Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2010

This is a description of one of the essential constituents of sentence structure in one reduced linguistic system in use in various countries of the western coast of the Arab Gulf and Saudi Arabia, that has been given the name Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) in the very little that has been written about it. The paper starts with locating this reduced linguistic form in its sociolinguistic background. This is followed by a description of the morphological characteristics of the verbs used in this system. The discussion also involves how the grammatical categories that form part of the verbal system are signaled, when and if they are (e.g. tense, aspect, mood, modality, and those that mark agreement like gender, person, and number). Furthermore, the paper deals with the status of the copulative element and predication marker fii and sentence negation in relation to the verbal system. It ends with a discussion of the properties of GPA compared to the general characteristics of world pidgins and to other Arabic-based pidgins and creoles.

This paper investigates changes in the dialect of a group of northern Japanese immigrants from the Tôhoku dialect speaking areas who migrated to Hawai‘i. The speakers moved to Hawai‘i as sugar plantation workers between 1899 and 1923 and the data were recorded between 1972 and 1975. Being latecomers to the plantations as well as a linguistic minority in the Japanese community in Hawai‘i, Tôhoku immigrants experienced dialect discrimination by other Japanese immigrants. The data tell us that the traditional Tôhoku dialect forms were replaced almost completely by the non-Tôhoku dialect forms after the speakers’ immigration. This study suggests that obvious dialect stigmatization led to the Tôhoku dialect speakers’ adoption of non-Tôhoku dialect features in order to gain acceptance in the local Japanese communities. Interestingly, however, the speakers transferred their Tôhoku dialect phonology to the newly acquired non-Tôhoku dialect forms. The findings support current second dialect acquisition studies that adult speakers acquire lexically-bound features more easily than phonological features.

This article examines the influence of perception on creole phonological restructuring, drawing comparisons to loanword adaptation and second language learning and outlining a formal framework within which change can be described and explained. The three scenarios of contact-induced modification are compared and contrasted, focusing on the nature of contact, the role of different source and target languages, and the means by which participants access source tokens. Data from Haitian, showing diachronic modification to lexifier rhotics, is used to illustrate the position that perception may be the primary causal factor in phonological modification in some instances. It is argued that source ambiguity and substrate (L1) perceptual knowledge underlie restructuring. Perceptual competence is formalized in a broadly Optimality Theoretic grammar using level-specific constraints referring to the parsing and categorization of experiential input. Putative substrate data are used to establish a perceptual grammar which, when applied to experiential input, predict attested outcomes in Haitian.

This paper addresses the debate on the place of origin of the Upper Guinea branch of Portuguese Creole (UGPC) as spoken in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance (GBC) and on the Santiago Island of Cape Verde (SCV). The hypothesis that UGPC emerged on Santiago rather than on the mainland is underpinned both historically and linguistically. First, a historical framework is presented that accounts for the linguistic transfer from Santiago to Cacheu. Secondly, Parkvall’s (2000) lexical evidence in favor of a Santiago birth will be analyzed and corroborated. Thirdly, a phonological trait that separates GBC from SCV is highlighted and shown to favor a Santiago origin. Finally, lexical and phonological features typical of 15th–16th century Portuguese shared by GBC and SCV are combined with historical data to further strengthen the Santiago birth hypothesis.