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Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
1 - 20 of 25 results
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Eski fitir-la touzour insertin? Is the future still uncertain? : The acceptability of Mauritian Creole’s elusive VA marker in future contexts
Author(s): Hannah Davidson and Sandra PaoliAvailable online: 02 June 2025More LessAbstractMost 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.
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Obituary : Jeffrey Alan Siegel 3 November 1945 — 8 March 2025
Author(s): Felicity Meakins and Cindy SchneiderAvailable online: 02 June 2025More Less
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What do we talk about when we talk about Chavacano? : Language names in the archaeology of knowledge
Author(s): Jillian Loise MelchorAvailable online: 26 May 2025More LessAbstractThis 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.
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Measuring the similarity between languages : The case of creoles and non-creoles
Author(s): Lara Rüter and Ingo PlagAvailable online: 26 May 2025More LessAbstractIn typology, statistical methods have been successfully used to assess similarities and differences between languages. In creole studies, the use of quantitative methods has been discussed controversially. In the debate many methodological aspects of the statistical models used have been criticized (e.g. Meakins 2022; Bakker 2023). This paper presents an investigation of two methodological problems that have not been critically looked at so far: the question of which statistical models produce which results, and the question of how the amount of missing values in data sets influences the results. We present a study in which we tested different statistical models on 21 features from two arbitrarily chosen domains (‘Word Order’ and ‘Nominal Categories’) from the WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013) and APiCS (Michaelis et al., 2013) data bases. It is demonstrated that different statistical methods yield similar results, and that different sample sizes do not dramatically influence the model outcomes.
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Why all the fuss about bare nouns in English-related creoles?
Author(s): Paula PrescodAvailable online: 26 May 2025More LessAbstractThe 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.
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Review of Jean-Louis & Zribi-Hertz (2024): Petit guide de créole martiniquais
Author(s): Marie-Thérèse VinetAvailable online: 06 March 2025More Less
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Predicting reading comprehension in Creole Papiamento and Dutch in a post-colonial context
Author(s): Gil-Marie Mercelina, Eliane Segers, Ronald Severing and Ludo VerhoevenAvailable online: 24 February 2025More LessAbstractIn 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.
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“Mij dodte, mij loppe, in mijn lande” : Extending the horizon on documented contact language use in the Virgin Islands with a quote in incipient Dutch Creole from 1681
Author(s): Kristoffer Friis Bøegh, Mikael Parkvall and Peter BakkerAvailable online: 06 February 2025More LessAbstractA 1681 letter written by Jørgen Iversen (1638–1682), the first governor of Danish St. Thomas, unearthed from the Danish National Archives, contains a quote in incipient Virgin Islands Dutch Creole (VIDC). The quote, Mij dodte, mij loppe, in mijn lande, lit. ‘I die/dead, I go, in my country’ (free translation: ‘If/when I die, I will go back to my own country’), predates other early VIDC sources by over half a century. This finding shows that a Dutch-related contact variety was in use on St. Thomas a mere decade after the island’s colonization in 1672. Assessing historical-demographic evidence alongside the linguistic evidence, the most plausible scenario, we argue, is one in which VIDC formed locally on St. Thomas rather than having been imported before the 1680s. The quote is among the earliest fragments of a European-lexifier contact language in the Caribbean, and among the earliest in any Dutch-related contact language.
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The copula sendá in the revitalization of Palenquero Creole : Fresh evidence
Author(s): Mara MarsellaAvailable online: 28 January 2025More LessAbstractThis 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.
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Is variation a sign of decreolization? : Exploring decreolization through diachronic analysis of variation in ‘doz’ and singular pronouns in Guyanese Creolese
Author(s): Emma KainzAvailable online: 21 November 2024More LessAbstractThe sociolinguistic situation in Guyana is one in which Creolese has intensive contact with its lexifier language, English, creating a continuum of varieties in which the acrolect varieties behave much like Standard English (Rickford 1987a). The creole continuum has been associated with decreolization following the pidgin-creole lifecycle (Hall 1962). Decreolization is the theory of contact induced change wherein a creole becomes more similar to its lexifier language over time (Bickerton 1980). Many researchers (e.g. Mayeux 2019, Patrick 1999b) call into question the existence of decreolization as separate from regular language change. This study will add evidence to these critiques and challenge the association of the creole continuum with decreolization and thus language change. Using a meta-analysis of the habitual marker doz and singular pronouns in Guyanese Creolese over a nearly twenty-year period, this paper will investigate whether the linguistic variation observed on the creole continuum shows evidence of loss of creole variants. The findings of this paper help to support earlier critiques of decreolization, and arguments against its usefulness in describing diachronic change observed in creole languages.
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On the orthography of Philippine Creole Spanish in Zamboanga
Author(s): Gefilloyd L. De CastroAvailable online: 18 November 2024More LessAbstractThis 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.
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The rhotics of the Salvador, Bahia variety of Brazilian Portuguese
Author(s): Trey Jagiella and J. Clancy ClementsAvailable online: 03 September 2024More LessAbstractBrazilian Portuguese has two rhotic phonemes: the alveolar flap /ɾ/ and another variable phoneme. This phoneme has been cited as velar, uvular, and glottal fricatives, as well as alveolar trills and approximants. Variability of surface forms occurs both within and across varieties. This phoneme occurs in simple onsets, codas, and intervocalically. Deletion of the phoneme is common, particularly in word-final position. The goal of this project is to explore the variation in rhotic production in Salvador, particularly with regards to substrate influence. Ten participants read predetermined stimuli of isolated tokens and sentences, with a total of 1409 instances of the phoneme. The findings indicate that the range of possible surface forms is more variable than previously cited, including palatal and uvular fricatives among others. We suggest that the degree of variability of rhotic production in Salvador may be due to past contact between Africans and Portuguese in the city.
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Speaking with attitude : Language attitudes in comic literature in Macanese Creole
Author(s): João Pedro OliveiraAvailable online: 03 September 2024More LessAbstractApplying 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.
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Lingua francas as evidence of standard language ideology in historical perspective
Author(s): Josh BrownAvailable online: 05 July 2024More LessAbstractThe paper considers historical lingua francas and standard language ideology from the framework of ‘language history from below’. Although some work has been devoted to mixed forms of language in studies of standardisation, little attention has been paid to lingua francas. This paper focusses on a historical dictionary – the Dictionnaire de la langue franque of 1830 – to argue that historical data can be considered as evidence ‘from below’ for the broader ideologies of standardisation which were circulating in early modern Europe. I argue that the fictive dialogues contained in the Dictionnaire are a projection that reflect broader theories about language standardisation at the time. In this sense, the paper argues for further development of the role of lingua francas in models of standardisation more generally.
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Selectional factors in pronominal system formation : Evidence from Fiji’s two pidgins
Author(s): Brian HaydenAvailable online: 28 June 2024More LessAbstractCreolists 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.
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Noun phrases in Kwéyòl Donmnik
Author(s): Joy P. G. PeltierAvailable online: 22 February 2024More LessAbstractThough Creole nominal systems have been intensely researched, in-context, corpus-based examinations are uncommon, and there are Creole languages whose noun phrases remain understudied. I use a corpus of conversational data and a pattern-building task designed to elicit demonstrative and definite noun phrases, exophoric reference, and co-speech pointing gestures to explore the noun phrase in Kwéyòl Donmnik, an endangered, understudied French lexifier Creole. I focus on noun phrases that are bare, marked by the post-nominal determiners definite la ‘the’ or demonstrative sa-la ‘this/that’, or accompanied by the pre-nominal indefinite determiner yon ‘a(n)’. Results pinpoint the readings conveyed by each noun phrase type, identify the word categories of their nouns, and address similarities in usage between definite la and demonstrative sa-la.
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Reported language choice and usage of teenage Mauritians : A sociolinguistic perspective
Author(s): Anu Bissoonauth and Gaetano RandoAvailable online: 12 February 2024More LessAbstractThis 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.
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Remarks on the syntax of bare nouns in Papiamentu
Author(s): Luis López, Rodi Laanen, Charlotte Pouw and M. Carmen Parafita CoutoAvailable online: 19 January 2024More LessAbstractThis article presents an argument that bare (singular) nouns in Papiamentu include additional silent functional structure, as proposed in Kester and Schmitt (2007) . The argument is based on Dutch-Papiamentu code-switched noun phrases and exploits the crucial datum that a Dutch bare noun is grammatical when inserted in a Papiamentu sentence, although bare nouns are ungrammatical in a Dutch unilingual sentence. We propose that this datum can be accounted for if the Dutch bare noun is the complement of a silent Papiamentu category, D or Num. The locus of cross-linguistic variation that yields the (un)acceptability of bare nouns is a property in D or Num.
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Pacific transformations of the ‘Country of Babel’ : The legacy of a colonial language myth in nationalist discourses on Hawai‘i Creole and Tok Pisin
Author(s): Christoph NeuenschwanderAvailable online: 18 January 2024More LessAbstractThe 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.
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‘It runs in the family’ : Reconstructing the kinship terminology of Tugu Creole Portuguese
Author(s): Raan-Hann Tan and Silvio Moreira De SousaAvailable online: 11 January 2024More LessAbstractThe reconstruction of the kinship terminology of the now-extinct Tugu Creole Portuguese (TCP) results from the triangulation between TCP’s available kinship terminology, the complete mapping for Malacca Creole Portuguese (MCP), and the terminology used currently by the Tugu community, which experienced a language shift towards Indonesian Malay and Betawi Malay. By examining the Tugu Village community in Jakarta, Indonesia, this paper adds more evidence for the existence of parallel kinship structures within one community and establishes linguistic and anthropological evidence for markers of inclusion and distinction among Jakarta’s ethnic groups. Thus, the Malay variety spoken in Tugu (TuM) possesses sociohistorical and linguistic elements that distinguish the community from other local communities, together with elements that bind the community to other Asian-Portuguese creole communities.
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Intonation in Palenquero
Author(s): José Ignacio Hualde and Armin Schwegler
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Off Target?
Author(s): Philip Baker
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The Origins of Fanagalo
Author(s): Rajend Mesthrie
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Relexification
Author(s): Derek Bickerton
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