CREOLE LANGUAGE
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(Redirected from Creole languages)
A 'creole language', or simply a 'creole', is a stable language that originates seemingly as a "new" language, sometimes with features that are not inherited from any apparent source, without however qualifying in any appreciable way as a mixed language. In the earliest days of modern creolistics, conceptions of creole genesis were largely developmental and creoles were uniformly assumed to be nativized pidgins culminating in Hall's (1966) notion of the pidgin-creole life cycle. Dispite some opposition, a unified theory for explaining creole phenomena seemed at hand.
However, efforts to conceive a yardstick for measuring creoleness in any scientifically meaningful way have failed so far.[1] The answer might be that creoleness is better described and referred to as a syndrome, a combination of phenomena seen in association with little inherent unity. In some cases, the modified source language might be the substrate language when warranted by a homogeneous substrate;[2]. in other cases, the modified source language clearly is what creolists identify as the superstrate language;[3] and in still other cases, no single source language might be identifiable.[4] The same approach must be applied to identifying indiviual features as inherited or non-inherited and to distilling the defining grounds which separate creole languages from mixed languages such as Michif, especially when relexification is somehow claimed to be a moving factor.[5]
The term ''creole'' comes from Portuguese ''crioulo'', via Spanish ''criollo'' and French ''créole''. The Portuguese word ''crioulo'' is derived from the verb ''criar'' (to raise/to bring up), with a suffix of debated origin. The term was coined in the 16th century during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade and the establishment of European colonies in the Americas, in Africa, and along the coast of South and Southeast Asia up to the Philippines, China, India, and in Oceania.
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. Such areas include the Caribbean as well as the north and east coasts of South America, western Africa and the Indian Ocean. The majority of creole languages are based on European languages with substratum elements from Africa, although some creoles (such as Sango) show little to no contact with European languages. The extent to which substratum features are significant in the genesis or the description of creole languages is a heated dispute.[6]
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 situation, incidentally, is the reason why "creole" has come to be used in opposition to "language," rather than a qualifier for it, so that one would say "a French creole" (rather than "a French creole language"), or "the Papiamentu creole" (rather than "the Papiamentu creole language").[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. 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 by the earliest advocates of the wave model, Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt, the forerunners of modern sociolinguistics. This controversy of the late 19th century profoundly shaped modern approaches to the comparative method in historical linguistics and in creolistics.
Since the middle of the late 19th century, linguists have promulgated the idea that creole languages are in no way inferior to other languages, and that those earlier labels are as inappropriate as saying that French is a "degenerate Latin" or an "Italian dialect". Linguists now use the term "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. They are increasingly and more openly being used in literature and in media, and many of their speakers are quite fond and proud of promoting the usage. They are studied and standardized by linguists as languages on their own; many have already been standardized, and are now taught in local schools and universities abroad.
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 interfer in the scientific discussion.
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 only reasonably well-defined 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). 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.
However, these terms are not as meaningful where the new language is distilled from multiple substrata and a homogeneous superstratum. The substratum-superstratum continuum becomes outright awkward when multiple superstrata must be assumed such as in Papiamentu or when the substratum cannot be identified, or when the presence or the suvival of substratal evidence is inferred from mere typological analogies. 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.[8]
Main articles: Syntactic similarities of creoles
Studies of creole languages around the world suggest remarkable similarities in grammar and a uniform development from pidgins in a single generation, thus lending support to the theory of a common origin. Critics, however, argue that examples are largely drawn from creoles derived from European languages, and that non-European-based creoles such as Nubi or Sango display fewer similarities, or that Creole French shows closer affinities with Koiné French. Bickerton's (1981) seminal work mainly purported to debunk the monogenetic theory of pidgins[9] according to which, most European-based pidgins and creoles hail from a Mediterranean Lingua Franca via a ''broken Portuguese'' relexification in the slave factories of Western Africa.
Considering creoles from European languages, the similarities in grammatical structure seem striking in Taylor's latest revision of the facts (1977:170-197), especially taking into account that they evolved in communities which were isolated from one another. However, as it is, the data is open to be reclaimed to abet the African substratum hypothesis of Michael Parkvall (2000) or is open to challenge with data from non-creole congeners besides being readable in a universalist perspective à la Bickerton. Particularly troubling is the evidence that definite articles are predominantly prenominal in English-based creole languages and predominantly postnominal in French creoles and French koinés (Fournier 1998). 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 he calls Standard Average European (SAE) to distinguish them from languages of other grammatical types.[10] French and English are particularly close since English, through extensive borrowing, is typologically closer to French than to other Germanic languages. In the end, according to Vennemann (2006) most European languages might even share a common substratum as well as a common superstratum.
This no doubt motivated Arends, Muysken & Smith to adopt in their (1995) introduction a four-fold approach to creole genesis:
:
★ ''Theories focusing on the European input''
:
★ ''Theories focusing on the non-European input''
:
★ ''Gradualist and developmental hypotheses''
:
★ ''Universalist approaches''
and to confine ''Pidgins'' and ''Mixed languages'' into separate chapters ouside their scheme.
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 some similarities with Hancock's domestic origin hypothesis are undeniable (Wittmann 2001).
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.
However, if a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a native language, it usually becomes fixed and acquires a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. The syntax and morphology of such languages may often have local innovations not obviously derived from any of the parent languages.
Pidgins can become full languages in only a single generation. This does not mean that they always do. Tok Pisin, for example, was born as a pidgin and became a stable language after about 90 years.
Once formed, creoles can remain as a sort of second, local standard, like the Cape Verdean Creole. Some creoles, like Papiamentu and Tok Pisin, have obtained recognition as official languages. On the other hand, some creoles have been gradually "decreolized" by conforming to a parent language, usually as a result of continuing political dominance, and have become, essentially, a continuum of dialects of the latter. This has happened a little in Hawai'i, and is one theory of the development of African American Vernacular English from Slave English.
Creolization is the second stage where the pidgin language develops into a fully developed language that is a creole language. This will be the mother-tongue for many people. The creolization process happens because people, especially children, using a pidgin develop native capacity (Noam Chomsky) in it, and its structure changes over time. It is a normal language with all the criteria a language needs. The morphology and syntax of the creole are richer than the pidgin's, its phonology has set rules, and the functions in which the creole is used are increased. The vocabulary will contain more and more words according to a rational and stable system (Wardhaugh 56-57).
The post-creole continuum comes into being when the process of decreolization begins, namely, if a society has two official languages, a 'creole Y' and a 'standard Y' and the standard has a great effect on the creole. In this case speakers of the creole start correcting their language according to the standard. Then a large scale of varieties can be observed.
Universalist models stress the intervention of specific general process 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 (1981, 1984) work. His 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 a natural languages; and the children used their own innate linguistic capacities to transform the pidgin input into a full-fledged language.
★ Creolistics
★ Creolization
★ Relexification
★ Substratum
★ Gradualism
★ Language change
★ Mediterranean Lingua Franca
★ Lingua Franca
★ Mixed languages
★ Arabic-based creole languages
★ Dutch-based creole languages
★ English-based creole languages
★ French-based creole languages
★ German-based creole languages
★ Malay-based creole languages
★ Ngbandi-based creole languages
★ Portuguese-based creole languages
★ Spanish-based creole languages
★ Creole Dictionary from Webster's Dictionary
1. Henri Wittmann (1999). "Prototype as a typological yardstick to creoleness." ''The Creolist Archives Papers On-line'', Stockholms Universitet.[1]
2. John Victor Singler (1988). "The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis." ''Language'' 64.27-51.
3. Henri Wittmann (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.[2]
4. Michel DeGraff (2001). On the origin of creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-Darwinian linguistics." ''Linguistic Typology'' 5:2-3.213-310.[3]
5. Michel DeGraff (2002). "Relexification: A reevaluation." ''Linguistic Anthropology'' 44:4.321-414.[4]
6. Salikoko S. Mufwene, ed. (1993). ''Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties''. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
7. Guus Meijer & Pieter Muysken, ed. (1977). "On the beginnings of pidgin and creole studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling." In: Valdman 1977:21-45. These concerns came out in the latter half of the 19th century. The glottonymic controversy as to whether drawing in superstratum-substratum concerns (such as ''French-based'' instead of ''French'') are appropriate is a recent event.
8. See the substratum article for the revelant references.
9. as aired principally from 1956 onward by Douglas Taylor, Keith Whinnom and R.W. Thompson and refined en proceedings of 1968 conference edited b y Dell Hymes (1971); see the articles on the monogenetic theory of pidgins and on relexification for the relevant historical references.
10. According to Whorf, people whose languages have very different systems of grammar perceive reality in different ways and conceive of it in different forms. Thus, language wields a profound influence on human thought. This is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
★ Arends, Jacques, Muysken, Pieter & Norval Smith (1995). ''Pidgins and creoles: An introduction''. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
★ Roots of Language, Bickerton, Derek, , , Karoma Publishers, 1981, ISBN 0-89720-044-6
★ Creole Languages, Bickerton, Derek, , , Scientific American, 1983
★ Bickerton, Derek (1984). "The language bioprogram hypothesis." The Behavioral an Brain Sciences 7.173-188.
★ Fournier, Robert (1998). "Des créolismes dans la distribution des déterminants et des complémenteurs en français québécois basilectal." ''Français d'Amérique: variation, créolisation, normalisation'', Patrice Brasseur (ed.), 217-228. Université d'Avignon: Centre d'études canadiennes.
★ DeCamp, David (1977). "The Development of Pidgin and Creole Studies." In: Valdman (1977), 3-20.
★ DeGraff, Michel (2001). "On the origin of creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-Darwinian linguistics." ''Linguistic Typology'' 5:2-3.213-310.[5]
★ DeGraff, Michel (2002). "Relexification: A reevaluation." ''Linguistic Anthropology'' 44:4.321-414.[6]
★ Hall, Robert A. (1966). Pidgin and creole languages. Ithaca: Cornell University.
★ Hancock, Ian F. "The domestic hypothesis, diffusion and componentiality: An account of Anglophone creole origins." ''Substrata versus univerals in creole genesis'', Piete Muysken & Norval Smith (ed.), 71-102. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
★ Holm, J. (1988, 1989). ''Pidgins and Creoles''. 2 vols. Cambridge: CUP.
★ Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, Hymes, D. H., ed., , , Cambridge University Press, 1971,
★ Meijer Guus & Pieter Muysken, ed. (1977). "On the beginnings of pidgin and creole studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling." In: Valdman 1977:21-45.
★ Mufwene, Salikoko S., ed. (1993). ''Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties''. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
★ Parkvall, Michael (2000). ''Out of Africa: African influences in Atlantic Creoles''. London: Battlebridge.
★ Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles, Sebba, Mark, , , MacMillan, 1997, ISBN 0-333-63024-6
★ Singler, John Victor (1988). "The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis." ''Language'' 64.27-51.
★ Singler, John Victor (1996). "Theories of creole genesis, sociohistorical considerations, and the evaluation of evidence: The case of Haitian Creole and the Relexification Hypothesis". ''Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages'' 11:185-230.
★ Taylor, Douglas (1977). ''Languages in the West Indies''. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
★ Valdman, Albert, ed. (1977). ''Pidgin and Creole Linguistics''. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
★ An Introduction to Sociolinguistics:Fourth Edition, Wardhaugh, Ronald, , , Blackwell Publishing, 2002,
★ Vennemann, Theo (2003). "Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps". ''Languages in Prehistoric Europe'', Alfred Bammesberger & Theo Vennemann (ed.), 319-332. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
★ Wittmann, Henri (1999). "Prototype as a typological yardstick to creoleness." ''The Creolist Archives Papers On-line'', Stockholms Universitet.[7]
★ 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.[8]
★ Whorf, Benjamin (1956). ''Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf''. Cambirdge, Mass.: MIT Press, edited by John Carroll.
★ Nicaraguan Sign Language
★ Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL)
★ Association for Portuguese and Spanish Lexically Based Creoles (ACBLPE)
★ Groupe Européen de Recherches en Langues Créoles
★ Groupe d'Etude et de Recherche en Espace Créolophone (GEREC)
★ Associação Brasileira de Estudos Crioulos e Similares (ABECS)
★ Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL)
A 'creole language', or simply a 'creole', is a stable language that originates seemingly as a "new" language, sometimes with features that are not inherited from any apparent source, without however qualifying in any appreciable way as a mixed language. In the earliest days of modern creolistics, conceptions of creole genesis were largely developmental and creoles were uniformly assumed to be nativized pidgins culminating in Hall's (1966) notion of the pidgin-creole life cycle. Dispite some opposition, a unified theory for explaining creole phenomena seemed at hand.
However, efforts to conceive a yardstick for measuring creoleness in any scientifically meaningful way have failed so far.[1] The answer might be that creoleness is better described and referred to as a syndrome, a combination of phenomena seen in association with little inherent unity. In some cases, the modified source language might be the substrate language when warranted by a homogeneous substrate;[2]. in other cases, the modified source language clearly is what creolists identify as the superstrate language;[3] and in still other cases, no single source language might be identifiable.[4] The same approach must be applied to identifying indiviual features as inherited or non-inherited and to distilling the defining grounds which separate creole languages from mixed languages such as Michif, especially when relexification is somehow claimed to be a moving factor.[5]
History of the concept
Colonial origins
The term ''creole'' comes from Portuguese ''crioulo'', via Spanish ''criollo'' and French ''créole''. The Portuguese word ''crioulo'' is derived from the verb ''criar'' (to raise/to bring up), with a suffix of debated origin. The term was coined in the 16th century during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade and the establishment of European colonies in the Americas, in Africa, and along the coast of South and Southeast Asia up to the Philippines, China, India, and in Oceania.
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. Such areas include the Caribbean as well as the north and east coasts of South America, western Africa and the Indian Ocean. The majority of creole languages are based on European languages with substratum elements from Africa, although some creoles (such as Sango) show little to no contact with European languages. The extent to which substratum features are significant in the genesis or the description of creole languages is a heated dispute.[6]
Historical neglect
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 situation, incidentally, is the reason why "creole" has come to be used in opposition to "language," rather than a qualifier for it, so that one would say "a French creole" (rather than "a French creole language"), or "the Papiamentu creole" (rather than "the Papiamentu creole language").[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. 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 by the earliest advocates of the wave model, Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt, the forerunners of modern sociolinguistics. This controversy of the late 19th century profoundly shaped modern approaches to the comparative method in historical linguistics and in creolistics.
Recognition and renaissance
Since the middle of the late 19th century, linguists have promulgated the idea that creole languages are in no way inferior to other languages, and that those earlier labels are as inappropriate as saying that French is a "degenerate Latin" or an "Italian dialect". Linguists now use the term "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. They are increasingly and more openly being used in literature and in media, and many of their speakers are quite fond and proud of promoting the usage. They are studied and standardized by linguists as languages on their own; many have already been standardized, and are now taught in local schools and universities abroad.
Classification of creoles
''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 interfer in the scientific discussion.
Substrate and superstrate
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 only reasonably well-defined 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). 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.
However, these terms are not as meaningful where the new language is distilled from multiple substrata and a homogeneous superstratum. The substratum-superstratum continuum becomes outright awkward when multiple superstrata must be assumed such as in Papiamentu or when the substratum cannot be identified, or when the presence or the suvival of substratal evidence is inferred from mere typological analogies. 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.[8]
Shared features
Main articles: Syntactic similarities of creoles
Studies of creole languages around the world suggest remarkable similarities in grammar and a uniform development from pidgins in a single generation, thus lending support to the theory of a common origin. Critics, however, argue that examples are largely drawn from creoles derived from European languages, and that non-European-based creoles such as Nubi or Sango display fewer similarities, or that Creole French shows closer affinities with Koiné French. Bickerton's (1981) seminal work mainly purported to debunk the monogenetic theory of pidgins[9] according to which, most European-based pidgins and creoles hail from a Mediterranean Lingua Franca via a ''broken Portuguese'' relexification in the slave factories of Western Africa.
Considering creoles from European languages, the similarities in grammatical structure seem striking in Taylor's latest revision of the facts (1977:170-197), especially taking into account that they evolved in communities which were isolated from one another. However, as it is, the data is open to be reclaimed to abet the African substratum hypothesis of Michael Parkvall (2000) or is open to challenge with data from non-creole congeners besides being readable in a universalist perspective à la Bickerton. Particularly troubling is the evidence that definite articles are predominantly prenominal in English-based creole languages and predominantly postnominal in French creoles and French koinés (Fournier 1998). 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 he calls Standard Average European (SAE) to distinguish them from languages of other grammatical types.[10] French and English are particularly close since English, through extensive borrowing, is typologically closer to French than to other Germanic languages. In the end, according to Vennemann (2006) most European languages might even share a common substratum as well as a common superstratum.
This no doubt motivated Arends, Muysken & Smith to adopt in their (1995) introduction a four-fold approach to creole genesis:
:
★ ''Theories focusing on the European input''
:
★ ''Theories focusing on the non-European input''
:
★ ''Gradualist and developmental hypotheses''
:
★ ''Universalist approaches''
and to confine ''Pidgins'' and ''Mixed languages'' into separate chapters ouside their scheme.
Creole Genesis
1. Theories focusing on the European input
1.1 The monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles
1.2 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 some similarities with Hancock's domestic origin hypothesis are undeniable (Wittmann 2001).
1.3 Hancock's (1985) Domestic Origin Hypothesis and similar theories
1.4 Foreigner talk and baby talk
2. Theories focusing on the non-European input
2.1 The Cafeteria Principle
2.2 West-African substrate languages
3. 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.
However, if a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a native language, it usually becomes fixed and acquires a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. The syntax and morphology of such languages may often have local innovations not obviously derived from any of the parent languages.
Pidgins can become full languages in only a single generation. This does not mean that they always do. Tok Pisin, for example, was born as a pidgin and became a stable language after about 90 years.
Once formed, creoles can remain as a sort of second, local standard, like the Cape Verdean Creole. Some creoles, like Papiamentu and Tok Pisin, have obtained recognition as official languages. On the other hand, some creoles have been gradually "decreolized" by conforming to a parent language, usually as a result of continuing political dominance, and have become, essentially, a continuum of dialects of the latter. This has happened a little in Hawai'i, and is one theory of the development of African American Vernacular English from Slave English.
Creolization is the second stage where the pidgin language develops into a fully developed language that is a creole language. This will be the mother-tongue for many people. The creolization process happens because people, especially children, using a pidgin develop native capacity (Noam Chomsky) in it, and its structure changes over time. It is a normal language with all the criteria a language needs. The morphology and syntax of the creole are richer than the pidgin's, its phonology has set rules, and the functions in which the creole is used are increased. The vocabulary will contain more and more words according to a rational and stable system (Wardhaugh 56-57).
The post-creole continuum comes into being when the process of decreolization begins, namely, if a society has two official languages, a 'creole Y' and a 'standard Y' and the standard has a great effect on the creole. In this case speakers of the creole start correcting their language according to the standard. Then a large scale of varieties can be observed.
4. Universalist approaches
Universalist models stress the intervention of specific general process 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 (1981, 1984) work. His 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 a natural languages; and the children used their own innate linguistic capacities to transform the pidgin input into a full-fledged language.
Related articles
★ Creolistics
★ Creolization
★ Relexification
★ Substratum
★ Gradualism
★ Language change
★ Mediterranean Lingua Franca
★ Lingua Franca
★ Mixed languages
Creoles by main parent language
★ Arabic-based creole languages
★ Dutch-based creole languages
★ English-based creole languages
★ French-based creole languages
★ German-based creole languages
★ Malay-based creole languages
★ Ngbandi-based creole languages
★ Portuguese-based creole languages
★ Spanish-based creole languages
Dictionary
★ Creole Dictionary from Webster's Dictionary
Notes
1. Henri Wittmann (1999). "Prototype as a typological yardstick to creoleness." ''The Creolist Archives Papers On-line'', Stockholms Universitet.[1]
2. John Victor Singler (1988). "The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis." ''Language'' 64.27-51.
3. Henri Wittmann (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.[2]
4. Michel DeGraff (2001). On the origin of creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-Darwinian linguistics." ''Linguistic Typology'' 5:2-3.213-310.[3]
5. Michel DeGraff (2002). "Relexification: A reevaluation." ''Linguistic Anthropology'' 44:4.321-414.[4]
6. Salikoko S. Mufwene, ed. (1993). ''Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties''. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
7. Guus Meijer & Pieter Muysken, ed. (1977). "On the beginnings of pidgin and creole studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling." In: Valdman 1977:21-45. These concerns came out in the latter half of the 19th century. The glottonymic controversy as to whether drawing in superstratum-substratum concerns (such as ''French-based'' instead of ''French'') are appropriate is a recent event.
8. See the substratum article for the revelant references.
9. as aired principally from 1956 onward by Douglas Taylor, Keith Whinnom and R.W. Thompson and refined en proceedings of 1968 conference edited b y Dell Hymes (1971); see the articles on the monogenetic theory of pidgins and on relexification for the relevant historical references.
10. According to Whorf, people whose languages have very different systems of grammar perceive reality in different ways and conceive of it in different forms. Thus, language wields a profound influence on human thought. This is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
References
★ Arends, Jacques, Muysken, Pieter & Norval Smith (1995). ''Pidgins and creoles: An introduction''. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
★ Roots of Language, Bickerton, Derek, , , Karoma Publishers, 1981, ISBN 0-89720-044-6
★ Creole Languages, Bickerton, Derek, , , Scientific American, 1983
★ Bickerton, Derek (1984). "The language bioprogram hypothesis." The Behavioral an Brain Sciences 7.173-188.
★ Fournier, Robert (1998). "Des créolismes dans la distribution des déterminants et des complémenteurs en français québécois basilectal." ''Français d'Amérique: variation, créolisation, normalisation'', Patrice Brasseur (ed.), 217-228. Université d'Avignon: Centre d'études canadiennes.
★ DeCamp, David (1977). "The Development of Pidgin and Creole Studies." In: Valdman (1977), 3-20.
★ DeGraff, Michel (2001). "On the origin of creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-Darwinian linguistics." ''Linguistic Typology'' 5:2-3.213-310.[5]
★ DeGraff, Michel (2002). "Relexification: A reevaluation." ''Linguistic Anthropology'' 44:4.321-414.[6]
★ Hall, Robert A. (1966). Pidgin and creole languages. Ithaca: Cornell University.
★ Hancock, Ian F. "The domestic hypothesis, diffusion and componentiality: An account of Anglophone creole origins." ''Substrata versus univerals in creole genesis'', Piete Muysken & Norval Smith (ed.), 71-102. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
★ Holm, J. (1988, 1989). ''Pidgins and Creoles''. 2 vols. Cambridge: CUP.
★ Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, Hymes, D. H., ed., , , Cambridge University Press, 1971,
★ Meijer Guus & Pieter Muysken, ed. (1977). "On the beginnings of pidgin and creole studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling." In: Valdman 1977:21-45.
★ Mufwene, Salikoko S., ed. (1993). ''Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties''. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
★ Parkvall, Michael (2000). ''Out of Africa: African influences in Atlantic Creoles''. London: Battlebridge.
★ Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles, Sebba, Mark, , , MacMillan, 1997, ISBN 0-333-63024-6
★ Singler, John Victor (1988). "The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis." ''Language'' 64.27-51.
★ Singler, John Victor (1996). "Theories of creole genesis, sociohistorical considerations, and the evaluation of evidence: The case of Haitian Creole and the Relexification Hypothesis". ''Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages'' 11:185-230.
★ Taylor, Douglas (1977). ''Languages in the West Indies''. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
★ Valdman, Albert, ed. (1977). ''Pidgin and Creole Linguistics''. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
★ An Introduction to Sociolinguistics:Fourth Edition, Wardhaugh, Ronald, , , Blackwell Publishing, 2002,
★ Vennemann, Theo (2003). "Languages in prehistoric Europe north of the Alps". ''Languages in Prehistoric Europe'', Alfred Bammesberger & Theo Vennemann (ed.), 319-332. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
★ Wittmann, Henri (1999). "Prototype as a typological yardstick to creoleness." ''The Creolist Archives Papers On-line'', Stockholms Universitet.[7]
★ 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.[8]
★ Whorf, Benjamin (1956). ''Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf''. Cambirdge, Mass.: MIT Press, edited by John Carroll.
See also
★ Nicaraguan Sign Language
★ Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL)
★ Association for Portuguese and Spanish Lexically Based Creoles (ACBLPE)
★ Groupe Européen de Recherches en Langues Créoles
★ Groupe d'Etude et de Recherche en Espace Créolophone (GEREC)
★ Associação Brasileira de Estudos Crioulos e Similares (ABECS)
★ Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL)
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