Pidgins and Creoles

 

1. Introduction

ÝÝÝÝÝ Most studies of pidgins and creoles (PC) have focused on their origins, despite an undeniable increase during the 1990s in the number of works on structural features. Recently, some creolists have also addressed the question of whether, as a group, creoles can be singled out as a structural type of languages. Space limitations make it impossible to discuss structural features in this essay, aside from the fact that there are no features that are peculiar to PCS, as explained below.

2. What are pidgins and creoles?

ÝÝÝÝÝ Strictly speaking, PCS are new language varieties which developed out of contacts between colonial nonstandard varieties of a European language and several non-European languages around the Atlantic and in the Indian and Pacific Oceans during the 17th-19th centuries. Pidgins typically emerged in trade colonies which developed around trade forts or along trade routes, such as on the coast of West Africa. They are reduced in structures and specialized in functions (typically trade), and initially they served as non-native lingua francas to users who preserved their native vernaculars for their day-to-day interactions.. Some pidgins have expanded into regular vernaculars, especially in urban settings, and are called expanded pidgins. Examples include Bislama and Tok Pisin (in Melanesia) and Nigerian and Cameroon Pidgin Englishes. Structurally, they are as complex as creoles (FÈral 1989, Jourdan 1991). The latter vernaculars developed in settlement colonies whoseÝ primary industry consisted of sugar cane plantations or rice fields, which employed massive non-European slave labor. Examples include Cape Verdian Criolou (lexified by Portuguese) and Papiamentu in the Netherlands Antilles (apparently ‚Portuguese-based but influenced by Spanish); Haitian, Mauritian, and Seychellois (lexified by French); Jamai‚can, Guyanese, and Hawaiian Creole, as well as Gullah in the United States (all lexified by English); and Saramaccan and Sranan in Surinam (lexified by English, with the former heavily influenced by Portuguese and the latter by Dutch). Note that although Melanesian pidgins are associated with sugar cane plantations, they apparently originated in trade settings and were adopted on the plantations (Keesing 1988).

ÝÝÝÝÝ The terms creole and pidgin have also been extended to some other vari‚eties that devel‚oped during the same period out of contacts among primarily non-European languages. Examples include Delaware Pidgin, Chinook Jargon, and Mobilian in North America; Sango, (Kikongo-)Kituba, and Lingala in Central Africa, Kinubi in Southern Sudan and in Uganda; and Hiri Motu in Papua New Guinea (Holm 1989, Smith 1995). In the original, lay peopleís naming practice, the term jargon was an alternate to pidgin. However, Hall (1966) and M¸hlh”usler (1997) argue that pidgins are more stable and jargons are an earlier stage in the ìlife-cycleî that putatively progresses from Jargon, to Pidgin, to Creole, to Post-Creole by progressive structural expansion, stabilization, and closer approximations of the lexifieróthe language which contributed the largest part of a creoleís lexicon.

ÝÝÝÝÝ However, Chaudenson (1992) and Mufwene (1997) argue that creoles developed by basilectalizing away from the lexifier, i.e. acquiring a basilect, which is the variety the most different from the acrolect, the educated variety of the lexifier. Mufwene (2001) emphasizes that creoles and pidgins developed in separate places, in which Europeans and non-Europeans interacted differentlyósporadically in trade colonies but regularly in the initial stages of settlement colonies. Moreover, the term pidgin was coined in 1907 (Baker & M¸hlh”usler 1990), over 200 years after the term creole was used in reference to a language variety. Pidgin English, apparently a distortion of business English, developed in Canton, a geographical area where no large colonial plantation industry developed and no creoles have been identi‚fied.

ÝÝÝÝÝ The term creole was originally coined in Iberian colonies, apparently in the 16th century, in reference to non-indigenous people born in the American colonies. (See Mufwene 1997 for references.) It was adopted in metropolitan Spanish, then in French, and later in English by the early 17th century. By the second half of the same century, it was generalized to descendants of Africans or Europeans born in Romance colonies. Usage varied from one colony to another. The term was also used as an adjec‚tive to characterize plants, animals, and customs typical of the same colonies (Valkhoff 1966).

ÝÝÝÝÝ Creole may not have applied widely to language varieties until the late 18th century, though Arveiller (1963) cites La Courbeís Premier voyage (1688:192), in which it is used for ëcor‚rupted Portuguese spoken in Senegalí. Such usage may have been ini‚tiated by metro‚pol‚itan Europeans to disfranchise par‚ticular colonial varieties of their lan‚guages. It is not clear how the term became associated only with vernaculars spoken primarily by descendants of non-Europeans. Nonetheless, several speakers of creoles (or pidgins) actually believe they speak dia‚lects ‚of their lexifiers (M¸hlh”usler 1985, Mufwene 1988).

ÝÝÝÝÝ Among the earliest claims that creoles developed from pidgins is the following statement in Bloomfield (1933:474): ìwhen the jargon [i.e., pidgin] has become the only language of the subject group, it is a creolized language.î Hall (1962, 1966) reinterpreted this, asso‚ci‚ating the vernacular function of creoles with nativization. Since then, creoles have been defined inaccurately as ìnativized pidgins,î i.e., pidgins that have acquired native speakers and have therefor expanded both their structures and functions and have stabilized. Hall then also introduced the pidgin-creole ìlife-cycleî to which DeCamp (1971) added a ìpost-creoleî stage (see below).

ÝÝÝÝÝ Among the creolists who dispute the above connection is Alleyne (1971). He argues that fossilized inflectional morphology in Haitian Creole (HC) and the like is evidence that Europeans did not communicate with the Africans in foreigner or baby talk (see below), which would have fostered pidgins on the plantations. Chaudenson (1979, 1992) argues that plantation communities were preceded by homesteads on which mesolectal approxi‚mations of European lexifiers, rather than pidgins, were spoken by earlier slaves. Like some economic historians, Berlin (1998) observes that in North American colonies creole Blacks spoke the lexifier fluently. In ads on runaway slaves in British North American colonies, bad English is typically associated with slaves imported as adults from Africa. Diachronic evidence of creoles suggests that the basilects developed during the peak growth of plan‚tations (in the 18th century for most colonies!), when infant mortality was high, life expectancy was short, the plantation populations increased primarily by massive impor‚tation of slave labor, and the pro‚por‚tion of fluent speakers of the earlier colonial varieties kept decreasing (Baker & Corne 1986, Chaudenson 1992, Mufwene 2001).

ÝÝÝÝÝ According to the life-cycle model, as a creole continues to co-exist with its lexifier, the latter exerted pressure on it to shed some of its ìcreole features.î This developmental hypoth‚esis may be traced back to Schuchardtís (1914) explanation of why African-American Eng‚lish (AAE) is structurally closer to North American Eng‚lish than Saramaccan is to its lexifier: coexistence with it in North America and absence of such continued contact in Suriname. Jespersen (1921) and Bloomfield (1933) anticipated DeCamp (1971), Bickerton (1973), and Rickford (1987) in invoking ìdecreolizationî (ëloss of ìcreoleî featuresí) to account for speech continua in creole com‚munities.

ÝÝÝÝÝ It is in the above context that DeCamp (1971) coined the term post-creole continuum, which must be inter‚preted charitably. If a variety is creole because of the particular sociohistorical ecology of its development (see below), rather than because of its structural peculiarities, it cannot stop being a creole even after some of the fea‚tures have changed. Besides, basilectal and mesolectal features con‚tinue to co-exist in these communities, suggesting that Creole has not died yet. ‚Lalla & DíCosta (1990) present copious data against decreol‚iza‚tion in Carib‚bean English creoles, just as Mufwene (1994) adduces linguistic and non-linguistic arguments against the same process in ‚Gullah. On the other hand, Rickford and Handler (1994) show that in the late-18th-century, Barbados had a basilect, which now seems to have vanished. How the basilect was lost here but not elsewhere in the Caribbean calls for an explanation.

ÝÝÝÝÝ Closely related to the above issue is the common assumption that creoles are separate languages from their lexifiers and ex-colonial varieties thereof spoken by descendants of Europeans. Thus, the nonstandard French varieties spoken in Quebec and Loui‚siana, as well as onÝ the Caribbean islands of St. Barths and St. Thomas, are considered dialects of French rather than creoles. Likewise New World nonstandard varieties of Spanish and Portuguese are not con‚si‚dered creoles, despite structural similarities which they display with creoles of the same lexifiers. Has the fact that similar varieties are spoken by descendants of both Europeans and Africans in territories where the latter are not majorities influenced the naming practice? Ignoring Hjelmslev (1938) and Posner (1985), creolists have adopted uncritically this socially-based naming ‚tra‚di‚‚tion in former European settlement colonies, identifying as creoles those varieties of Euro‚pean languages which have been appro‚priated as vernac‚u‚lars by non-European majorities. There is yet no yardstick for measuring structural divergence from the lexifier, nor was the latter the same in every contact setting. Contact was indeed a factor in all colonial settings.

ÝÝÝÝÝ It has also been claimed that creoles have more or less the same structural design (Bickerton 1981, 1984; Markey 1982). This position is as disputable as the counterclaim that they are more similar in the socio‚historical ecologies of their developments (Mufwene 1986), or even the more recent claim that there are creole prototypes from which others deviate in various ways (Thomason 1997, McWhorter 1998). The very fact of resorting to a handful of prototypes for the general creole structural category suggests that the vast majority of them do not share the putative set of defining features, hence that the features cannot be used to single them out as a unique type of language. On the other hand, variation in the structural features of creoles (lexified by the same language) is correlated with variation in the linguistic and sociohistori‚cal ecologies of their developments (Mufwene 1997, 2001). The notion of ëecologyí includes, among other things, the nature of the lexifier, structural features of the substrate languages, changes in the ethnolinguistic makeups of the populations that came in contact, the kinds of interactions between speakers of the lexifier and those of other languages, and rates and modes of population growth.

ÝÝÝÝÝ To date the best known creoles have been lexified by English and French. Those of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean are, along with Hawaiian Creole, those that have informed most theorizing on the development of creoles. While the terms creole and creolization have been ap‚plied often uncritically to various contact-induced lan‚guage vari‚eties, several dis‚tinc‚tions, which are not clearly articulated have also been proposed, for instance, between pidgin, creole, koinÈ, semi-creole, intertwined varieties, for‚eign workersís vari‚eties of European languages (e.g., Gastarbeiter Deutsch), and indigen‚ized varieties of Euro‚pean languages (e.g., Nigerian and Sin‚ga‚porean Englishes). The denotations and impor‚tance of these terms deserve re-examining (Arends et al. 1995, Mu‚fwene 1997, 2001).

3. The Development of Creoles

ÝÝÝÝÝ The central question here is: how did creoles develop? The following hypotheses are the major onesÝ competing today: the substrate, the superstrate, and the universalist hypotheses.

ÝÝÝÝÝ Substratist positions are historically related to the baby talk hypothesis, which I have traced back to 19th-century French creolists: Bertrand-BocandÈ (1849), Baissac (1880), Adam (1883), and Vinson (1882). Puta‚tive‚ly, the lan‚guages previous‚ly spoken by the Africans enslaved on New World and Indian Ocean plantations were the primary reason why the European lexifiers which they appropri‚ated were restructured into creoles. These French creolists assumed African languages to be ìprimitive,î ìinstinc‚tive,î in ìnaturalî state, and simpler than the ìcu‚lti‚vat‚edî Euro‚pean languages with which they came in contact. Creolesí systems were considered to be reflections of those non-European languages.Ý The baby-talk connection is that, in order to be understood, the Europeans supposedly had to speak to the Africans like to babies, their interpretation of foreigner talk.

ÝÝÝÝÝ The revival of the substrate hypothesis (without its racist compo‚nent) has been attributed to Sylvain (1936). Although she recognizes influence from French dialects, She ar‚gues that African linguistic influence, especially from the Ewe group of languages, is very significant in HC. Unfortunately, she states in the last sentence of her conclusions that this creole is Ewe spoken with a French vocabulary. Over two decades later, Turner (1949) disputed American dialectol‚ogistsí claim that there was virtually no trace of African languages in AAE and showed phonological and morphosyn‚tactic similarities between Gullah and some West-African (especially Kwa) languages. He con‚cluded that ìGullah is indebted to African sourcesî (254).

ÝÝÝÝÝ Mufwene (1990) identifies three main schools of the substrate hypothesis today. The first, led by Alleyne (1980, 1996) and Holm (1988) is closer to Turnerís approach and is marked by what is also its main weakness: invocation of influence from diverse African languages without explaining what kinds of selection principles account for this seemingly random invocation of sources. This criticism is not ipso facto an invalidation of substrate of substrate influence; it is both a call for a more principled account and a reminder that the nature of such influence must be reassessed (Mufwene 2001).

ÝÝÝÝÝ The second school has been identified as the relexification hypothesis. The proponents of its latest version,Ý Lefebvre (1998) and Lumsden (1999), argue that HC is a French relexi‚fication of languages of the Ewe-Fon (or Fongbe) group. This account of the development of creoles has been criticized for several basic shortcomings, including the following: 1) its ìcomparativeî ap‚proach has not taken into account several features that HC (also) shares with non‚stan‚dard varieties of French; 2) it downplays features which HC shares also with sev‚eral other African lan‚guages which were represented in Haiti dur‚ing the critical stages of its development; 3) it has not shown that the language appropriation strategies associated with relexification are typically used in naturalistic second language acquisition; and 4) it does not account for those cases where HC has selected structural options which are not consistent with those of Ewe-Fon. Moreover, relexificationists assume, disputably, that languages of the Ewe-Fon group are struc‚turally identical and that no com‚pe‚tition of influence was involved among them.

ÝÝÝÝÝ The least disputed version of the substrate hypothesis is Keesingís (1988), which shows that substrate languages may impose their structural features on the new, contact-induced varieties if they are typologically homogeneous, with most of them sharing the relevant features. Thus Melanesian pidgins are like (most of) their sub‚strates in having DUAL/PLURAL and INCLUSIVE/EXCLUSIVE distinctions and in having a transitive marker on the verb. Sankoff and Brown (1976) had shown similar influence with the brac‚keting of rela‚tive clauses with ia. However, the pidgins have not inherited all the pecu‚liarities of Melane‚sian languages. For instance, they do not have their VSO major constituent order, nor do they have much of a nu‚mer‚al classifying system in the combination of pela with quantifiers. For an extensive discussion of substrate influence in Atlantic and Indian Ocean creoles, see Muysken and Smith (eds., 1986) and Mufwene (ed., 1993).

ÝÝÝÝÝ Competing with the above genetic views has been the dialectologist, or super‚strate, hypoth‚esis, according to which the primary, if not the exclusive, sources of creolesí structur‚al features are nonstandard varieties of their lexifiers. Speaking of AAE, Krapp (1924) and Kurath (1928), for example, claimed that this variety was an archaic retention of the non‚standard speech of low-class Whites with whom the African slaves had been in contact. According to them, African substrate influence was limited to some isolated lexical items such as goober ëpea‚nutí, gumbo, and okra. It would take until McDavid (1950) and McDavid and McDavid (1951) before allowance was made for someÝ African grammat‚ical con‚tri‚‚butions to AAE. DíEloia (1973) and Schneider (1989) invoke several dia‚lec‚tal English models to rebut Dillardís (1972) thesis that AAVE devel‚oped from an erstwhile West-African Pidgin English brought over by slaves. Since the late 1980s, Shana Poplack and her associates have shown that AAE shares many features with white nonstandard vernaculars in North America and England, thus it has not developed from an erstwhile creole. (See Poplack, ed. 1999 for a synthesis.) Because some of the same features are also attested in creoles (Rickford 1998), we come back to the question of whether most features of creoles did not after all originate in their lexifiers.

ÝÝÝÝÝ Regarding French creoles, the dialectologist position was first defended by Faine (1937), according to whom HC was essentially Norman French. This position was espoused later by Hall (1958), who argues that ìthe ëbasicí relationship of Creole is with seven‚‚teenth-century French, with heavy carry-overs or survivals of African linguistic struc‚ture (on a more superficial structural level) from the previous language(s) of the earliest speakers of Negro Pidgin French; its ëlexicalí relationship is with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Frenchî (1958:372). Chaudenson (1989, 1992) is more accommodating to substrate influence as a factor that accounts for the more extensive structural divergence of creoles from their lexifiers compared to their non-creole colonial kin.

ÝÝÝÝÝ The universalist hypotheses, which stood as strong contenders in 1980s and 1990s, have forerunners in the 19th century. For instance, Adolfo Coelho (1880-1886) partly anti‚ci‚pated Bickertonís (1981f) language bioprogram hypothesis in stating that creoles ìowe their origin to the operation of psychological or physiological laws that are everywhere the same, and not to the influence of the former languages of the people among whom these dialects are found.î Bickerton pushed things further in claiming that children made creoles by fixing the parameters of these new language varieties in the their unmarked, or default, settings as specified in Universal Grammar. To account for cross-creole struc‚tural differences, Bickerton (1984:176-177) invokes a ìPidginization Indexî (PI) that includes the following factors: the proportion of the native to non-native speak‚ers during the initial stages of colonization, the duration of the early stage, the rate of increase of the slave population after that initial stage, the kind of social contacts between the native speakers of the lexifier and the learners, and whether or not the contact between the two groups continued after the formation of the new language variety.

ÝÝÝÝÝ Some nagging questions with Bickertonís position include the fol‚low‚ing: ‚Is his intuitively sound PI consistent with his creolization qua abrupt pidgin-nativization hypothesis? Is the abrupt creolization hypoth‚esis consistent with the social histories of the ter‚ri‚tories where classic creoles developed (Mufwene 1999)? How can we explain simi‚larities between abrupt creoles and expanded pidg‚ins when the stabilization and structural expansion of the latter is not necessarily associated with restructuring by children? ‚Is there convincing evidence for assuming that adult speech is less controlled by Universal Grammar than child language is? How can we account for similari‚ties between abrupt cre‚ol‚ization and naturalistic second-language acqui‚sition?

ÝÝÝÝÝ Not all creolists who have invoked universalist explanations have made children critical to the emergence of creoles. For instance, Sankoff (1979) and M¸hl‚‚h”usler (1981) make allowance for Universal Grammar to operate in adults, too.

ÝÝÝÝÝ Few creolists subscribe nowadays to one exclusive genetic account, as evidenced by the contributions to Mufwene (ed., 1993). The com‚plemen‚ta‚ry hypothesis (Baker & Corne 1986; Hancock 1986; and Mufwene 1986, 2001) seems to be an adequate alternative, pro‚vided we can articulate the ecological conditions under which the competing influences (between the substrate and superstrate languages, and with‚in each group) may converge or prevail upon each other. This position was well anti‚cipated by Schuchardt (1909, 1914) in his accounts of the geneses of Lingua Franca and of Saramaccan. More and more research is now under‚way uncovering the sociohis‚torical conditions under which different creoles have developed, for instance, Arends (1989f), Baker (1982f), Chaudenson (1979f), Corne (1999), Mufwene (2001), and Arends (ed. 1995).

ÝÝÝÝÝ Still, the future of research on the development of creoles has ‚‚‚‚some problems to overcome. So far knowledge of the nonstandard varieties of the lexifiers spoken by the European colonists remains limited. There are few comprehensive descriptions of creolesí structures, which makes it diffi‚cult to determine globally how the competing influences interacted among them and how the features selected from diverse sources became integrated into new systems. Few structural facts have been correlated with the conclusions suggested by the socio‚his‚torical backgrounds of individual creoles. Other issues remain up in the air, for in‚stance, regarding the markedness model that is the most adequate to account for the selection of features into creolesí systems. For developmental issues on PCs, the following edited collections are good starting points: Hymes (1971), Valdman (1977), Hill (1979), Muysken and Smith (1986), Mu‚fwe‚ne (1993), and Arends et al. (1995). More specific issues may be checked in volumes of the Creole Lan‚guage Library (John Benjamins) and of Amsterdam Creole Studies, in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, and in Etudes CrÈ‚oles. Several issues of Pacific Linguistics also include publications on Melanesian cre‚oles.

4. Creolistics and General Linguistics

ÝÝÝÝÝ There is much more literature on the genesis, sociology, and morphosyntax of PCs than on their phonologies, seman‚tics, and pragmatics. With the excep‚tion of time reference (e.g., Singler, ed. 1990, Michaelis 1993, Schlupp 1997) and nominal number (see Tagliamonte & Poplack 1993 for references), studies in semantics and pragmatics are scant. On the other hand, the develop‚ment of quantitative socio‚lin‚guistics owes a lot to research on AAE since the mid-1960s (see, e.g., Labov 1972) and Carib‚bean English creoles (e.g., Rickford 1987). Numerous pub‚li‚cations in American Speech, Language in Society, and Language Variation and Change reflect this. There are also several surveys of creolistics today, including the following: Romaine (1988), Holm (1988), Manessy (1994), Arends et al. (1995), and M¸hlh”usler (1997). They vary in geographical areas of focus and adequacy. Hopefully, Corne (1999) is the beginning of a new trend of comparative studies of creoles lexified by the same language.

ÝÝÝÝÝ Studies of structural aspects of creoles have yet to inform general linguistics beyond the subject matters of time reference and serial verb construc‚tions. For instance, studies of lectal continua (e.g., Escure 1997) have had this potential, but little has been done by creolists to show how their find‚ings may apply to other languages. The mixed nature of mesolects, those intermediate varie‚ties combining features of both the acrolect and the basi‚lect should have informed general linguistics against the fallacy of assum‚ing monolithic grammatical systems (Mufwene 1992, Labov 1998). However, little has been done on the subject matter. Likewise, the debate on creole genesis could have informed histor‚ical linguis‚tics on the importance of varying exter‚nal conditions to lan‚guage change (Mufwene 2001).

ÝÝÝÝÝ Although lack of consensus among creolists may be invoked as a general reason for this failure to influence general linguistics, alarming indifference from theoret‚ical lin‚guists, especially those engaged in theories of typology and universals, is a more impor‚tant reason. Consensus cannot be expected of creolistics any more than of other sub‚fields of linguistics or any other scientific discipline. However, in the broader context of language contact (including second-lan‚guage acqui‚sition), studies of especially creole genesis have been inspiring. For instance, Thomason & Kaufman (1988) is widely cited in studies of indigenized Eng‚lishes. Ander‚sen, ed. (1983) was an important step to consolidate common interests between second-language acquisition and creole genesis. More cross-fertilization might be expected between studies of creole genesis and those of (child) language development (DeGraff, ed. 1999), as among diverse sub‚fields of linguistics.

 

 

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Salikoko S. Mufwene

University of Chicago