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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.
1 - 20 of 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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