Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 10, Issue 1, 1995

Evidence recently unearthed in documentary sources (such as voyage accounts and Hawaiian-language newspapers) has failed to support the theory that the predominant plantation language and lingua franca of Hawaii's polyglot population in the 19th century was an English-lexifier pidgin. Available evidence actually indicates that a pidginized variety of Hawaiian (which began to develop almost immediately after first contact) formed the original plantation language, and began to be displaced by pidgin English only in the 1880s and 1890s. This Hawaiian-lexifier pidgin also served as a general communicative medium in competition with pidgin English outside the plantation communities. Its prevalence may explain the slow development of pidgin English in Hawaii and late creolization.

A recent study of Tayo shows an obligatory subordinator sa in all relative clauses. The Isle de France dialects, like most other varieties of Creole French, have an obligatory subordinator ki for subject relatives, while ki is optional elsewhere. Reunion Creole has a subordinator ke which is almost always optional, and thus stands out as different from all others in this respect.To explain this oddity, the paper contains the following topical sequence: 1) Reunion Creole relative clauses and the "mysterious" verb marker i with which they interact are described, using data covering nearly three centuries; 2) a highly specific past tense formation is described and discussed; and 3) inferential arguments are advanced, with the addition of data that pertain to both Tayo and Isle de France Creole, to suggest that the anomalous optionality of the relative subordinator in Reunion Creole became established in the 17th century as a result of Malagasy influence on what is essentially a continuation of 17th century (varieties of) French. Tayo and Isle de France Creole are seen as new creations, new solutions to problems of interethnic communication.

A survey of literary and lexical evidence — early French descriptions of Martinique and its neighboring islands, and the etymologies of modern Dominican names for fish and parts of dugout canoes — suggests that Lesser Antillean French Creole did not take shape until the first decades of the 18th century, some 70 years after French colonization got seriously underway in 1635. The language's progenitors included a Spanish-Carib-French pidgin used between French settlers, their African slaves, and the islands' aboriginal inhabitants; a simplified form of French; and Standard French. No African influences are attested before the 1690s.

From 1904 to 1906 a series of linked vernacular texts — purportedly written by Trinidadians and other West Indians, including Barbadians — appeared in the Trinidadian newspaper Penny Cuts. Trinidadian English Creole (TEC), a fundamentally stable and clearly creole language throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, included several varieties, containing more and less English influence. The texts appear linguistically reliable, and show that by this time, TEC was recognizably different from other creole varieties. This differentiation is held to be closely related to the contemporary social situation, reflecting a nationalist/nativist movement towards self-identification.