than a qualifier for it.[7] Prejudice of this kind was compounded by the inherent instability of the colonial system, leading to the disappearance of creole languages, mainly due to dispersion or assimilation of their speech communities.[citation needed] Another factor that may have contributed to the relative neglect of creole languages in linguistics is that they comfort critics of the 19th century neogrammarian "tree model" for the evolution of languages and their law of the regularity of sound change (such as the earliest advocates of the wave model, Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt, the forerunners of modern sociolinguistics).[citation needed] This controversy of the late 19th century profoundly shaped modern approaches to the comparative method in historical linguistics and in creolistics.[citation needed] Since then, linguists have promulgated the idea that creole languages are in no way inferior to other languages and use the term "creole" or "creole language" for any language suspected to have undergone creolization, without geographic restrictions or ethnic prejudice.

As a consequence of these social, political, and academic changes, creole languages have experienced a revival in recent decades.[citation needed] They are increasingly and more openly being used in literature and in media, and their community prestige has improved.[citation needed] They are studied by linguists as languages on their own. Many have already been standardized, and are now taught in local schools and universities abroad.[citation needed]

[edit] Classification of creoles

[edit] Whose creole?

By the very nature of the subject, the creoleness of a particular creole usually is a matter of dispute. The parent tongues may themselves be creoles or pidgins that have disappeared before they could be documented.

For these reasons, the issue of which language is the parent of a creole — that is, whether a language should be classified as a "Portuguese creole" or "English creole", etc. — often has no definitive answer, and can become the topic of long-lasting controversies, where social prejudices and political considerations may interfere with the scientific discussion.[citation needed]

[edit] Substrate and superstrate

Main article: Substratum

The terms substratum and superstratum are often used to label the source and the target languages of a creole. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon that language for another language (the superstrate).[citation needed] The outcome of such an event will be that erstwhile speakers of the substrate will be speaking a version of the superstrate, at least in more formal contexts. The substrate may survive as a second language for informal conversation (as in the case of Venetian and many other European non-official languages). Its influence on the official speech, if detectable at all, is usually limited to pronunciation and a modest number of loanwords. The substrate might even disappear altogether without leaving any trace.[citation needed]

However, these terms are not as meaningful where the new language is distilled from multiple substrata and a homogeneous superstratum.[citation needed] The substratum-superstratum continuum becomes awkward when multiple superstrata must be assumed (such as in Papiamentu), when the substratum cannot be identified, or when the presence or the survival of substratal evidence is inferred from mere typological analogies.[citation needed] However, facts surrounding the substratum-superstratum opposition cannot be set aside where the substratum as the receding or already replaced source language and the superstratum as the replacing dominant target language can be clearly identified and where the respective contributions to the resulting compromise language can be weighed in a scientifically meaningful way; and this so whether the replacement leads to creole genesis or not.[citation needed] With creole languages, "superstrate" usually means European and "substrate" non-European or African.

A post-creole continuum is said to come about in a context of decreolization where a creole is subject to pressure from its superstrate language. Speakers of the creole feel compelled to conform their language to superstrate usage introducing large scale variation and hypercorrection.

[edit] Shared features

See also: Syntactic similarities of creoles and relexification

Comparing the different creoles in any theory-orientated perpective, whether phylogenetic or purely typological in nature, leads to widely divergent results. The score of similarities will be higher when the comparison is restricted to European-based creoles and excluding non-European-based creoles such as Nubi and Sango. French creoles show closer affinities with Koiné French than with other European-based creoles. The comparative work of Bickerton (1981) argued against the monogenetic theory of pidgins[8] according to which, most European-based pidgins and creoles hail from a Mediterranean Lingua Franca via a broken Portuguese relexified in the slave factories of Western Africa.

Particularly troubling is the evidence that definite articles are predominantly prenominal in English-based creole languages and English whereas they are predominantly postnominal in French creoles and French koinés.[9] Moreover, as already noted by Whorf (1956), the European languages which gave rise to the colonial creole languages all belong to the same subgroup of Western Indo-European and have highly convergent systems of grammar to the point where they form a homogeneous group of languages Whorf called Standard Average European (SAE) to distinguish them from languages of other grammatical types. French and English are particularly close since English, through extensive borrowing, is typologically closer to French than to other Germanic languages.[citation needed] According to Vennemann (2006), most European languages themselves might even share a common substratum as well as a common superstratum.

[edit] Creole genesis

There are a variety of theories on the origin of creole languages, all of which attempt to explain the similarities among them. Arends, Muysken & Smith (1995) outline a fourfold classification of explanations regarding creole genesis:

  • Theories focusing on European input
  • Theories focusing on non-European input
  • Gradualist and developmental hypotheses
  • Universalist approaches

[edit] Theories focusing on European input

  • 1. The monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles

The monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles hypothesizes a single origin for these languages, deriving them through relexification from a West African Pidgin Portuguese of the 17th century and ultimately from the Lingua franca of the Mediterranean. This theory was originally formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Douglas Taylor,[10] as well as in Whinnom (1956), Thompson (1961) and Stewart (1962).

  • 2. The Domestic Origin Hypothesis

Proposed by Hancock (1985) for the development of a local form of English in West Africa, the Domestic Origin Hypothesis argues that, towards the end of the 16th century, English-speaking traders began to settle in the Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers as well as in neighboring areas such as the Bullom and Sherbro coasts. These settlers intermarried with the local population leading to mixed populations and as a result of this intermarriage, an English pidgin was created, which in turn was learned by slaves in slave depots, who later on took it to the West Indies and formed one component of the emerging English creoles.

  • 3. European dialect origin hypotheses

The French creoles are the foremost candidates to being the outcome of "normal" linguistic change and their creoleness to be sociohistoric in nature and relative to their colonial origin though there are some similarities with Hancock's domestic origin hypothesis.[11]

  • 4. Foreigner talk or baby talk

The foreigner talk hypothesis (FT) argues that a pidgin or creole language forms when native speakers attempt to simplify their language in order to address speakers who do not know their language at all. Because of the similarities found in this type of speech and the speech which is usually directed at children, it is also sometimes called baby talk.[12]

Arends, Muysken & Smith (1995) suggest that four different processes are involved in creating Foreigner Talk:

  • Accommodation
  • Imitation
  • Telegraphic condensation
  • Conventions

This could explain why creole languages have much in common, while avoiding a monogenetic model. However, Hinnenkamp (1984), in analyzing German Foreigner Talk, claims that it is too inconsistent and unpredictable to provide any model for language learning.

While the simplification of input was supposed to account for creoles' simple grammar, there are a number of problems with this explanation:[13]

  1. There are too many grammatical similarities amongst pidgins and creoles despite having very different lexifier languages
  2. Grammatical simplification can be explained by other processes, i.e. the innate grammar of Bickerton's language bioprogram theory.
  3. Speakers of a creole's lexifier language often fail to understand, without learning the language, the grammar of a pidgin or creole.
  4. Pidgins are more often used amongst speakers of different substrate languages than between such speakers and those of the lexifier language.

Another problem with the FT explanation is its potential circularity. Bloomfield (1933) points out that FT is often based on the imitation of the incorrect speech of the non-natives, that is the pidgin. Therefore one may be mistaken in assuming that the former gave rise to the latter.

[edit] Theories focusing on non-European input

Theories focusing on the substrate, or non-European, languages attribute similarities amongst creoles to the similarities of African substrate languages. These features are often assumed to be transferred from the substrate language to the creole during the relexification process.[citation needed] The problem with this explanation is that the postulated substrate languages differ amongst themselves and with creoles in meaningful ways. Bickerton (1981) argues that the number and diversity of African languages and the paucity of a historical record on creole genesis makes determining lexical correspondances a matter of chance. Dillard (1970) coined the term "cafeteria principle" to refer to the practice of arbitrarily attributing features of creoles to the influence of substrate African languages or assorted substandard dialects of European languages.

For a representative debate on this issue, see the contributions to Mufwene (1993); for an up-to-date view, Parkvall (2000).

Because of the sociohistoric similarities amongst many (but by no means all), the Atlantic slave trade and the planation system of European colonies have been emphasized by linguists such as McWhorter (1999).

[edit] Gradualist and developmental hypotheses

One class of creoles might start as pidgins, rudimentary second languages improvised for use between speakers of two or more non-intelligible native languages. Keith Whinnom (in Hymes (1971)) suggests that pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others. The lexicon of a pidgin is usually small and drawn from the vocabularies of its speakers, in varying proportions. Morphological details like word inflections, which usually take years to learn, are omitted; the syntax is kept very simple, usually based on strict word order. In this initial stage, all aspects of the speech — syntax, lexicon, and pronunciation —tend to be quite variable, especially with regard to the speaker's background.

If a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a native language, it may become fixed and acquire a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. Pidgins can become full languages in only a single generation. "Creolization" is this second stage where the pidgin language develops into a fully developed native language. The vocabulary, too, will contain more and more words according to a rational and stable system.[14]

[edit] Universalist approaches

Universalist models stress the intervention of specific general processes during the transmission of language from generation to generation and from speaker to speaker. The process invoked varies: a general tendency towards semantic transparency, first language learning driven by universal process, or general process of discourse organization. The main source for the unversalist approach is still Bickerton's[15] work. His language bioprogram theory claims that creoles are inventions of the children growing up on newly founded plantations. Around them, they only heard pidgins spoken, without enough structure to function as natural languages; and the children used their own innate linguistic capacities to transform the pidgin input into a full-fledged language.

[edit] Recent study

The last decade has seen the emergence of some new approaches to creole studies, namely the question of complexity of creoles and the question of whether creoles are "exceptional" languages.

[edit] The creole prototype

If creole languages form a group which is different from other languages, they should have a set of features which clearly distinguishes them from "other" languages. Some features have been proposed (by Bickerton[16] for example), but no uncontestable unique creole features has been put forth so far. Features that are said to be true of all (or most) creole languages are in fact true of all isolating languages.[citation needed] Such features are then necessary but not sufficient to single out creole languages from non-creole isolating languages.

John McWhorter[17] has proposed the following list of features to indicate a Creole Prototype:

  • no inflectional morphology (or no more than two or three inflectional affixes)
  • no tone on monosyllabics
  • no semantically opaque word formation

The hypotheses is that every language with these three features is a creole, and every creole must have these three features.

The creole prototype hypothesis has been attacked from two different perspectives:

[edit] Exceptionalism

Building up on this discussion, McWhorter has proposed that "The world's simplest grammars are Creole grammars" (not "Creoles are the simplest languages"). He claims that no non-Creole language will be found which will be less complex than any creole language.[citation needed] To this, David Gil replied that Riau Indonesian is precisely such a language, and that Riau has a simpler grammar than Saramaccan, the language McWhorter uses as a showcase for his theory.[citation needed] The same objections were raised by Wittmann in his 1999 debate with McWhorter.[18]

Jeff Good has shown that Saramaccan suprasegmental phonology is quite complex,[19] though showing that creoles can be complex does not disprove McWhorter's hypothesis; it must be shown that non-Creoles can be as simple or more simple than the Creoles that they are compared to.[20]

The lack of progress made in defining creoles morphosyntactically has led some scholars to question the value of Creole as a typological class. Robert Chaudenson, Mufwene[21] and Wittmann have argued that Creole languages are structurally no different from any other language, and that Creole is in fact a sociohistoric concept (and not a linguistic one), encompassing displaced population and slavery.[citation needed]

Thomason & Kaufman (1988) spell out the idea of creole exceptionalism, claiming that creole languages are an instance of non-genetic language change due to the language shift without normal transmission. Gradualists question the abnormal transmission of languages in a creole setting and argue that the processes which lead to today's creole languages are in no way different from the universal patterns of language change.[citation needed]

Given that the concept of creoleness is disputed on both morphosyntactic and evolutionary grounds, the idea of creoles being exceptional in any meaningful way is increasingly questioned, giving rise to publications entitled "Against Creole Exceptionalism"[22] or "Deconstructing Creole".[23]. Mufwene (2002) argues that it is only history that prevents us from considering some Romance languages as potential creoles.

[edit] See also

[edit] Related articles

[edit] Creoles by main parent language

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Wardhaugh (2002:61)
  2. ^ Hall (1966)
  3. ^ Bickerton (1983:116-122)
  4. ^ Winford (1997:138); cited in Wardhaugh (2002)
  5. ^ Mufwene (1993:?)
  6. ^ Arends, Muysken & Smith (1995:15)
  7. ^ See Meijer & Muysken (1977).
  8. ^ as aired principally from 1956 onward by Douglas Taylor, Keith Whinnom and R.W. Thompson and refined in the proceedings of a 1968 conference edited in Hymes (1971)
  9. ^ Fournier (1998:?)
  10. ^ such as in Taylor (1977)
  11. ^ Wittmann, 2001
  12. ^ See, for example, Ferguson (1971)
  13. ^ Wardhaugh (2002:73)
  14. ^ Wardhaugh (2002:56-57)
  15. ^ See Bickerton (1981) and Bickerton (1984)
  16. ^ See Bickerton (1983)
  17. ^ See McWhorter (1998) and McWhorter (2005)
  18. ^ Wittmann-McWhorter debate
  19. ^ Good (2004)
  20. ^ McWhorter 2001, Wittmann 1999, Gil 2001, also Huber
  21. ^ Mufwene (2000)
  22. ^ i.e. Degraff (2003)
  23. ^ i.e. Ansaldo & Matthews (2007)

[edit] References

  • Ansaldo, U. & S. Matthews (2007), "Deconstructing creole: The rationale", Typological Studies in Language 73: 1-20
  • Arends, Jacques; Pieter Muysken & Norval Smith (1995), written at Amsterdam, Pidgins and creoles: An introduction, Benjamins, ISBN 902725236X
  • Bickerton, Derek (1981), Roots of Language, Karoma Publishers, ISBN 0-89720-044-6
  • Bickerton, Derek (1983), "Creole Languages", Scientific American 249 (8): 116-122
  • Bickerton, Derek (1984), "The language bioprogram hypothesis", The Behavioral an Brain Sciences 7: 173-188
  • Bloomfield, L. (1933), written at New York, Language, Henry Holt
  • DeGraff, Michel (2001), "On the origin of creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-Darwinian linguistics", Linguistic Typology 5 (2-3): 213-310
  • DeGraff, Michel (2002), "Relexification: A reevaluation", Linguistic Anthropology 44 (4): 321-414
  • DeGraff, Michel (2003), "Against Creole Exceptionalism", Language 79 (2): 391-410
  • Dillard, J.L. (1970), "Principles in the history of American English: Paradox, viginity, and cafeteria", Florida Foreign Language Reporter 8: 32-33
  • Ferguson, C.A. (1971), "Absence of Copula and the Notion of Simplicity: A Study of Normal Speech, Baby Talk, Foreigner Talk and Pidgins.", written at Cambridge, in Hymes, D., Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, Cambridge University Press
  • Fournier, Robert (1998), "Des créolismes dans la distribution des déterminants et des complémenteurs en français québécois basilectal", in Patrice Brasseur, Français d'Amérique: variation, créolisation, normalisation, Université d'Avignon: Centre d'études canadiennes, 217-228
  • Gil, David (2001), "Creoles, Complexity and Riau Indonesian", Linguistic Typology 5: 325-371
  • Good, Jeff (2004), "Tone and accent in Saramaccan: Charting a deep split in the phonology of a language", Lingua 114 (5): 575–619
  • Hall, Robert A. (1966), written at Ithaca, Pidgin and creole languages, Cornell University
  • Hancock, Ian F. (1985), "The domestic hypothesis, diffusion and componentiality: An account of Anglophone creole origins", written at Amsterdam, in Pieter Muysken, Substrata versus univerals in creole genesis, Benjamins, 71-102
  • Hinnenkamp, V. (1984), "Eye-witnessing pidginization: Structural and Sociolinguistic Aspects of German and Turkish Foreigner Talk", in Sebba, M., Papers from the York Creole Conference, September 24-27 1983
  • Hymes, D. H. (1971), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, Cambridge University Press
  • McWhorter, John H. (1998), "Identifying the creole prototype: Vindicating a typological class", Language 74: 788-818
  • McWhorter, John H. (1999), "The Afrogenesis Hypothesis of Plantation Creole Origin", written at London, in Huber, M & M Parkvall, Spreading the Word: The Issue of Diffusion among the Atlantic Creoles, University of Westminster Press
  • McWhorter, John H. (2005), written at Oxford, Defining Creole, Oxford University Press
  • Meijer, Guus & Pieter Muysken (1977), "On the beginnings of pidgin and creole studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling.", written at Bloomington, Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Indiana UP, 21-45
  • Mufwene, Salikoko (1993), written at Athens, Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties, University of Georgia Press
  • Mufwene, Salikoko (2000), "Creolization is a social, not a structural, process", written at Amsterdam, in Neumann-Holzschuh, Ingrid & Edgar Schneider, Degrees of restructuring in creole languages, John Benjamins, 65-84
  • Mufwene, Salikoko (2002), written at Cambridge, The ecology of language evolution, Cambridge University Press
  • Parkvall, Michael (2000), written at London, Out of Africa: African influences in Atlantic Creoles, Battlebridge
  • Singler, John Victor (1988), "The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis.", Language 64: 27-51
  • Stewart, William A. (1962), written at Washington, D.C, F.A. Rice, ed., Study of the role of second languages, Center for Applied Linguistics, 34-53
  • Taylor, Douglas (1977), written at Baltimore, Languages in the West Indies, John Hopkins University Press
  • Thomason, Sarah & Terrence Kaufman (1988), written at Berkely, Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics (first ed.), University of California Press
  • Thompson, R.W. (1961), "A note on some possible affinities between the creole dialects of the Old World and those of the New", Creole Language Studies 2: 107-113
  • Vennemann, Theo (2003), "Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps", written at Heidelberg, in Alfred Bammesberger, 319-332
  • Winford, D (1997), "Creole Formation in the Context of Contact Languages", Journal of Pidign and Creole Language 12 (1): 131-151
  • Wardhaugh, Ronald (2002), "Pidgins and Creoles", An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (fourth ed.), Blackwell Publishing, 57-86
  • Whinnom, Keith (1956), written at Hong Kong, Spanish contact vernaculars in the Philippine Islands
  • Wittmann, Henri (1983). "Les réactions en chaîne en morphologie diachronique." Actes du Colloque de la Société internationale de linguistique fonctionnelle 10.285-92.
  • Wittmann, Henri (1999). "Prototype as a typological yardstick to creoleness." The Creolist Archives Papers On-line, Stockholms Universitet.[http://homepage.mac.com/noula/ling/1999a-prototype.html
  • Wittmann, Henri (2001). ."Lexical diffusion and the glottogenetics of creole French." CreoList debate, parts I-VI, appendixes 1-9. The Linguist List, Eastern Michigan University|Wayne State University
  • Whorf, Benjamin (1956), written at Cambirdge, John Carroll, ed., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, MIT Press

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