Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2011

In creolist circles, there has been a a long-standing debate whether creoles differ structurally from non-creole languages and thus would form a special class of languages with specific typological properties. This debate about the typological status of creole languages has severely suffered from a lack of systematic empirical study. This paper presents for the first time a number of large-scale empirical investigations of the status of creole languages as a typological class on the basis of different and well-balanced samples of creole and non-creole languages. Using statistical modeling (multiple regression) and recently developed computational tools of quantitative typology (phylogenetic trees and networks), this paper provides robust evidence that creoles indeed form a structurally distinguishable subgroup within the world’s languages. The findings thus seriously challenge approaches that hold that creole languages are structurally indistinguishable from non-creole languages.

That creole languages resemble each other beyond the diversity of their lexifiers and formative environments is a fact. Similarity should not be overstated, however, as creole languages also differ from each other in important ways. Hence the fundamental issues of creole studies: why are Creoles similar and what makes them different? What kind of a language group do they constitute? A genetic family they certainly are not, nor are they a typological group: creole languages do not constitute a type of their own. Assuming universal grammar viewed as a language bioprogram (LB) to be the principle of creole similarity strongly overstates this similarity. Moreover there are reasons to doubt the reality of the LB. Actually the kind of partial similarities exhibited by creole languages looks rather like what languages in a sprachbund or linguistic area have in common. How can languages scattered all over the world constitute an area, though? An answer is proposed in this study, which rests on two assumptions. First, creole languages constitute a virtual (non-spatial) area by virtue of their very similar origins, namely strong punctuations (catastrophes in a technical sense) involving Basic Variety (pidgin) episodes. Secondly, the (by no means necessary) aftermath of the catastrophe was an exceptional and limited repairing recourse to default grammar, whereby is meant a non-innate (at least not genetically coded), usage-based organization of the sound-meaning interface ensuring semantic transparency, that is the most direct mapping possible given (a) the organization of language sound; (b) the nature of meaning; (c) human preferred ways of associating forms and notions, also relevant for drawing, tool making, and so forth. Beyond that, creole languages are free to differ according to their lexifiers, substrates, adstrates, and so forth.

Proponents of a ‘feature pool’ approach to creolization (e.g. Mufwene 2001, Aboh & Ansaldo 2006) have claimed that the emergence of the new grammar is driven by the syntax-discourse prominence, markedness, and frequency of available features, with typological similarity or dissimilarity of the languages involved playing a crucial role in the competition and selection process. This paper takes a closer look at the predictions of a feature pool-based approach to creolization and tests whether these predictions are borne out by the facts. Three case studies from the Surinamese creoles and Sri Lanka Malay show that the feature pool approach suffers from a number of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical problems. The typology alone of the languages involved in the contact is not a good predictor for the outcome of language contact. The feature pool approach neglects processing constraints: one can only select from what one can process. ‘Creolization’, as in the case of the emergence of the Surinamese Creoles, is not ‘exceptional’, but happens in contact situations in which second language acquisition plays a significant role. The processing restrictions inherent in second language acquisition play an important role in shaping the structural outcome. ’Admixture’, as in the case of Sri Lanka Malay, is not ‘exceptional’ either, but happens in different situations and shows different processes at work. And these processes allow structural outcomes that are very different from those found under the conditions of second language acquisition.

Especially since Ferraz (1974, 1975, 1979), it has been generally accepted that the four Gulf of Guinea creoles (GGCs) — Santome (ST), Angolar (ANG), Lung’ie (LU), and Fa d’Ambô (FA)2 — are closely related languages based on historical and linguistic data. Ferraz shares his view on the type of genetic relation between these creoles in the following quote: To take the GG [Gulf of Guinea] case, it would not be plausible to assume that the contact language which developed in the town of São Tomé and the surrounding areas was the same as that which gave rise to Ang[olar], Pr[incipense], and Pag[alu]4. There are enough differences between each of these languages to rule out such a possibility. It would be closer to the truth to say that the four contact languages show many resemblances because, to a large extent, they grew up together, with slaves and settlers introduced through the central administration in São Tomé. (…). Hence different languages developed in the archipelago rather than dialects of one contact language. (Ferraz 1987: 348)This paper will reassess the linguistic relation between the GGCs and the typological contribution of the African strata. It will be argued that there is substantial linguistic evidence that the GGCs are to a significant extent the result of a common ancestor, which throughout the paper will be labelled the proto-Gulf of Guinea creole (proto-GGC), and that this common ancestor derived most of its features from its Nigerian substrate rather than from western Bantu.

This paper reports on the analysis of a typological database of creole phoneme inventories and surface syllables. The sample encompasses a balanced set of creole languages lexified by Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The results of the analysis demonstrate that most creole languages exhibit between twenty and thirty-seven contrastive segments, between five and seven phonemic vowel qualities, and between two and three stop series. No creoles show only CV, and many display CCVC surface syllables. These features are quite unremarkable in comparison with non-creole languages around the world, but they represent significant evidence against claims that the structure of creole languages is especially simple. Instead, creole languages cluster in the typological middle.

Although many aspects of Creole languages remain relatively unexplored, the morphology of Creole languages has been especially neglected. This is largely because it is still widely believed that Creoles have very little in the way of morphology, even compared to an inflection-poor language such as English. Moreover, the morphology that Creoles do have is often assumed to be quite similar from one Creole language to another and is further thought to be predictable and transparent. However, there is an emerging body of research on Pidgin and Creole morphology showing that the hypothesis of semantic transparency and regularity in Creole morphology does not stand up to scrutiny. The purpose of this paper is to explore the typological characteristics of morphological reduplication in Caribbean Creole (CC) languages, and to assess these characteristics against this background. To this purpose, we will examine reduplication in a sample of CC languages of different lexifiers (Dutch, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish), with respect to their form, semantics and distribution. Our research confirms that morphological reduplication is not uniform across these languages. Moreover, it shows that reduplication is surprisingly complex within a single language.