Why creole is a language

Some of these complexities may be due to West African structural contributions see below , others to independent developments or even influence from Dutch. It is important to note that several of the distinctions listed in Table 4 e.

Rather, they may result from the combination of separate partly grammatical words. In many typological surveys, such as the ones reported on WALS, morphosyntactic encoding is operationalized as morphological encoding, leaving aside juxtaposition on the syntactic level.

Likewise, regularities in verbal marking are studied at the level of paradigms, rather than at the level of collocations and syntactic possibilities.

This bias has the effect that language with limited or no inflections are, by definition, defined as making fewer distinctions. All or most researchers will agree that certain distinctions that exist in the lexifiers have been lost in the corresponding creole languages; where researchers disagree is whether other distinctions, less familiar and not directly morphologically encoded, exist in the creole languages but not in the lexifiers.

Very few creole languages have been described with the same degree of detail as other languages, and when they are, they often show all kinds of distinctions not made in their lexifiers. However, not all these distinctions are marked morphologically. Indeed, the words in most creoles tend to be short, and there is less affixation than in the European lexifiers. It needs to be seen to which extent this property has deceived people into thinking these languages are simple.

Restructuring sometimes takes the form of morpho-syntactic simplification, and sometimes of other change. This leads to the difficult issue of mixture, and of the contribution of the non-European languages to the creoles. As stated, this contribution was not lexical. In any case, Table 5 gives an overview of some of the relevant West African features involved.

Not always the same West African languages are mentioned as possible contributors, but the Gbe languages figure prominently, as do Akan, Ijo, and Kikongo. Particularly present among the English, Dutch, and Ibero-Romance-lexifier creoles, absent with the French creoles.

Open syllables are cross-linguistically highly frequent. Highly probable, but among the creoles, only a few have reduplication to form resultative adjectives.

In the West African languages, the reduplication patterns are more complex than in the creoles. This feature is shared between the Caribbean creoles and many contributing West African languages, but it is not very specific. Fronting and reduplicating the verb is a feature shared by the Caribbean creoles and related West African languages. Very likely. This features is found productively in a range of Caribbean creoles, though not in all.

Quite possible, and fairly wide distribution. They are found in some non-standard varieties of the European lexifier languages as well, however. Double object fixed order indirect object—direct object constructions are found in English and Dutch, but not French and Spanish.

They are very general, however, among the creole languages and often found in West Africa. The tma systems of some Caribbean creoles resemble their West African counterparts, but many developments seem due to autonomous grammaticalization patterns. The amount of West African influence in creoles is, as with many other topics, controversial, but it is fair to say that West African languages have contributed considerably to some creoles probably not more than a handful , while other Caribbean languages show at least a few structural features from African sources.

The amount of West African influence may well be linked to the degree to which European lexifier languages had a significant presence in the colonies. The reasoning here is that it takes time for languages to acquire all kinds of irregularities and exceptions, and that all non-creole languages carry a lot of debris with them—words with old inflections that have fallen out of use, irregular verbal paradigms, etc.

In some sense, creole genesis would lead to the wiping out of all these anomalies, and the creoles would become lean and clean. This idea has some intuitive appeal, but several caveats are in order.

We do not know how long it takes for a language to acquire irregularities, and since many Caribbean creoles emerged around or so, three hundred years is enough time for specific idioms and exceptional meanings to spread. Again, since creoles have limited if any inflectional morphology, this is not where we should be looking, but rather at all kinds of compounds and fixed phrases. Another criterion that may play a role in distinguishing creoles from other languages is displacement.

Creole languages typically emerge far away from the regions where their lexifiers are spoken as native languages, and where the substrates are spoken as native languages: double displacement. Creoles can definitely be viewed as export languages in this respect. If we look at the list of lexifiers mentioned above, they include the major European colonial languages English, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and French as well as two language clusters that had been involved in considerable expansion, but only single displacement: Arabic and Malay.

In the case of West African pidgins and creoles, there was only single displacement as well; the colonial lexifier languages were brought into contact with much more stable local languages. The notion of displacement leads us to wonder about other languages that have undergone considerable expansion in different continents, expansions that have not come under the scrutiny of scholars working in creole studies.

In South America, we find that the Arawakan languages have spread enormously, as have the Quechuan languages and some branches of the Tupian languages. Are any of the resulting languages comparable to creoles? This question acquires new urgency as there is a new field emerging at the cross-section of sociolinguistics and language typology. Pioneered by Kusters , further developed by McWhorter , and most prominently elaborated by Trudgill , this field explores the relation between the sociolinguistic circumstances in which a language is or was spoken and its typological properties.

Within each language group he identified one of the most traditional members of the group, a language that had undergone intermediate amounts of restructuring and simplification, and a language that had undergone considerable restructuring. He then tried to identify general properties of restructuring, which hold across the different language groups, and embedded analysis of these properties in an Optimality Theoretical framework.

The works of Trudgill , McWhorter , and Kusters are relevant here because they provide another window on creole genesis in two ways. Thus, a model of this type can help us identify creole languages in areas not covered by the traditional canon of creoles. Second, the type of thinking in the work of Kusters , McWhorter , and Trudgill can help us place creole studies in the wider framework of language contact studies.

This approach can help identify creole languages and also languages that are like creoles in some respects but not in others. A crucial question here concerns the degree to which the structural features of the canonical creoles, the ones listed in Table 1 , are actually the accidental result of the meeting of European structural patterns with those of the languages of West Africa, the southeastern parts of Asia, and the Pacific, or indeed a universally conditioned, inherent result of processes of creole genesis.

How accidental is the canon of creoles from a typological perspective? This question will require detailed research in all major language families, and will require combined research between language family experts and creole researchers. This is made all the more complicated because the so-called language isolates, languages for which no clear genealogical affiliation can be established, are by necessity excluded from the enquiry, since we cannot prove or disprove their status as creoles.

At the same time, perhaps circumstances of their genesis may have contributed to the fact that they are now difficult to classify genealogically. Creole studies thus becomes part of a much wider research endeavour, in which properties of different languages are related to their social ecology globally. They are a special, and perhaps very striking, case of the general fact that to some extent at least the properties of languages are linked to their history and the setting in which they are spoken.

In such an endeavor, it may be possible as a first step, to create several border areas for languages that are like creoles but differ crucially in some specific respect, as in the set of interlocking circles in Figure 1. Figure 1. Intersecting circles for the three properties: displacement, mixture, and restructuring. The language types described in Figure 1 are certainly not homogeneous blocks, and the boundaries between these types may be fluid rather than rigid.

Table 6 provides further comments on these types, with some potential examples. World Englishes and Latin American Spanish, where there are changes but no discernible sub- or adstratal influence.

Varieties of such expansion languages, like Indian English and Andean Spanish, where we see traces of local sub- or adstratal languages Hindi and Quechua, respectively. Perhaps the transition from Old to Middle English could be a case where we find extensive restructuring but little clear substratal or adstratal influence.

These criteria can be also used to help understand the differences between creoles. Given the discussion so far, it is also possible to consider again the different kinds of creoles that were distinguished by Bickerton :. Maroon creoles, spoken by the descendants of Africans who ran away from captivity on the plantations in different parts of the Caribbean.

Fort creoles, spoken by the descendants of people who lived near trading posts or forts, often in West Africa. An example would be Turkish in northwestern Europe. Since there is continuous cyclic migration between communities in Europe and regions in Turkey, Turkish as a heritage language remains rather stable in Europe.

In the same way, the initial displacement of the European colonial languages to the Caribbean was often followed by continuous cyclic migration, leading to the stability of the displaced heritage varieties and in the creoles to which they were linked as lexifiers. To summarize, the proposal is to stop looking at creoles as a separate class but take them as special cases of the general fact that the way languages emerge and are used helps determine their properties.

Two of the dimensions mentioned in Figure 1 are also mentioned in McWhorter ; see also McWhorter, , where he presents a table with nine cells regarding the degree of restructuring or simplification, and the degree of mixture.

Creole studies have long been characterized by a succession of oppositions between radically different positions, often the result of particular strong claims brought in. Consider first the debates around the assumed similarities among creole languages. One of the reasons creoles have been especially interesting for linguists of different theoretical persuasions is that they appear to have many features in common.

Over the years, these similarities have been explained in various ways. In the s Taylor, ; Thompson, , the idea was brought forward that creoles had not emerged separately, but were relexified versions of an Ur Portuguese-lexifier Pidgin, probably spoken along the coast of West Africa at the beginning of the slave trade.

Relexified in the sense that the Portuguese lexicon had been replaced by English, French, or other lexicons, obscuring their common origin. There can be little doubt that early Atlantic pidgins were important in feeding into the Caribbean creoles that emerged here and there, but monogenesis in its strong form is not accepted any more.

One of the reasons was an attractive universalist account for similarities that was proposed by Bickerton He claimed that innate cognitive abilities of children growing up in pidgin-speaking environments played a crucial role. The children had to create a full creole language out of the rudimentary input they got from their pidgin-speaking parents, and to do this they used resources from their bioprogram.

Since the latter is innate, it led to parallel structures in different creoles. Shared substrate. Another explanation came around the same time from Alleyne Although he limited himself to English-lexifier creoles, the implications were broader: shared West African substrate features could be responsible for similarities between creoles in the Atlantic. Whatever the merits of this analysis, it is clear that appealing to West African substrate as a source for similarities is only successful insofar as the substrate features are actually present, and this is only partly the case.

However, as such, appealing to shared substrate is not an implausible idea. Needless to say, the story for the Pacific has to be a very different one, but there also may be commonalities between creoles due to shared substrate. All approaches mentioned have the underlying assumption in common that the creoles share fundamental structural similarities that cannot be explained in terms of the properties of their lexifiers.

It should also be mentioned that a number of their basic typological properties—generally subject-verb-object [SVO] order and prepositions, nominative-accusative alignment—are shared with their lexifiers. However, it only recently became possible to study this systematically. McWhorter has proposed to define creoles not in sociohistorical terms, as in the work of Mufwene , but structurally, in terms of a few key typological features.

These studies have the merit of pointing to the fact that in many creoles the number of morphosyntactic distinctions has been reduced with respect to their lexifiers.

This is a trend that can be observed not just in the canonical creoles, but also in the expansion varieties discussed by Kusters , McWhorter , and Trudgill However, their approach suffers from two potential bias problems, already mentioned in the essay.

First, the list of pidgins and creoles was established in large part on the basis of the very criteria later used to set them apart as a typological class: structural differences between them and their lexifiers, differences seen in terms of making less morphosyntactic distinctions. Second, the lists of features for which creoles have been coded may also be biased, in stressing the presence or absence of morphosyntactic distinctions. It remains to be seen whether the results of McWhorter , and Bakker et al.

The problem of the language sample bias is unsolvable at present, requiring a much more concerted global search for potential creoles in different language families all over the world, but the feature bias issue can be resolved. Where agreement can be found across many accounts in the notion that whatever is involved in non-demic expansion will involve structural simplification of some sort with respect to an ancestor language. However, the typological properties of that ancestor language may determine what kind of simplification is found.

This may be complete erosion of verb endings, as in most canonical creoles, or rather restructuring of the morphological system towards greater regularity and transparency, without actual loss. Altogether, the major trend that can be seen in pidgin and creole studies is to bring these languages back into the larger context of contact linguistics and linguistic typology. Rather than studying these languages in isolation, there is an increasing awareness of their place within contact languages in a broader sense.

Another trend in creole studies concerns more philological approaches. New work at the intersection of philology and creole studies is carried out, aimed at creating a solid basis for work on older documents of creoles.

How should we read these documents, and to which audience were they addressed? Essentially philological methods are also applied to study creole languages used in the new media, both in migration settings and in their traditional habitat. There are many interesting books comparing creoles, but Velupillai definitively replaces older introductions, such as Arends, Muysken, and Smith , which will be used now mainly for references, as is also the case for Holm a , b.

Recently, the Journal of Language Contact founded has also started publishing papers of interest to creolists. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Linguistics. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.

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There are plenty of books out there on creoles if you want to further your knowledge. Or perhaps you could dive straight in and learn to speak a creole language yourself? Post your Comment. Tomedes Translation Services is committed to broadening the horizons of individuals and businesses in the United States and internationally, through the effective use of professional translation services. Translation Services.

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All Rights Reserved. Sign In. Creole Languages. What Is a Creole Language? Formation of Creole Languages Creole languages are hugely diverse and there is no single theory that can explain every creole origin. Transformation into a Stable Language As they evolve into stable languages, creoles take on their own grammatical structures, as well as vocabulary.

Other Theories on the Development of Creole Languages There are three main camps when it comes to creole origin and development theories. English-based Creoles When British sailors established colonies and trading outpost in the Americas and Africa, they took their language with them. Some of the most widely spoken include: Nigerian Pidgin Nigerian Pidgin, despite the name, is in fact a creole language.

Jamaica Creole Over three million people speak Jamaican Creole. Tok Pisin Evolved from English and the local languages of Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin has up to a million native speakers now, with around four million second language speakers. Hawaiian Creole English Hawaiian Creole English has a total of a million speakers, including , first language speakers and , people who speak it as a second tongue.

Sranan Tongo Spoken in Suriname, where it is used as a lingua franca, Sranan Tongo has around , total speakers. Belizean Kriol Belizean Kriol has around , native speakers and approximately , second language speakers. French-based Creoles I touched on the topic of French-based creoles ever so briefly recently, when writing about French-speaking countries you can click the link below to jump to that article.

Read more: French Speaking Countries and Varieties of the French Language Haitian Creole Haitian Creole is the most widely spoken of any creole language, with between 10 and 12 million speakers.

Antillean Creole Antilliean Creole has around 1. Seychellois Creole One of the three official languages of the Seychelles, Seychellois Creole has around 73, native speakers. Physical and social infrastructures. World regions. Sub-Sahara Africa.

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