Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Online First

This article discusses past and current names for contact languages, and their origins. Pidgins and creoles are new languages, and naming them may indicate a perceived continuation from preexisting languages or a break away from the antecedent languages, the lexifiers. Names for individual languages of pidgins and creoles are diverse. The languages may bear the name of the lexifier (e.g. French), a label referring to what today is a type of language (e.g. creole), they may be named after the function of the language (e.g. trade), a colonial vision of the language (e.g. “broken”), a frequent expression (e.g. “Fanakalo” ‘say it like this’), a population, a location, etc. Generic names for pidgins and creoles, as used in academic circles, often started off as names for individual languages. Terms spread, both from languages they were initially applied to, to other languages, and they may spread from being used in one language to another language.

Drawing from linguistic landscape data collected in the public space of multilingual Mauritius, this paper discusses the manifestation of linguistic hybridization in its written form. Theoretically, we draw mainly on the concept of interlect coined by Prudent (1981) to describe the linguistic practices in creole speaking islands. We show the embeddedness of French and Creole, two of the most spoken languages in the country, and English, the official language, in these signs and argue that boundaries between these languages are difficult to define and fuzzy. The case is particularly frequent that Creole structures are ‘masked’ by a French orthography. Although this fuzziness can be observed at all the levels of the language structure, we here focus mainly on the orthographical and the morphological levels.

The Cape Verde Islands — Upper Guinea contact zone became the first location where Pt. crioulo and its loan translations Sp. criollo, Fr. créole and En. creole were used to designate pidgin or creole varieties. Approaching this issue from the perspective of language ideologies, we differentiate between the perspective of local communities and the perception of European outsiders, and hence between the use of autoglossonyms, i.e., names given by speakers, and the use of alloglossonyms, i.e., names given by outsiders. The paper illustrates how labels for local languages were (mis-)used within the outsiders’ othering strategy, becoming subject to ideological stances.

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 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.

A 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.

The 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.

Brazilian 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.