Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Online First

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.

We investigated the development of word decoding (Grades 4–6; 165 children) in Papiamento (L1) and Dutch (L2) in the postcolonial context of the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. The results show a steady development over the upper Grades for both L1 Papiamento and L2 Dutch word decoding in that children became more efficient in word decoding over the years. However, the children were generally better decoders in L2 Dutch than in L1 Papiamento. Moreover, the initial language of decoding instruction did not matter for the development of word decoding. The groups were equally efficient in L1 and L2 word decoding in Grades 4–6. Furthermore, rapid naming and phonological awareness predicted L1 word decoding development, whereas rapid naming, phonological awareness, and working memory predicted L2 word decoding development. Finally, evidence was found for linguistic interdependencies for word decoding development from L1 to L2 and vice versa.

In this paper, we add to the body of existing literature on Arabic-based pidgins. We focus on the verbal system because the structure of this phrasal category and how it is used in discourse remain inconclusive. For instance, while some claim these speakers prefer the imperfective form which is marked for male third person singular (e.g. y-iji ‘3sg.m-come.ipf’), others claim it is the imperative that is most preferred (e.g. rūh ‘2.sg.m-go.imp’). Equally, while some argue the choice between either verb forms is pragmatically motivated, others claim it is phonologically motivated. To add to this mix, a third group claims there is a systematic division of labor in that non-state verbs usually follow the prefixed type while the state verbs follow the unprefixed type.

We evaluate these proposals. Analysis of ‘frog story’ narratives by 10 GPA speakers in the United Arab Emirates reveal the prefixed form to be the most preferred and this preference is influenced by the contriving of phonological, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Frequency as well as item-based analogy as understood within usage-based theories of learning provide a viable framework in which the apparent inconsistencies between the competing proposals are resolved.

The present multidimensional study investigates the acquisition of pronominal subject-verb dependencies in Standard Haitian Creole (HC). A corpus analysis confirms that HC subject pronouns are phonological clitics in the target grammar and that their reduction is optional and unpredictable. The comprehension and production of dependencies involving these subject pronouns in 20 preschoolers acquiring HC as their first language were investigated. While the production of third person singular and plural subject pronouns l(i) and y(o) reveals early mastery of adult constraints on their phonological reductions, the systematic assignments of l(i) to singular subjects vs. y(o) to plural subjects of the verb in the syntactic dependency emerge later, in both production and comprehension. The few syntactic contexts in which HC-learning children show evidence of comprehension involve full forms, rather than phonological reductions. Possible factors that explain these findings include the relative unpredictability of their forms and the linguistic status of HC pronouns.