Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Online First

This article examines the polysemic nature of the glossonym ‘Chavacano’ at the level of discourse, beyond the documented structural properties of its referent, i.e. the Philippine Chavacano Creoles. Arguing that language names function as statements with epistemic value, the study explores the evolving meanings produced through the labelling of Asia’s only Spanish-based creole. By comparing colonial-era documentation with contemporary emic and etic wsritings, we observe how current uses of the creole language name interact with its original derogatory connotations through affirmation, contestation, or negotiation. Applying a Foucauldian archaeological approach to language naming broadens the analytic scope of Creolistics, shifting the focus from purely structural concerns to the discursive power embedded in language names. By analysing the glossonym ‘Chavacano’, we gain insight into the complex meaning-making processes that are couched in creole language naming, where the reproduction of colonial pejorative statements intersects with the reclamation of ethnolinguistic pride.

The heightened scholarly attention given to the absence of articles in creoles since the 1990s leaves an impression of a linguistic particularism. But are articleless nouns in English-related creoles so peculiar? If bare nouns are characteristic of creoles, their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic behaviour are not wholly unexpected, given the relatively small number of mismatches observed in the comparative data I provide in this column. A comparative view of textual corpora extracted from translations of Le Petit Prince in Jamaican, Vincentian and English shows compelling grammatical affinities between the three languages. Apart from a minimal number of innovations, bare nouns in the creoles function very much like English bare nominals. I illustrate these affinities using the semantico-pragmatic notions of presupposed identifiability and contextual salience, which facilitate the interpretation of bare nouns.

In postcolonial contexts, children usually learn to read in a language other than their main socialization language, usually a creole. To understand how this affects reading acquisition we examined the early Creole Papiamento (L1) and Dutch (L2) reading skills of 128 Caribbean children. We investigated the impact of instructional order, first Papiamento then Dutch (Papiamento-first group), and vice versa (Dutch-first group), and cognitive and linguistic predictors on grade 2 reading comprehension. The study also explored linguistic interdependence. Results showed a significant positive effect of instructional order on Dutch reading comprehension for the Dutch-first group, but no differences between groups on Papiamento reading comprehension. Both linguistic and cognitive precursors predicted reading comprehension in Papiamento and Dutch. We found that reading comprehension in Papiamento and Dutch is interdependent, influenced by instruction language, especially in the Dutch-first group. This underlines the crucial role of L1 in shaping reading comprehension in both L1 and L2.

This study provides a first description of the distribution of the copular items of the Spanish-lexified Creole Palenquero (San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia). Notably, besides the descriptions of the occurrence of the oppositional couple ta/é (and its variants era and jue), the distribution of the third and most innovative copula sendá (< Sp. sentar(se) ‘to sit’) has not yet been clarified. This study reveals that the distribution of the copulas é/jue/era ~ sendá is stratified by age. Although sendá has been recorded in previous traditional corpora with low frequency of occurrence, this paper demonstrates that young Palenquero speakers nowadays regularly select the copula sendá in both attributive and identificational equative copular constructions. Elderly traditional speakers prefer using the copulas é, jue, and era in this context. The change in usage is particularly prevalent among second language users of Palenquero who acquired it as part of language revitalization activities.

This article aims to demonstrate the critical importance of corpus-driven language standardization and linguistic expertise in orthography development using Zamboanga Chavacano (henceforth ZC) as a case study. I aim to highlight the inconsistencies between the official orthography and actual usage and make a case for corpus-driven language planning in the development of creole orthographies by analyzing the current official orthography of ZC. Specifically, I will present what the orthographic system of ZC should look like if corpus planning had played a role in the development of the official and standard orthography of ZC. This note discusses this issue based on an analysis of the Contemporary Written Zamboanga Chabacano Corpus (CWZCC) compiled by Himoro (2019) and compares the practices that emerge from the corpus with those used in the officially approved orthography. CWZCC is a comprehensive corpus, consisting of 8,038,200 words from radio scripts, newspapers, news articles, literary pieces (i.e., songs, poems, short stories), public and government documents, certificates, educational materials (e.g., Chavacano lessons in the MTB-MLE), public and commercial signs and/or advertisements, and campaign materials such as posters and tarpaulins, Facebook posts and comments, Twitter posts and comments, blogs, and online forums. The AntConc version 3.5.9, a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordance and text analysis was utilized to establish the word list from the CWZCC. The spelling variants were manually determined and arranged according to the frequency of occurrences.

Applying a qualitative discourse-based analysis, this paper discusses the attitudes towards the languages spoken in Macao based on their representation in the comic literature written in Macanese Creole. The texts consist of those collected by Leopoldo Danilo Barreiros and those written by José dos Santos Ferreira. They originated from the mid-1800s to the 1990s, just before the creation of the special administrative region of Macao in 1999. The attitudes towards different languages vary according to the ethnicity, gender, age and socioeconomic status of the characters. While celebrating the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Macao, the authors of the texts performatively express nostalgia about Macanese Creole and the Macao of the olden days with which the language is associated, as well as concern about the decreasing Portuguese influence on Macanese culture and fear about growing Chinese influence.

Creolists have long debated the role of sociocultural ecologies and superstrate/substrate typology in the formation of new contact languages. The present study broadens this discussion by examining the pronominal systems of two pidgins that formed in Fiji – Pidgin Hindustani and Pidgin Fijian. Both pidgins have smaller pronoun paradigms than do their lexifiers, but differ in the kind and degree of restructuring they exhibit. This study conducts a systematic typological comparison of the languages present in the feature pools of both pidgins, in search of selectional factors that shaped their systems of person reference. I argue that within this grammatical subdomain, Pidgin Hindustani and Pidgin Fijian each lend support to different models of pidgin formation, suggesting that pidginization is not a single deterministic process with a prototypical typological outcome.

This article investigates language choice and usage of teenage Mauritians and possible variations due to gender differences. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from our investigation, we analyse language differences in male and female students when interacting with peers, using social media, evaluating language preference and making future plans. The findings reveal that teenage girls are more likely to use trilingual combinations (English, French, Kreol) in everyday interactions with friends and on social media whereas boys tend to favour Kreol predominantly. Respondents’ language attitudes towards English and French were influenced by academic success, opportunities for global mobility and employment. Positive attitudes towards Kreol were associated with its role as the Mauritian native language that allows ease of communication. Quadralingual combinations (English, French, Kreol and an Asian heritage language) were low, but preference for heritage languages was related to one’s cultural and ancestral ties as well as career prospects.

The story of Babel has been used for centuries to prompt negative evaluations of linguistic diversity. It has been instrumentalised in debates about English, to attest linguistic purity and propagate the standard variety. In (post)colonial discourses, Babel came to project imperialist language ideologies and hierarchies onto new contexts. This paper demonstrates how Babel, as a recurring theme in debates on Hawai‘i Creole and Tok Pisin, has undergone transformation, having been employed in seemingly contradictory ways, variably used to legitimise or delegitimise the creoles. These competing, diametrically opposed lines of argumentation reflect different concepts of community and nation. Yet, as I propose here, Babel remains consistent in its core function: It serves as a topos, invoking ostensibly common knowledge about the dangers of (unmonitored) linguistic heterogenisation. Thus, regardless of its ideological force to challenge or maintain the (post)colonial status quo, it perpetuates a basic imperialist understanding of the nation as monolingual.