Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 23, Issue 2, 2008

Mauritian Creole (Kreol) is a French-lexified creole spoken on post-colonial and multilingual Mauritius. Although it is extensively used, it has not been officially standardised. The choice of a given orthography reflects language beliefs and is therefore ideologically loaded. More specifically, the way creoles are standardised can reflect the bias towards these languages which are seen as inferior to, and dependent on, their lexifiers. In the Mauritian case, this issue is especially significant because there are now efforts to devise an official standard for the language. In 2004, the Government set up a committee to develop a standard orthography for MC. This paper considers use of, and attitudes to, written Kreol. The material presented is based on interviews conducted in Mauritius and participant observation. Although interviewees do not make extensive use of Kreol in written interactions, they tend to support the promotion of literacy in the language. Responses highlight the tension between Kreol and the colonial languages — English and French — and also the role of Kreol as an index of national identity. Our findings confirm that the choice of an orthographic system reflects linguistic and social hierarchies. I conclude that this study has practical social implications for the standardisation of Kreol.

This article examines sound change in French Lexifier Creoles and the neutralization of contrast involving the feature [round]; secondary concerns include the nature of diachronically related inputs, base richness and decreolization. Phonological restructuring is described in an Optimality Theoretic grammar distinguishing between perceptual, declarative and procedural strata. Base richness holds only at the declarative stratum, as input to the perceptual and procedural strata are constrained by experience and feature licensing, respectively. Explanation of phonological restructuring centers on the perception grammar, where constraints refer to the parsing of experiential input. In the incipient creole, neutralization of contrast predicated by [round] is initially attributed to substrate grammatical transfer, reflecting first language attenuation. The possibility of creole-specific learning or attenuation to second language contrasts is also addressed and shown to lead to distinct output scenarios, depending upon the reranking of constraints under each stratum. Crucially, reranking at either the declarative or procedural strata is dependent upon learning at the perceptual stratum; rankings that do not mirror those of either the lexifier or substrate lead to output variability, the frequency of which is hypothesized to frame the eventual stabilization of representations.

A contact language called Broken Slavey or Slavey Jargon flourished among the Gwich’in in the nineteenth century. Slavey Jargon absorbed elements of at least five source languages: French, Gwich’in, South Slavey (Dene-Tha’), Chipewyan, and English. Analyzing historical sources and recorded ethnographic texts from fluent speakers of Gwich’in, I offer an explanation of how the lexicon and grammar of this kaleidoscopic language converged regionally in the small subarctic communities of Fort McPherson, La Pierre’s House, and Fort Yukon. I also conclude that there is no internal textual evidence that Slavey Jargon was used as a trading pidgin. The polyglot form of most Slavey Jargon texts represents a curious inseam of linguistic democracy, suggesting that a measure of social equality was negotiated between the speakers of its diverse component tongues.