Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2005

From the 1820s humorous representations of the local vernacular began to appear in the periodical press of the Cape Colony. These popular texts developed into a highly productive genre and influenced the formation of an early Afrikaans written norm by shaping expectations of social, linguistic and local authenticity. Whereas the early vernacular representations fall largely into the category of racist parodies or ‘mock language’ (Hill 1995), later texts were intended as projections of the colonists' own ‘voice’. Using LePage's concept of linguistic focusing (cf. LePage & Tabouret-Keller 1985), Coupland's (2001) notion of stylization, and Gal and Irvine's (2000) semiotic principles of iconization and erasure, this paper argues that linguistic forms which were propagated as ‘authentic’ representations of local speech in the popular literature came to be used as conventionalized ideological resources in non-literary texts and contributed to the gradual formation and diffusion of a written norm at the Cape. The data basis for the analysis includes early literary texts (1828–1889), theCorpus of Cape Dutch Correspondence(1880–1922, cf. Deumert, 2001, 2004) as well as a small, pragmatically cohesive corpus of application letters for the position of a nanny in the house of Colin Steyn (1923/1924).

Language and dialect choice are frequently thematized in creole literature, notably in Alfred Parépou's 1885 Guianese novelAtipa. The concept of the basilect has accordingly played an important role in creole writing, critical thinking, and polemic. Given the assimilative pressure exerted by the superstrate, writers and critics often argue that the ideal creole literary dialect should be as divergent from it as possible. During the 1980s the P.A.I.C.V. government in Cape Verde tried to promote a revolutionary literature in what was described as the deep, original dialect of Crioulo, that of the hinterland of Santiago Island. Of particular interest were the agency of theInstitutu Kauberdianu di Livruin Praia and the intellectual work of Manuel Veiga, especially hisDikrison Strutural di Lingua Kabuverdianu. Around the same time, writers in Martinique, most prominently Raphaël Confiant, embraced the vision of a literary basilect ‘maximally deviant’ from standard French, which Jean Bernabé defined as a ‘nuclear creole.’ This article concludes with an extract from one of Confiant's novels in which ‘hyper-acrolectal’ French is humorously contrasted with the author's figuration of deep Kréyol.

This article examines the role of orthography in the standardization of pidgins and creoles with particular reference to Pidgin in Hawai'i. Although linguists have generally stressed the desirability of phonemic over non-phonemic or etymological orthographies as a prerequisite for creatingAbstand‘distance’ and revalorizing pidgins and creoles as autonomous systems vis-à-vis their lexifiers, most writers in Hawai'i and elsewhere have been reluctant to use phonemic writing systems even where they exist. This is true even ofDa Jesus Book(2000), which has aimed at setting a standard for written Pidgin. Special attention is paid to the orthographic practices used in this translation of theNew Testamentcompared to those made by other writers, some of whom have explicitly disavowed standardization. These choices present a rich site for investigating competing discourses about Pidgin. Creole orthographies reflecting differing degrees and kinds of distance from those of their lexifiers are powerful expressive resources indexing multiple social meanings and identities. The orthographic practices of some Pidgin writers encode attitudinal stances that are oppositional to standard English and the ideology of standardization. Pidgin is being consciously elaborated as an anti-language, one of whose social meanings is that of Pidgin as an anti-standard. This brings to the fore varied ideological dimensions of a complex debate that has often been oversimplified by posing questions concerning orthographies for pidgins and creoles in terms of a choice between a phonemic vs. a non-phonemic orthography.

Looking up ‘creolization’ on any data base, or doing a search at amazon.com or simply googling the term will show that it is more widely used outside linguistics than inside – especially in anthropology, sociology, history and literary studies. Jourdan (2001: 2903) notes that the term has been borrowed from linguistics where one of its definitions is the creation of a new language out of contact between at least two different languages. Creolization in the sociocultural context usually refers to the creation of new aspects of culture as a result of contact between different cultures. In this column, I present some background information on what I'll call ‘sociocultural creolization’ and its links with linguistic creolization. Then I describe what I see as some of the differences between the sociocultural and linguistic approaches. I conclude with implications of these differences for the field of creolistics.