Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2013

Língua de Pretofalar GuinéIn the first part of the study (sections 1–4), we substantiate our claim that such literary representations are indeed reliable renditions of the linguistic medium African slaves in Portugal actually used in their interactions with the white population and among themselves. We propose a historical scenario to account for the ‘return’ of LdP to Africa, i.e. Senegambia, where it soon became the lingua franca of trade between Portuguese expatriates and the local populations. From this lingua franca, creoles subsequently arose.In the second part (sections 5–11), we propose an extensive outline of LdP grammar such as we are able to retrieve from the corpus. Comparisons with present-day WAPCs are attempted.We conclude (sections 12–13) that the availability of such historical testimonies indeed gives us the exceptional opportunity of gaining some first-hand knowledge of the transitional medium that necessarily separates a lexifier language from ‘its’ creole(s). The fact that this transitional medium, we think, looks much more like a BV than a destructured jargon lends support to the assumption that untutored L2 acquisition by adults played a crucial role in creole formation.

This paper discusses supplementary roles played by Bazaar Malay and Baba Malay in the genesis of wh-questions in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). CSE has three options for wh-questions: (a) full wh-movement, (b) partial wh-movement, and (c) wh-in-situ, just like Bazaar Malay and Baba Malay. Whereas options (a) and (c) arose under pressure from English and Chinese, option (b) apparently challenges the Sinitic substrate hypothesis on CSE for two reasons. Firstly, neither Cantonese nor Hokkien possesses partial wh-movement. Secondly, it is mysterious how the apparent Malayic pattern could have entered the pool of CSE features within the predominantly Sinitic contact environment. This paper proposes that partial wh-movement was added onto the CSE grammar as an evolutionary ‘adaptive’ trait from Malay which survived selective Sinitic pressures due to congruence between Malay and Chinese. Both Cantonese and Hokkien possess a wh-topicalization structure, which is sufficiently similar to the partial structure in Malay. As a result, the former served as the template for Chinese speakers to analyze the latter as a congruence structure in the emerging variety. This result supports the recent view that typological congruence between Sinitic and Malay must be taken into account in any discussion of the origin/development of CSE grammar.

In this article I propose that creoles are relatively transparent compared to their source languages. This means that they display more one-to-one relations between meaning and form. Transparency should be distinguished from the concepts of simplicity, ease of acquisition, and regularity. Definitions of these notions are given and it is shown how they have been mixed up in earlier literature.The transparency of creoles is explained as a result of language contact. When people speaking radically different languages communicate, they tend to use maximally intelligible forms, i.e. transparent forms. The repeated selection of transparent over opaque forms will lead to the formation of a relatively transparent language. Hence, creoles are predicted to be either as transparent as or more transparent than their source languages.An empirical study is performed to test this prediction. The transparency of four contact languages and their sub- and superstrates is measured by checking them on a list of non-transparent features. It turns out that they all exhibit opaque structures, but that there is a striking absence of so called form-based forms: linguistic elements and rules that are not motivated pragmatically or semantically. This indicates that such ‘empty’ forms are lost during intense language contact.

This article provides a sociohistorical and linguistic account for the development of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS), an Afro-Hispanic vernacular spoken in Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. Previous research has indicated that ABS might be the descendent of an Afro-Hispanic pidgin (Lipski 2008), which first creolized in colonial times and eventually decreolized due to contact with Spanish after the Bolivian Land Reform of 1952.The present study argues that ABS was probably never a creole, but rather a language relatively close to Spanish from its inception. The basis on which this claim is built consists of sociodemographic and linguistic data. The findings strongly indicate that the historical conditions for a creole language to emerge were not in place in Bolivia for the period under analysis (15th–19th century).