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Creole Language Library
A book series presenting descriptive and theoretical studies designed to add significantly to the data available on pidgin and creole languages. As of volume 54 (2017), this series is continued as Contact Language Library.
53 results
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Afro-Peruvian Spanish
Author(s): Sandro SessaregoPublication Date October 2015More LessThe present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Missing Spanish Creoles, the current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of black slavery. This book proposes the 'Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis', which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.
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Agency in the Emergence of Creole Languages
Editor(s): Nicholas FaraclasPublication Date June 2012More LessThis book is a ‘must read’ for those who are looking for fresh perspectives on the process of creolization of language. Focusing on peoples whose agency has too often been rendered invisible in colonial and neo-colonial history and on voices which have too often been silenced in linguistic accounts of creole genesis, this volume considers socio-historical and linguistic evidence that attests to the important roles played in the emergence of the Atlantic and Pacific Creoles by marginalized populations, such as women and people of non-European descent. In this work, the authors amass and critically analyze a wealth of compelling data not only from phonology, morpho-syntax, pragmatics, and descriptive, theoretical, and applied linguistics, but also from history, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and critical theory to demonstrate how enterprising women, rebellious slaves, insubordinate sailors, and a host of other renegades and maroons had a major impact on the creolized societies, cultures, and languages of the colonial era Atlantic and Pacific.
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Atlantic Meets Pacific
Editor(s): Francis Byrne and John HolmPublication Date December 1992More LessSelected papers from the Society for Pidgin and Creole linguistics.
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Case-Marking in Contact
Author(s): Felicity MeakinsPublication Date September 2011More LessUntil recently, mixed languages were considered an oddity of contact linguistics, with debates about whether or not they actually existed stifling much descriptive work or discussion of their origins. These debates have shifted from questioning their existence to a focus on their formation, and their social and structural features. This book aims to advance our understanding of how mixed languages evolve by introducing a substantial corpus from a newly-described mixed language, Gurindji Kriol. Gurindji Kriol is spoken by the Gurindji people who live at Kalkaringi in northern Australia and is the result of pervasive code-switching practices. Although Gurindji Kriol bears some resemblance to both of its source languages, it uses the forms from these languages to function within a unique system. This book focuses on one structural aspect of Gurindji Kriol, case morphology, which is from Gurindji, but functions in ways that differ from its source.
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Complex Processes in New Languages
Editor(s): Enoch O. Aboh and Norval SmithPublication Date December 2009More LessIn recent years, there has been a new interest in evaluating ‘complex’ structures in languages. The implications of such studies are varied, e.g., the distinction between supposedly more complex and less complex languages, how complexity relates to human knowledge of language, and the role of the reduction or increase of complexity in language change and creolization. This book focuses on the latter issue, but the conclusions presented here hold of typological ‘complexity’ in general. The chapters in this book show that the notion of complexity as conceived of in linguistics mainly centres on the outer manifestations of language (e.g., numbers of affixes). This exercise is useful in establishing the patterning of languages in terms of their degrees of analyticity or synthesis, but it fails to address the properties of the inner rules of these grammars, and how these relate to the computational system that governs the human language capacity. Put simply, issues of complexity should not be equated with the complexity observed in surface patterns of grammars alone.
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Contact Languages
Editor(s): Sarah G. ThomasonPublication Date March 1997More LessThis book contributes to a more balanced view of the most dramatic results of language contact by presenting linguistic and historical sketches of lesser-known contact languages. The twelve case studies offer eloquent testimony against the still common view that all contact languages are pidgins and creoles with maximally simple and essentially identical grammars. They show that some contact languages are neither pidgins nor creoles, and that even pidgins and creoles can display considerable structural diversity and structural complexity; they also show that two-language contact situations can give rise to pidgins, especially when access to a target language is withheld by its speakers. The chapters are arranged according to language type: three focus on pidgins (Hiri Motu, by Tom Dutton; Pidgin Delaware, by Ives Goddard; and Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin, by George L. Huttar and Frank J. Velantie), two on creoles (Kituba, by Salikoko S. Mufwene, and Sango, by Helma Pasch), one on a set of pidgins and creoles (Arabic-based contact languages, by Jonathan Owens), one on the question of early pidginization and/or creolization in Swahili (by Derek Nurse), and five on bilingual mixed languages (Michif, by Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen; Media Lengua and Callahuaya, both by Pieter Muysken; and Mednyj Aleut and Ma’a, both by Sarah Thomason). The authors’ collective goal is to help offset the traditional emphasis, within contact-language studies, on pidgins and creoles that arose as an immediate result of contact with Europeans, starting in the Age of Exploration. The accumulation of case studies on a wide diversity of languages is needed to create a body of knowledge substantial enough to support robust generalizations about the nature and development of all types of contact language.
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Creole and Dialect Continua
Author(s): Geneviève EscurePublication Date March 1997More LessAlthough there is a substantial amount of linguistic research on standard language acquisition, little attention has been given to the mechanisms underlying second dialect acquisition. Using a combination of function-based grammar and sociolinguistic methodology to analyze topic marking strategies, the unguided acquisition of a standard by speakers of nonstandard varieties is examined in two distinct linguistic and geographical situations: in a Caribbean creole situation (Belize), with special attention to the acquisition of acrolects by native speakers of basilects, and in a noncreole situation (PRC), documenting the acquisition of standard Chinese (Putonghua) by speakers of nonstandard varieties represented in Cultural Revolution literature, Wuhan Chinese, and Suzhou Wu story-telling style. In both cases psychosocial factors, linguistic bias toward nonnative renderings of the standard varieties, the social status of their speakers, and related political and educational consequences play an important role in the development of second dialects. The broad-ranging analysis of a single feature of oral discourse leads to the formulation of cross-linguistic generalizations in acquisition studies and results in an evaluation of the putative uniqueness of creole languages. Related issues addressed include the effect of linguistic bias on the development and use of language varieties by marginalized groups; the interaction of three major language components — semantics, syntax, and pragmatics — in spontaneous communication; and the development of methods to identify discourse units. The ultimate goal underlying the comparison of specific discourse variables in Belizean and Chinese standard acquisition is to evaluate the relative merits of substratal, superstratal, and universal explanations in language development.
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Creole Discourse
Author(s): Susanne MühleisenPublication Date November 2002More LessCreole languages are characteristically associated with a negative image. How has this prestige been formed? And is it as static as the diglossic situation in many anglo-creolophone societies seems to suggest? This volume examines socio-historical and epistemological factors in the prestige formation of Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles and subjects their classification as a (socio)linguistic type to scrutiny and critical debate. In its analysis of rich empirical data this study also demonstrates that the uses, functions and negotiations of Creole within particular social and linguistic practices have shifted considerably. Rather than limiting its scope to one "national" speech community, the discussion focusses on changes of the social meaning of Creole in various discursive fields, such as inter generational changes of Creole use in the London Diaspora, diachronic changes of Creole representation in written texts, and diachronic changes of Creole representation in translation. The study employs a discourse analytical approach drawing on linguistic models as well as Foucauldian theory.
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Creole Formation as Language Contact
Author(s): Bettina MiggePublication Date July 2003More LessThe research on the formation of (radical) creoles has seen an unprecedented intensification and diversification in the last 20 years. This book discusses, illustrates, and evaluates current research on creole formation based on an in-depth investigation of the processes and mechanisms that contributed to the emergence of the morphosyntactic system of the creoles of Suriname. The study draws on a rich corpus of a) natural conversational and elicited synchronic linguistic data from the Eastern Maroon Creole (EMC) and its main African substrate language, Gbe, b) published diachronic data from the EMC’s sister-language Sranan Tongo, and c) information on the early history of Suriname coming from socio-historical investigations. It suggests that mechanisms of deliberate and contact-induced change also involved in borrowing and particularly shift situations led to the initial formation of the creoles of Suriname while language-internal change played a role in their subsequent development.
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Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse
Editor(s): John R. Rickford and Suzanne RomainePublication Date December 1999More LessThis collection in honor of creolist Charlene Junko Sato (1951–1996) brings together contributions by leading specialists in pidgin-creole studies in three primary areas: Pidgin-Creole Genesis and Development; Attitudes and Education, and Creole Discourse and Literature. The varieties covered come from English, French and Spanish lexical bases and from places as far apart as Africa, Australia, Hawaii, and the Caribbean.
Editors Rickford and Romaine introduce each of the papers and provide a biography and bibliography of Sato. A short story and poems in Hawaiian Creole, Sato’s native language and the variety which was the focus of her research and writing, round out the collection.
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Creoles in Education
Editor(s): Bettina Migge, Isabelle Léglise and Angela BartensPublication Date May 2010More LessThis volume offers a first survey of projects from around the world that seek to implement Creole languages in education. In contrast to previous works, this volume takes a holistic approach. Chapters discuss the sociolinguistic, educational and ideological context of projects, policy developments and project implementation, development and evaluation. It compares different kinds of educational activities focusing on Creoles and discusses a list of procedures that are necessary for successfully developing, evaluating and reforming educational activities that aim to integrate Creole languages in a viable and sustainable manner into formal education. The chapters are written by practitioners and academics involved in educational projects. They serve as a resource for practitioners, academics and persons wishing to devise or adapt educational initiatives. It is suitable for use in upper level undergraduate and post-graduate modules dealing with language and education with a focus on lesser used languages.
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Creoles, Contact, and Language Change
Editor(s): Geneviève Escure and Armin SchweglerPublication Date October 2004More LessThis volume contains a selection of fifteen papers presented at three consecutive meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, held in Washington, D.C. (January 2001); Coimbra, Portugal (June 2001); and San Francisco (January 2002). The fifteen articles offer a balanced sampling of creolists’ current research interests. All of the contributions address questions directly relevant to pidgin/creole studies and other contact languages. The majority of papers address issues of morphology or syntax. Some of the contributions make use of phonological analysis while others study language development from the point of view of acquisition. A few papers examine discourse strategies and style, or broader issues of social and ethnic identity. While this array of topics and perspectives is reflective of the diversity of the field, there is also much common ground in that all of the papers adduce solid data corpora to support their analyses. The range of languages analyzed spans the planet, as approximately twenty contact varieties are studied in this volume.
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Creolization and Contact
Editor(s): Norval Smith and Tonjes VeenstraPublication Date December 2001More LessThis volume contains revised and extended versions of a selection of the papers presented at “The Amsterdam Workshop on Language Contact and Creolization.” These studies apply the concept of relexification to creoles as well as other contact languages; highlight the relevance of strategies of second language learning for theories of pidgin/creole genesis; critically discuss the notions levelling (koine formation) and convergence; the relation between types of contact situations and processes of crosslinguistic influence; as well as the linguistic consequences of the social structure of the plantation system. In addition to discussing English-, French-, and Dutch-related creoles, the papers cover a wide range of contact languages spoken throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. The breadth and coverage makes this an indispensable title for research in the field of contact linguistics.
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The Defective Copy Theory of Movement
Author(s): Nélia AlexandrePublication Date March 2012More LessWithin the framework of Chomsky’s Principles and Parameters Theory and the Minimalist Program, this work presents a detailed discussion of the different types of wh-question formation and relativization strategies in Cape Verdean Creole (Santiago variety), especially focusing on wh-movement of PPs. The book explores the Copy Theory of Movement, discussing a defective copy construction involving wh-movement of PPs which poses interesting theoretical questions as to how the defective copy is to be generated and form a chain with the relevant displaced wh-constituent. It is also shown that the defective copy strategy ([wh[PL] … el[3SG]]) is distinct from resumption ([wh[PL] … es[3PL]]) due to some properties of PPs in Cape Verdean Creole and to the nature of the pronominal element that occurs at the foot of the wh-chain. This book relates well with those on Cape Verdean Creole and highlights the need to look more closely at deeper syntactic issues in more creole languages, inspiring further comparative work amongst creole linguists.
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Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages
Editor(s): Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh and Edgar W. SchneiderPublication Date February 2001More LessBasic notions in the field of creole studies, including the category of “creole languages” itself, have been questioned in recent years: Can creoles be defined on structural or on purely sociohistorical grounds? Can creolization be understood as a graded process, possibly resulting in different degrees of “radicalness” and intermediate language types (“semi-creoles”)? If so, by which linguistic structures are these characterized, and by which extralinguistic conditions have they been brought about? Which are the linguistic mechanisms underlying processes of restructuring, and how did grammaticalization and reanalysis shape the reorganization of linguistic, specifically morphosyntactic structures commonly called “creolization”? What is the role of language contact, language mixing, substrates and superstrates, or demographic factors in these processes? This volume provides select and revised papers from a 1998 colloquium at the University of Regensburg in which these questions were addressed. 19 contributions by renowned scholars discuss structural, sociohistorical and theoretical aspects, building upon case studies of both Romance-based and English-oriented creoles. This book marks a major step forward in our understanding of the nature of creolization.
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Development and Structures of Creole Languages
Editor(s): Francis Byrne and Thom HuebnerPublication Date March 1991More LessThis collection of original essays is intended to both celebrate Derek Bickerton's sixty-fifth birthday and honor his long and eminent career. Each author included in the volume is a noted scholar who has distinguished him/herself in some area of linguistics and has professionally or personally interacted with Bickerton and been influenced by his work. While the papers make independent thematic contributions, they also discuss, augment, present alternatives to, or are inspired in some way by Bickerton's seminal ideas or penetrating analyses. The book is organized into 5 sections, each a reflection of a major research period in Bickerton's career: Section 1: Identifying Creoles; Section 2: Language Variation; Section 3: Creole Processes; Section 4: Creole Syntax and Semantics; Section 5: Serial Verbs.
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The Early Stages of Creolization
Editor(s): Jacques ArendsPublication Date January 1996More LessThis volume brings together a number of studies on the early stages of creolization which are entirely based on historical data. The recent (re)discovery of early documents written in creole languages such as Negerhollands, Bajan, and Sranan, allows for a detailed and empirically founded reconstruction of creolization as an historical-linguistic process. In addition, demographic and socio-historical evidence on some of the relevant former colonies, such as Surinam, Haiti, and Martinique, sheds new light on some crucial sociolinguistic aspects of creolization, such as the rate of nativization of the creole-speaking population. Both types of evidence relate to essential questions in the theory of creolization, such as: Is creolization a matter of first or second language acquisition? What are the respective roles of substrate, superstrate, and universal grammar in creole genesis? And, what, if any, are the differences between creole development and normal language change? The subjects discussed in this volume include: a comparative study of the historical development of seven pidgins and creoles (Baker); reflexives in 18th-century Negerhollands (Van der Voort & Muysken); the emergence of taki as a complementizer in Sranan (Plag); the historical development of relativization in Sranan (Bruyn); the cultural and demographic background of creolization in Haiti and Martinique (Singler); the creole nature of early Bajan (Field); a linguistic analysis of the so-called 'slave letters' in Negerhollands (Stein); and demographic factors in the formation of Sranan (Arends).
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The Emergence of Black English
Editor(s): Guy Bailey, Natalie Maynor and Patricia Cukor-AvilaPublication Date April 1991More LessDebate over the evolution of Black English Vernacular (BEV) has permeated Afro-American studies, creole linguistics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics for a quarter of a century with little sign of a satisfactory resolution, primarily because evidence that bears directly on the earlier stages of BEV is sparse. This book brings together 11 transcripts of mechanical recordings of interviews with former slaves born well over a century ago. It attempts to make this crucial source of data as widely known as possible and to explore its importance for the study of Black English Vernacular in view of various problems of textual composition and interpretation. It does so by providing a complete description of the contents of the recordings, by providing transcripts of most of the contents, and by publishing a group of interpretive essays which examine the data in the light of other relevant historical, cultural, social, and linguistic evidence and which provide contexts for interpretation and analysis. In these essays a group of diverse scholars on BEV analyze the same texts for the first time; the lack of consensus that emerges may seem surprising, but in fact highlights some of the basic problems of textual composition and interpretation and of scholarly dispositions that underlie the study of BEV. The papers raise crucial questions about the evolution of BEV, about its relationship to other varieties, and, most important, about the construction and interpretation of linguistic texts.
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Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages
Editor(s): Francis Byrne and Donald WinfordPublication Date October 1993More LessThe volume has as its topic, not only the types of formal constructions and devices which creole languages syntactically utilize to achieve constituent focus, but also, in a much broader sense, the many other phenomena and processes found in these languages which serve to highlight sentence-level elements. The book is organized into five sections: 1. verb focus, predicate clefting and predicate doubling; 2. focus and anti-focus; 3. focus and pronominals; 4. discourse patterning; 5. grammatical relations.
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Functional Categories in Three Atlantic Creoles
Author(s): Claire LefebvrePublication Date July 2015More LessThis book is about the functional categories of three Caribbean creoles: Saramaccan, Haitian Creole and Papiamentu with two specific goals. The first one is to evaluate the respective contribution of the source languages to the functional categories of these three creoles. The second is to evaluate the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the functional categories across these creoles. This study is cast within the relabeling-based account of creole genesis. Several lexical items discussed in this book may fulfill more than one grammatical function thus raising the issue of multifuctionality. No such in-depth comparative work of these three creoles with their source languages and of the three creoles among themselves is available elsewhere in the literature. This book is addressed to linguists (including Master and PhD students) interested in syntactic categories and more specifically in functional categories, to creolists and to researchers interested in language contact.
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The Genesis of a Language
Author(s): J. Clancy ClementsPublication Date March 1996More LessKorlai Portuguese (KP), a Portuguese-based creole only recently discovered by linguists, originated around 1520 on the west coast of India. Initially isolated from its Hindu and Muslim neighbors by social and religious barriers, the small Korlai community lost virtually all Portuguese contact as well after 1740. This volume is the first-ever comprehensive treatment of the formation, linguistic components, and rapidly changing situation of this exotic creole.
The product of ten years of research, Korlai Creole Portuguese provides an exciting, in-depth diachronic look at a language that is now showing the strain of intense cultural pressure from the surrounding Marathi-speaking population. Framed in Thomason and Kaufman’s 1988 model of contact-induced language change, the author’s analysis is enriched by numerous comparisons with sister creoles, apart from medieval Portuguese and Marathi.
This book contrastively examines the following areas:
phonemic inventories, phonological processes, stress assignment, syllable structure, paradigm restructuring, paradigm use, lexicon, word formation, semantic borrowing, loan translations, grammatical relation marking, pre- and postnominal modification, negation, subject and object deletion, embedding, and word order.
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Gradual Creolization
Editor(s): Rachel Selbach, Hugo C. Cardoso and Margot van den BergPublication Date April 2009More LessIs creolization an abrupt or a gradual process? In this volume leading scholars provide both comparative and case studies that outline their working definitions and their views on the particular or average time depth, or key processes necessary for contact language formation, providing a state-of-the art assessment of the theory of gradual creolization. Authors scrutinize the roles of nativization, demography, initial settlement, language composition, koineization, adstrate presence, bilingualism, as well as a variety of structural features in pidgins, creoles and other contact languages world-wide. From Pacific to Atlantic, French-, English-, Dutch-, Portuguese- and other-lexified restructured varieties are covered. Syntactic, lexical, phonological, historical and socio-cultural studies are grouped into Part 1, Linguistic analysis, and Part 2, Social reconstruction. This volume provides the multi-faceted groundwork and expert discussion that will help formulate further a model of gradual creolization, as called for by the work of the late Jacques Arends.
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Grammatical Relations in a Radical Creole
Author(s): Francis Byrne and Derek BickertonPublication Date January 1987More LessWith English and Portuguese as parent languages; the significant lexical retention of African languages; and the relative isolation of its speakers, Saramaccan has always stood out among Creole languages. Yet despite its obvious interest Saramaccan received little in the way of scholarly study. This groundbraking monograph dispels the mystery surrounding Saramaccan and provides strong evidence for a new approach to Creole origins. The study is carried out within the government-binding framework. The author shows how Saramaccan comes close to demonstrating what constitues the irreducible minimum of building blocks with which a language can be constructed, and the types of structure which must develop under such conditions. In this work Frank Byrne combines the outcome of patient and persevering fieldwork with a firm grasp of current theoretical issues and provides us with the insights into the nature of universal grammar of which a Creole like Saramaccan is potentially capable.
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History from Below
Editor(s): Johannes FabianPublication Date January 1990More LessJohannes Fabian with assistance from Kalundi Mango (Administrator, National Museum of Zaire) and with linguistic notes by Walter Schicho (University of Vienna). An extraordinary linguistic and sociopolitical document, this is a history of colonization written by the colonized, about the colonized, and for the colonized. The original text, a history of what is now Lubumbashi in the Shaba region of Zaire, is reproduced in exact facsimile in Part 1. The period covered is from the beginning of Belgian colonization to 1965. The text was commissioned by an association of former domestic servants and written, or compiled, by one Andre Yav. The facsimile text is followed by linguistic notes (provided by W. Schicho) on the variety of Swahili used by the author. In Part 2 this amazing document is twice translated: first, into an oralized' version in current Shaba Swahili and, second, into English. Numerous historical and linguistic notes make the text accessible to the non-specialist. While Parts 1 and 2 are of particular interest to linguists, Part 3 covers a wider area of intellectual concerns. It is an essay analyzing the social conditions, literary means and political purposes and importance of the history. Of interest to linguists, historians, sociologists and political scientists.
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History, Society and Variation
Editor(s): J. Clancy Clements, Thomas A. Klingler, Deborah Piston-Hatlen and Kevin J. RottetPublication Date July 2006More LessThis volume presents a collection of new articles by sixteen specialists in the field of pidgin and creole studies, assembled in honor of the world-renowned creolist, Albert Valdman. The articles, written from a variety of theoretical perspectives, are organized thematically in three sections: on the history of specific pidgins or creoles (including Louisiana Creole and Haitian Creole); on the sociohistorical settings that gave rise to these contact languages and issues affecting their future development; and on issues of linguistic variation and change. In keeping with Valdman’s own primary interests, the French-based creoles receive the most attention, including both those of the Atlantic zone and those of the Indian Ocean, but the volume also presents significant scholarship on English- and Portuguese-based varieties.
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Ibero-Asian Creoles
Editor(s): Hugo C. Cardoso, Alan N. Baxter and Mário Pinharanda-NunesPublication Date November 2012More LessStarting in 1498, contact between Ibero-Romance and Asian languages has taken place along a vast stretch of the coastlines of continental and insular Asia, producing a string of contact varieties which are among the least visible in the field of Creole Studies. This volume, the first one dedicated to the Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified creoles of Asia, brings together comparative studies on various issues across the Ibero-Asian creoles and beyond, by specialists in these languages. This type of cross-linguistic analysis allows progress on many fronts, including the reconstruction of past stages of the languages, the explanation of observed similarities and differences, the identification and consolidation of typological/taxonomic clusters, or the assessment of the linguistic effects of different contact equations. The volume provides a timely window onto aspects of current research on the Ibero-Asian creoles, including unsettled debates and ways in which their study can contribute to advance several areas of linguistic enquiry.
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Jamaican Creole Goes Web
Author(s): Andrea MollPublication Date July 2015More LessLarge-scale migration after WWII and the prominence of Jamaican Creole in the media have promoted its use all around the globe. Deterritorialisation has entailed the contact-induced transformation of Jamaican Creole in diaspora communities and its adoption by ‘crossers’. Taking sociolinguistic globalisation yet a step further, this monograph investigates the use of Jamaican Creole in a web discussion forum by combining quantitative and qualitative methodology in a sociolinguistic ‘third wave’ approach. In the absence of standardised orthography, one of the central aims of this study is to document the sociolinguistic styling and grassroots (anti-) standardisation of spelling norms for Jamaican Creole in the web forum as a virtual community of practice. An analysis of individual repertoire portraits demonstrates that conventionalised spelling variants co-occur with basilectal Jamaican Creole morphosyntax in ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ as the digital ethnolinguistic repertoire of the discussion forum. The enregisterment of this ethnolinguistic repertoire is closely tied to staged performance, which establishes the link between ‘Cyber-Jamaican’ and the negotiation of sociolinguistic identity and authenticity via stance-taking.
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Kriyol Syntax
Author(s): Alain KihmPublication Date July 1994More LessThis book describes the Portuguese-based Creole which is widely spoken as a first language in Guinea-Bissau. The study focuses on one variety, 'central Kriyol', and its main aim is to present a complete description of the grammar of the language. The theoretical framework for the syntactic analysis is purposely eclectic but relies primarily on Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and ample attention is paid to the cognitive or semantic dimension in the explanation of linguistic facts. After a short introduction on the history and phonology of the language and the organization of the study, there are chapters dealing with the simple sentence, Tense and Aspect, the noun phrase, the complex sentence, topicalization/focalization/questions, and Middles/Passives/Causatives. The final chapter discusses Kriyol texts, especially comic-books, from which a considerable number of examples used in the study are taken.
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Kwéyòl in Postcolonial Saint Lucia
Author(s): Aonghas St-HilairePublication Date September 2011More LessCan historically marginalized, threatened languages be saved in the contemporary global era? In relation to the wider postcolonial world, especially the Caribbean, this book focuses on efforts to preserve and promote Lesser Antillean French Creole – Kwéyòl – as the national language of Saint Lucia and on the legacy of colonialism and impact of globalization, with which English has become the universal lingua franca, as mitigating factors undermining these efforts. It deals specifically with language planning for democratization and government; literacy, the schools and higher education; and the mass media. It also examines changes in the status of and attitudes toward Kwéyòl, English and French since national independence and presents language planning implications from these changes and steps already undertaken to elevate Kwéyòl. The book offers new insight into globalization and its impact on linguistic pluralism, language planning, national development, Creole languages, and cultural identity in the Caribbean.
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Language and Slavery
Author(s): Jacques ArendsEditor(s): Crit CremersPublication Date July 2017More LessThis posthumous work by Jacques Arends offers new insights into the emergence of the creole languages of Suriname including Sranantongo or Suriname Plantation Creole, Ndyuka, and Saramaccan, and the sociohistorical context in which they developed. Drawing on a wealth of sources including little known historical texts, the author points out the relevance of European settlements prior to colonization by the English in 1651 and concludes that the formation of the Surinamese creoles goes back further than generally assumed. He provides an all-encompassing sociolinguistic overview of the colony up to the mid-19th century and shows how ethnicity, language attitude, religion and location had an effect on which languages were spoken by whom. The author discusses creole data gleaned from the earliest sources and interprets the attested variation. The book is completed by annotated textual data, both oral and written and representing different genres and stages of the Surinamese creoles. It will be of interest to linguists, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and anyone interested in Suriname.
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Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles
Editor(s): John H. McWhorterPublication Date May 2000More LessThis book collects a selection of fifteen papers presented at three meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in 1996 and 1997. The focus is on papers which approach issues in creole studies with novel perspectives, address understudied pidgin and creole varieties, or compellingly argue for controversial positions. The papers demonstrate how pidgins and creoles shed light on issues such as verb movement, contact-induced language change and its gradations, discourse management via tense-aspect particles, language genesis, substratal transfer, and Universal Grammar, and cover a wide range of contact languages, ranging from English- and French-based creoles through Portuguese creoles of Africa and Asia, Sango, Popular Brazilian Portuguese, West African Pidgin Englishes, and Hawaiian Creole English.
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Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas
Editor(s): Cecelia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzić and Philipp AngermeyerPublication Date July 2017More LessLanguage Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas brings together the original research of nineteen leading scholars on language contact and pidgin/creole genesis. In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid to the role of historical, cultural and demographic factors in language contact situations. John Victor Singler’s body of work, a model of what such a research paradigm should look like, strikes a careful balance between sociohistorical and linguistic analysis. The case studies in this volume present investigations into the sociohistorical matrix of language contact and critical insights into the sociolinguistic consequences of language contact within Africa and the African Diaspora. Additionally, they contribute to ongoing debates about pidgin/creole genesis and language contact by examining and comparing analyses and linguistic outcomes of particular sociohistorical and cultural contexts, and considering less-studied factors such as speaker agency and identity in the emergence, nativization, and stabilization of contact varieties.
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Language Description, History and Development
Editor(s): Jeff Siegel, John Lynch and Diana EadesPublication Date March 2007More LessThis volume in memory of Terry Crowley covers a wide range of languages: Australian, Oceanic, Pidgins and Creoles, and varieties of English. Part I, Linguistic Description and Typology, includes chapters on topics such as complex predicates and verb serialization, noun incorporation, possessive classifiers, diphthongs, accent patterns, modals in Australian English and directional terms in atoll-based languages. Part II, Historical Linguistics and Linguistic History, ranges from the reconstruction of Australian languages, to reflexes of Proto-Oceanic, to the lexicon of early Melanesian Pidgin. Part III, Language Development and Linguistic Applications, comprises studies of lexicography, language in education, and language endangerment and language revival, spanning the Pacific from South Australia and New Zealand to Melanesia and on to Colombia. The volume will whet the appetite of anyone interested in the latest linguistic research in this richly multilingual part of the globe.
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The Making of a Mixed Language
Author(s): Maarten MousPublication Date December 2003More LessThe Mbugu (or Ma'á) language (Tanzania) is one of the few genuine mixed languages, reputedly combining Bantu grammar with Cushitic vocabulary. In fact the people speak two languages: one mixed and one closely related to the Bantu language Pare. This book is the first comprehensive description of these languages. It shows that these two languages share one grammar while their lexicon is parallel. In the distant past the people shifted from a Cushitic to a Bantu language and in the process rebuilt a language of their own that expresses their separate ethnic identity in a Bantu environment. This linguistic history is explained in the context of the intricate history of the people. The discussion of the processes that were involved in the formation of Ma'a/Mbugu is extremely relevant for both creole studies and for contact linguistics in general.
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The Morphosyntax of Reiteration in Creole and Non-Creole Languages
Editor(s): Enoch O. Aboh, Norval Smith and Anne Zribi-HertzPublication Date June 2012More LessThis is a new contribution to a theory of reiteration in natural languages, with a special focus on creoles. Reiteration is meant to denote any situation where the same form occurs (at least) twice within the boundaries of some linguistic domain. By including two case studies bearing on Hebrew and Breton alongside five chapters on creole languages (Surinam creole, Haitian, Mauritian, São Tomé and Pitchi), this volume brings counter-evidence to the claim that reiteration phenomena are particularly typical of creoles. And by exploring the syntax of reiteration alongside its morphology, the authors are led to challenge the 'iconic' theory of 'reduplication' proposed in several other studies of similar phenomena. This volume will be relevant for creole studies, but also for readers more generally interested in language universals and the architecture of grammars.
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Noun Phrases in Creole Languages
Editor(s): Marlyse Baptista and Jacqueline GuéronPublication Date November 2007More LessThis volume offers a thorough examination of the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse properties of noun phrases in a wide variety of creole (and non-creole) languages including Cape Verdean Creole, Santome, Papiamentu, Guinea-Bissau Creole, Mindanao Chabacano, Réunionnais Creole, Lesser Antillean, Haitian Creole, Mauritian Creole, Seychellois, Sranan, Jamaican Creole, Berbice Dutch Creole and African American English. Comparative studies also consider the determiner systems of Middle and Modern French, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Ewe, Fon and Gun. This compilation of 16 chapters brings together descriptive, theoretical, diachronic and synchronic studies that focus on the structure and interpretation of bare nouns in creoles. The contributions demonstrate the variety and complex nature of determiner systems in creoles and their widespread use of bare nouns in comparison to their source languages. This volume is evidence of the relevance of creole languages to theories of language creation, language change and linguistic theory in general.
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Phonological Variation in Rural Jamaican Schools
Author(s): Véronique LacostePublication Date July 2012More LessThis book investigates variation in the classroom speech of 7-year-old children who are learning Standard Jamaican English as a second language variety in rural Jamaica. For sociolinguists and second language/dialect researchers interested in the acquisition and use of sociolinguistic variables, an important challenge is how to efficiently account for language learning mechanisms and use. To date, this book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary look into phonological and phonetic variation observed in primary school in Jamaica, that is from the perspective of classic variationist and quantitative sociolinguistics and a usage-based model. Both frameworks function as explanatory for the children’s learning of phono-stylistic variation, which they encounter in their immediate linguistic environment, i.e. most often through their teachers’ speech. This book is intended for sociolinguists interested in child language variation, linguists working on formal aspects of the languages of the Caribbean, applied linguists concerned with the teaching and learning of second language phonology, and any researchers interested in applying variationist and quantitative methods to classroom second language learning.
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Pidgin and Creole Tense/Mood/Aspect Systems
Editor(s): John Victor SinglerPublication Date January 1990More LessMore than any other area of the grammar, tense-mood-aspect (TMA) has provided evidence to fuel the ongoing debates about creole genesis and about the relevance of pidgin and creole phenomena to language theory more generally. This volume advances the debate in two ways. First, it makes available in print for the first time and in its original form William Labov's On the Adequacy of Natural Languages: I. “The Development of Tense”. Second, the volume features detailed analyses of the TMA systems of seven diverse pidgins and creoles, which vary in terms of their lexifying (superstrate) languages, their location, and their social histories.With the authors employing a broad range of theoretical perspectives for their analyses, the study demonstrates both the extent to which pidgins and creoles share a single, prototypical TMA system and the degree to which individual pidgins and creoles diverge from that prototype. This is a volume that brings forward our knowledge and understanding of pidgin and creole TMA.The seven languages analyzed are: Capeverdean Crioulo, Kituba, Papiamentu, Berbice Dutch, Haitian Creole, Kru Pidgin English, and Eighteenth Century Nigerian Pidgin English.
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Pidgins and Creoles
Editor(s): Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken and Norval SmithPublication Date December 1994More LessThis introduction to the linguistic study of pidgin and creole languages is clearly designed as an introductory course book. It does not demand a high level of previous linguistic knowledge. Part I: General Aspects and Part II: Theories of Genesis constitute the core for presentation and discussion in the classroom, while Part III: Sketches of Individual Languages (such as Eskimo Pidgin, Haitian, Saramaccan, Shaba Swahili, Fa d'Ambu, Papiamentu, Sranan, Berbice Dutch) and Part IV: Grammatical Features (such as TMA particles and auxiliaries, noun phrases, reflexives, serial verbs, fronting) can form the basis for further exploration. A concluding chapter draws together the different strands of argumentation, and the annotated list provides the background information on several hundred pidgins, creoles and mixed languages.
Diversity rather than unity is taken to be the central theme, and for the first time in an introduction to pidgins and creoles, the Atlantic creoles receive the attention they deserve. Pidgins are not treated as necessarily an intermediate step on the way to creoles, but as linguistic entities in their own right with their own characteristics. In addition to pidgins, mixed languages are treated in a separate chapter.
Research on pidgin and creole languages during the past decade has yielded an abundance of uncovered material and new insights. This introduction, written jointly by the creolists of the University of Amsterdam, could not have been written without recourse to this new material.
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Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters
Editor(s): Isabelle Buchstaller, Anders Holmberg and Mohammad AlmoailyPublication Date January 2014More LessMost of what we know about pidgin and creole languages is the result of research into contact languages that developed as a consequence of European expansion into Africa and the Caribbean. The narrow focus on European lexifier and West African substrate languages has resulted in insufficient investigation of other contact varieties. Even more perniciously, lesser known and often under-described contact languages have not been taken into consideration when formulating supposedly general tendencies about the linguistic properties of contact languages. This volume aims to give a platform to research on the history, genesis, and typology of a number of non-European language-based contact languages. A more encompassing and diverse data-base will contribute to more accurate and comprehensive inventories of the typological features of contact languages.
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Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages
Author(s): Viveka VelupillaiPublication Date April 2015More LessThis lucid and theory-neutral introduction to the study of pidgins, creoles and mixed languages covers both theoretical and empirical issues pertinent to the field of contact linguistics. Part I presents the theoretical background, with chapters devoted to the definition of terms, the sociohistorical settings, theories on the genesis of pidgins and creoles, as well as discussions on language variation and the sociology of language. Part II empirically tests assumptions made about the linguistic characteristics of pidgins and creoles by systematically comparing them with other natural languages in all linguistic domains. This is the first introduction that consistently applies the findings of the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures and systematically includes extended pidgins and mixed languages in the discussion of each linguistic feature. The book is designed for students of courses with a focus on pidgins, creoles and mixed languages, as well as typologically oriented courses on contact linguistics.
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Predication in Caribbean English Creoles
Author(s): Donald WinfordPublication Date January 1993More LessThis is the first major study of the conservative or basilectal English creoles of the Anglophone Caribbean since Bailey's (1966) and Bickerton's (1975) descriptions of Jamaican and Guyanese Creole respectively. The book offers a comprehensive, unified treatment of the core areas of CEC predication, including the verb complex, auxiliary ordering, voice and valency, copular and attributive predication, serial verb constructions and complementation. Particularly note-worthy is its utilization of an extremely rich data base and a variety of sources to provide an up-to-date, state of the art account of predicate structures in CEC. The book presents new analyses of several areas of CEC syntax, including such phenonema as passivization, serialization and complementation, which have not been thoroughly analyzed, if at all, in the previous literature. The areas covered in the book involve a wide range of grammatical phenomena centering around the various sub-classes of verb and their subcategorization. The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six chapters, each of which explores some aspect of the behavior of verbs (or verb-like predicators) and the constructions in which they occur. The book is intended to be a pre-theoretical account of the facts of CEC predication. However, to further elucidate the workings of the grammar and add some degree of explicitness to the description, the author also presents more formal analyses of the grammatical phenomena, employing the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG).
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Roots of Afrikaans
Editor(s): Ton van der WoudenPublication Date June 2012More LessHans den Besten (1948-2010) made numerous contributions to Afrikaans linguistics over a period of nearly three decades. His writings helped shift the perspective on the roots of Afrikaans beyond Dutch to the structure and vocabulary of Khoekhoe, to Portuguese Creole, and to Malay varieties. This volume contains a selection of Den Besten’s most important papers – some of which originally appeared in less accessible journals – concerning the structure and history of Afrikaans. They cover a wide range of topics, including grammatical structure, vocabulary, the historical development of Afrikaans, as well its multiple roots. It is essential reading for any linguist interested in language contact and language change.
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Roots of Creole Structures
Editor(s): Susanne Maria MichaelisPublication Date October 2008More LessThis book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistorical contact situation. The languages covered in the book are: Guiné-Bissau Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawai‘i Creole, Indo-Portuguese creoles, Jamaican Creole, Lingua Franca, North American French, Mauritian Creole, Santomense, Saramaccan, Seychelles Creole, Sranan, Surinamese Maroon creoles, Vincentian Creole, and Zamboangueño Chavacano.
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Sing Without Shame
Author(s): Kenneth David JacksonPublication Date January 1990More LessThis study of literary themes, linguistic practice and cultural traditions analyzes the oral traditions of Indo-Portugese creole verse, as a synthesis from European, African and Asian sources. This musical, dramatic and textual syncretism defines tradition within the group and maintains the identity of the creole community. References are primarily to Indian and Sri Lankan materials collected in the late nineteenth century and to data in the H. Nevill collection, an extensive manuscript of Sri Lankan Creole texts from the 1870s or 1880s, housed in the British Museum. The importance of these texts is linguistic, anthropological and sociological. They are persistent in their ability to give definition to creole culture, surviving in South Asia from the seventeenth century to the present.
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The Speech of the Negros Congos in Panama
Author(s): John M. LipskiPublication Date January 1989More LessThe negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast are a unique cultural manifestation of Afro-Hispanic contact. During Carnival season each year, this group reenacts dramatic events which affected black slaves in colonial Panama, performs dances and pantomimes, and enforces a set of ritual laws' and punishments'. A key component of congo games is a special dialect, the hablar en congos, which is employed by a subset of the congos in each settlement. The present study investigates the congo dialect from a linguistic point of view along two dimensions. The first involves deliberate phonetic, syntactic, and semantic distortion as part of the overall spirit of of burlesque and ridicule that surrounds Panamanian Carnival. The second is the retention of earlier, partially creolized Afro-Hispanic language forms which may still be extracted from contemporary congo speech. These Afro-Hispanic vestiges are of key importance to monogenetic theories of Afro-Romance creolization as Panamanian congo speech provides examples of unique creolized Spanish.
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The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles
Editor(s): Arthur K. Spears and Donald WinfordPublication Date October 1997More LessDestined to become a landmark work, this book is devoted principally to a reassessment of the content, categories, boundaries, and basic assumptions of pidgin and creole studies. It includes revised and elaborated papers from meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in addition to commissioned papers from leading scholars in the field. As a group, the papers undertake this reassessment through a reevaluation of pidgin/creole terminology and contact language typology (Section One); a requestioning of process and evolution in pidginization, creolization, and other language contact phenomena (Section Two); a reinterpretation of the sources and genesis of grammatical aspects of Saramaccan and Atlantic creoles in general (Section Three); a reconsideration of the status of languages defying received definitions of pidgins and creoles (Section Four); and analyses of aspects of grammar that shed light on the issue of what a possible creole grammar is (Section Five).
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Structure and Variation in Language Contact
Editor(s): Ana Deumert and Stephanie DurrlemanPublication Date November 2006More LessThis volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai'i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect – from various perspectives and using different types of data – on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages, including Surinamese creoles, Chinook Jargon, Yiddish, AAVE, Haitian Creole, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties, Nigerian Pidgin, Sri Lankan Malay, Papiamentu, and Bahamian Creole English. A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions, and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation, agglutination, negation, TMAs, plural marking, the copula, and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.
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Substrata versus Universals in Creole Genesis
Editor(s): Pieter Muysken and Norval SmithPublication Date January 1986More LessTwo of the most prominent hypotheses about why the structures of the Creole languages of the Atlantic and the Pacific differ are the universalist and he substrate hypotheses. The universalist hypothesis claims, essentially, that the particular grammatical properties of Creole languages directly reflect universal aspects of the human language capacity, and thus Creole genesis involves, then, the stripping away of the accretions of language history. The substrate hypothesis claims, on the other hand, that creole genesis results from the confrontation of two systems, the native languages of the colonized groups, and the dominant colonial language, and that the native language leaves strong traces in the resulting Creole. The contributions of this ground breaking collection present new and historical research on the old debate of substrata versus universals in Creole languages.
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Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on Contact Languages
Editor(s): Magnus Huber and Viveka VelupillaiPublication Date September 2007More LessThis collection of selected conference papers from three SPCL meetings brings together a cross-fertilization of approaches to the study of contact languages. The articles are grouped into three coherent sections dealing with, respectively, phonetics and phonology, including Optimality Theory; synchronic analyses of both morphology and syntax; and diachronic tracings of language change, with special focus on sound patterns as well as semantics. An added value of the volume is that most of the articles are in various ways significant for more than one linguistic subgrouping, and there is a significant overlap of interests; the sections also cover sociolinguistic subjects, give both theoretical and functional linguistic analyses of language data, and discuss issues of grammaticalization. Thus, in discussing a number of issues relevant far beyond the study of pidgin and creole languages, as well as providing a wealth of linguistic data, this volume also contributes to the broader field of linguistics in general.
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The Syntax and Semantics of a Determiner System
Author(s): Diana GuilleminPublication Date November 2011More Less
Within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalism and Formal Semantics, this work documents the development of the Mauritian Creole (MC) determiner system from the mid 18th century to the present. Guillemin proposes that the loss of the French quantificational determiners, which agglutinated to nouns, resulted in the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions. This triggered a shift in noun denotation, from predicative in French to argumental in MC, and accounts for the very different determiner systems of the creole and its lexifier. MC nouns are lexically stored as Kind denoting terms, that share some of the distributional properties of English bare plurals. New MC determiners are analyzed as ‘type shifting operators’ that shift Kinds into predicates, and serve to establish the referential properties of noun phrases. The analysis provides evidence for the universality of semantic features like Definiteness and Specificity, and the mapping of their form and function.
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The Syntax of Serial Verbs
Author(s): Mark SebbaPublication Date January 1987More LessThis monograph is about the chains of verbs commonly found in Creole Languages, West African languages, in particular the Kwa sub-group of Niger-Congo, Chinese and certain other languages and have acquired the name of 'serial verbs' in the literature. As a case study, the serial constructions of Sranan, a creole language of Surinam with an English lexical base, are examined in detail.
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Variation in the Caribbean
Editor(s): Lars Hinrichs and Joseph T. FarquharsonPublication Date January 2011More LessThe study of linguistic variation in the Caribbean has been central to the emergence of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics as an academic field. It has yielded influential theory, such as the (post-)creole continuum or the 'Acts of Identity' models, that has shaped sociolinguistics far beyond creole settings. This volume collects current work in the field and focuses on methodological and theoretical innovations that continue, expand, and update the dialog between Caribbean variation studies and general sociolinguistics.
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