Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Online First

This study examines whether Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals maintain intonational distinctions between their two languages in polar questions (PQs). Earlier work reports both temporal and intonational differences, but temporal contrasts seem restricted to older speakers, and evidence is mixed, with older adults possibly showing greater intonational differences. Using two unilingual discourse completion tasks, this study analyzes whether PQ intonation varies by final stress, language, and speaker generation. Functional Principal Component Analysis of time-series F0 trajectories, combined with linear regression, reveals that the nuclear portion of younger adults’ intonation is more sensitive to the stress pattern of the final word than to the language, while older adults produce more language-specific final contours. Younger speakers resemble other Caribbean Spanish varieties. In contrast, older speakers appear to extend a truncation rule: they produce truncated contours in Spanish PQs and non-truncated contours in Palenquero. These findings suggest uneven maintenance of intonational contrasts across generations, likely reflecting generational change.

This study investigates language use and attitudes among teachers and students at two secondary schools in Dominica, a multilingual Caribbean island shaped by both French and British colonial influence. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 56 students and 11 teachers, the study explores perceptions of standard English, Dominican English Creole (DEC), and Kwéyòl. The findings show that standard English holds strong overt prestige and is widely used in formal settings, while DEC is the dominant spoken variety among students yet is often described as ‘broken English’ and socially stigmatized. Kwéyòl, associated with older generations, retains cultural value but is declining in active use among youth. Media exposure, particularly through music and social platforms, plays a key role in shaping language attitudes, often reinforcing stigmas. The findings offer insight into processes of language shift and the sociocultural positioning of local varieties in a postcolonial, digitally connected society.

This paper examines changes in Chabacano (Philippine Spanish Creole) identity in the national and global context of mass migration, focusing on the case of Cavite City, Philippines. Based on qualitative analysis of sociolinguistic, ethnographic, and literary data, we analyze translocal cultural and hybrid language practices in the context of language endangerment in the Cavite Chabacano-speaking community. The results show that due to the effects of migration, Caviteño identity has shifted from local to translocal, with Chabacano coming to represent nostalgia and authenticity as the language becomes more endangered. These shifts in identity are related to longstanding historical and cultural patterns, with complex dynamics reflecting both local pride and participation in the national and global markets. The Cavite Chabacano case also shows that the idea that ‘when a language dies, a culture dies’ is difficult to maintain in the multilingual Philippine context.

In Chabacano, certain words from the lexifier language Spanish have been adopted in their plural-derived form, although their number is singular. These invariable plural forms can also be found in Philippine languages as Spanish loanwords, without the plural marker that is common for these languages. This article presents an inventory of the invariable plural words in Chabacano and offers a detailed analysis of their semantics. The results are used to evaluate theories about the development of the invariable plurals and to explain the commonalities between their use in Chabacano and the Philippine languages. In addition, similar uses are shown to occur in present-day contact situations with English in the Philippines. In general, the results show a continuity in the adoption and semantics of the plurals between the substrate and the varieties of Chabacano, thus adding to the substratist explanations in language contact and to the discussion about the origins of the Chabacano varieties.

From the 18th century onwards the Russian Empire was vying for a share of the newly discovered overseas territories. It succeeded in establishing itself in Alaska for a century, and made brief forays into the American North West and Hawai’i. Russian overseas enterprises have raised expectations among Pidginists and Creolists that Russian-lexifier contact languages may have emerged. The evidence for this has, however, never been strong enough to make a case for the existence of pidgins or the like in these Russian domains, but there seemed also no clear indications to the contrary, so that hopeful anticipations of possible future discoveries of pertinent source material are still thriving. In the present article extant information on the overall sociolinguistic setting in the settlements set up by the Russian-American company is being pieced together in an attempt to argue for the unlikeliness of the emergence of a Russian pidgin in these settings.

Most research regarding Mauritian Creole future marking was carried out in the 1990s and assumed differences in ‘certainty’ dictated the choice of future marker (Baker 1993; Hazaël-Massieux 1993; Touchard & Véronique 1993). The consensus was that the two main markers, POU and VA, were used for ‘definite’ and ‘indefinite’ future events respectively. However, this distinction was inadequately defined, and although intuitively solid, it could not account for many naturally occurring instances. Davidson (2021) quantified a range of features relevant for future expression and a new obligation meaning of VA was mentioned by some speakers. In this paper, we explore in more detail the POU/VA opposition, considering contexts with different nuances of obligation/necessity and their compatibility with VA. Overall, VA is more acceptable in contexts which can be interpreted as obligation/necessity and it is now not only restricted to indefinite or ‘less certain’ contexts.

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.