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- Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2018
Language Ecology - Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2018
Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2018
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Language of empire, language of power
Author(s): Kees Versteeghpp.: 1–17 (17)More LessAbstractHow do people in a position of power address those under their control? Do they impose their own language, possibly in a reduced version? Do they adopt a simple form of the language of the people they control? Do they employ a lingua franca that is commonly used in the region? Recent research usually focuses on the linguistic strategies the new speakers apply to the input. Much less information is available about the input itself. The contributions to the present issue deal with the linguistic strategies and policies used by those in power to facilitate communication with those under their control, as well as the modifications they apply to their speech. The contributions deal with the input in several work- or trade-related varieties, such as Français tirailleur, Garden Herero, Pidgin Madame, Butler English, Lingua da preto, Dienstmaleisch, Kyakhta Pidgin, and the role they played in colonial societies.
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Mapping the spread of the English language in India
Author(s): Cristina Murupp.: 18–40 (23)More LessAbstractThis article aims to offer, within an intra- and interdisciplinary approach, a further analysis of the formal and informal contexts in which the English language was used in India during the British colonisation, highlighting the favourable conditions these contexts created for the formation of pidginised varieties of English, such as Butler Pidgin English or Boxwāllā(h) Pidgin English (Kachru 1994). Substantial elements of a wider picture of social, cultural, political and commercial contact have been taken into account along with the analysis of old written sources. Indeed, both official records of the East Indian Company (e.g. dispatches about political strategies and language policy) and merchants’ correspondence have been studied in order to understand how we can say something about oral communication through written sources (Rambø 2013).
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How to dictate and survive life in the tropics
Author(s): Jan van der Puttenpp.: 41–59 (19)More LessAbstractFrom the early years of contact in the closing years of the 16th century until the end of the colonial era in the early 1940s, European agents have tried to master and regulate the languages of the scattered islands that bridge Asia with Australia. The contact language they encountered was Malay, which had incorporated a relatively high percentage of foreign material. These foreign agents distinguished between high and low, colloquial and bookish, correct and incorrect variants which they needed to define and structure. This paper will briefly sketch the history of Malay language studies before turning to a more detailed discussion of a number of Malay language guides published in the 19th century. I will focus on the topics these guides deal with and what they tell us about the approach the Dutch migrants were expected to take towards the native population.
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Français tirailleur
Author(s): Mikael Parkvallpp.: 60–76 (17)More LessAbstractFrançais-Tirailleur is the conventional name for the French-lexicon pidgin used in France’s African army during the 19th and 20th centuries. Tirailleur literally translates as ‘rifleman’ or ‘sharpshooter’, but in time, and in practice, it came to refer specifically to indigenous colonial soldiers. The literature on the variety is anything but vast, but some publications are partly or entirely devoted it, almost invariably drawing on one and the same source (an anonymously authored phrasebook intended for use by French officers commanding African soldiers; Anon. 1916). Another thing most of them have in common is that they see the language as an instrument of oppression, and as we shall see, quite a few claim that the pidgin was even invented for this specific purpose.
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Língua de Preto, the language of the African slave community in Portugal (16th–19th centuries)
Author(s): Alain Kihmpp.: 77–90 (14)More LessAbstractLíngua de Preto ‘language of the Blacks’ (LdP) is the conventional name for the basic variety of Portuguese spoken by the West African slaves deported to Portugal from the end of the 15th century onwards, who formed an important and visible minority within the Portuguese population until the end of the 19th century. The restructured Portuguese they used with the white Portuguese and among themselves is partially known to us through theatre and folk literature. Although its heyday was the 16th century, it apparently continued in use until the 18th century. The present article tries to account for its emergence and continuance and to assess its possible contribution to the formation of West African Portuguese Creoles. What LdP implies for the Portuguese attitude toward language issues is also examined.
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Settler colonialism speaks
Author(s): Ana Deumertpp.: 91–111 (21)More LessAbstractIn this article I explore a particular set of contact varieties that emerged in Namibia, a former German colony. Historical evidence comes from the genre of autobiographic narratives that were written by German settler women. These texts provide – ideologically filtered – descriptions of domestic life in the colony and contain observations about everyday communication practices. In interpreting the data I draw on the idea of ‘jargon’ as developed within creolistics as well as on Chabani Manganyi’s (1970) comments on the ‘master-servant communication complex’, and Beatriz Lorente’s (2017) work on ‘scripts of servitude’. I suggest that to interpret the historical record is a complex hermeneutic endeavour: on the one hand, the examples given are likely to tell us ‘something’ about communication in the colony; on the other hand, the very description of communicative interactions is rooted in what I call a ‘script of supremacy’, which is quite unlike the ‘atonement politics’ (McIntosh 2014) of postcolonial language learning.
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The Russian-Chinese Pidgin
Author(s): Kapitolina Fedorovapp.: 112–127 (16)More LessAbstractFor a long period in history, the border between Russian Empire and China was a place of constant and intensive cultural and language contacts, which resulted in the emergence of the Russian-Chinese Pidgin. In the 19th century it was used by no less than one million people around the border with China, in an area of more than 3,000 kilometers long. The grammatical analysis of Russian-Chinese Pidgin reveals several features (e.g. using the imperative as a basic verb form), which can be interpreted not only linguistically but sociologically as well, because they are intertwined with the social positions of the contact groups and their attitudes towards each other. Interestingly, features found in the pidgin’s grammar have certain parallels in foreigner-directed talk used nowadays by Russian speakers when communicating with Chinese speakers in the border area, which may indicate there are rather stable linguistic stereotypes associated with these contact situations.
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Pidgin as a counterlanguage
Author(s): Fida Bizripp.: 128–146 (19)More LessAbstractA close-up on the linguistic interactive scene between Arab employers and Asian migrants communicating today in Asian Migrant Pidgin Arabic shows that migrant talk and native Arabs’ foreigner talk are different but interdependent. Here, it appears that the interactants are constantly navigating across one of two continua which sometimes meet and overlap. Arabic Foreigner Talk is further analysed from the perspective of the linguistic strategies deployed by Arabs to exert power over the migrants: self-facilitating, excluding, and mocking strategies. However, from a tool of communication and/or exclusion, the pidgin is also becoming one of transgression used by both Arabs and the migrants to oppose their respective hegemonic cultures – that of the masters for the migrants, that of religion for the Arabs.
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