Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2021

In this article, I develop an ethnographic view on social discourses associated with language use in a Belizean village in order to access the setting’s complex and not always easy to grasp patterns of linguistic prestige. Analyzing interview and observational data on language ideologies, I show that relationships of prestige are not necessarily neatly ordered and binary but that different language ideologies, in some cases relating to the same linguistic resources, may exist side-by-side. Therefore, linguistic resources may have several indexical, social-semiotic meanings at the same time. In these, the national and educational elite is not always a central point of orientation. Other cultural values, linking to colonial histories, African imaginaries, resistance towards standardization, transnational ties or the ability to keep codes apart, may have an influence on local language ideologies and thus also the language uses in this cultural context. Binary linguistic models like the diglossia or the continuum model, which map language variation in binary or linear fashions, are characteristic of epistemological traditions of Western linguistics that impact on but may also conceal complex language ideological realities in a postcolonial setting like Belize.

Pijin, the lingua franca of Solomon Islands, has acquired the functions of a creole in the capital city of Honiara. Yet, though Pijin is the common language of the urban culture of Honiara, it lacks linguistic legitimacy. Speakers of Pijin did not, until recently, consider it a true language in the same way that English and local vernaculars, with which it co-exists, are deemed to be. Specters of inauthenticity and illegitimacy were part of that assessment. In this paper, we consider that the nascent legitimacy ascribed to Pijin by some urban speakers is informed by the affirmation of their own legitimacy as a new socio-cultural group, that of the Pijin-speaking urbanite. This contributes to the complexification of the sociolinguistic scene. We show that while different ways of speaking Pijin are progressively becoming associated with various sociolinguistic groups and seem to constitute emergent social varieties, the question of a Pijin norm is also emerging.

This paper presents and discusses the instances of synchronic variation attested in the personal pronoun paradigm of modern Sri Lanka Portuguese, an endangered Portuguese-based creole spoken by relatively small communities scattered across Eastern and Northern Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka Portuguese has a long history of documentation dating from, at least, the beginning of the 19th century, only a few studies have explicitly reported cases of synchronic variation. This study aims, therefore, to fill that gap, by contributing to the description and explanation of patterns of variation relating to the personal pronoun paradigm as encountered in documentary data collected between 2015 and 2020, over several field trips to the districts of Ampara, Batticaloa, Jaffna, and Trincomalee. The nature of the variation observed in the data ranges from phonetic alternations to strategies of paradigm regularization and stylistic shrinkage, often revealing the effects of diachronic processes of variant competition and substitution. Combining the observed patterns of variation with surveyed linguistic trends of language shift, we propose that obsolescence may be responsible for some of the variability encountered in modern SLP personal pronouns, especially that associated with certain socially- or geographically-defined subsets of the speech community (viz. the younger generations and the speakers from Jaffna) characterized by advanced language loss.

The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed (Baptista 1995, 2002; Pratas 2004). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro-drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013), and when a semantically referentially deficient (Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers (Siewierska 2004) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression (Wratil 2009; Baptista & Bayer 2013).

Although in recent years researchers have intensified focus on the communication of the pre-trial right to silence or police caution to native and non-native speakers of English, most of this research has been concerned with linguistic complexity, comprehension, and comprehensibility issues. Relatively few studies have focused attention on the role played by the deliverer of the caution in the communicative equation (Cotterill 2000), particularly in situations where the caution has to be interpreted or translated by its deliverer. Drawing on a sociolinguistic variation approach, this study investigates the communication of the police caution to creole speakers, who remain nearly invisible in the research to date. It uses the categories of literal and free translation as tools to analyze spontaneous translations of the caution from English to French lexicon Creole (Kwéyòl) produced by (n = 25) police officers in St. Lucia. The results show considerable variability in these translations, which may have negative consequences for the accused. This study seeks to draw attention to these consequences, by underscoring some of the inaccuracies that may occur in translating or interpreting a caution written in English to Kwéyòl, and make a case for policy that would use the language of the accused in situations of language variation. The study argues that such a policy, which standardizes the Kwéyòl version of the caution, would not only obviate the potential for variability, but would also minimize misunderstandings, which could compromise the legal rights of the suspect.