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French Guianese Creole Its Emergence from Contact

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French Guianese Creole Its Emergence from Contact journal of language contact 8 (2015) 36-69 brill.com/jlc French Guianese Creole Its Emergence from Contact William Jennings University of Waikato [email protected] Stefan Pfänder FRIAS and University of Freiburg [email protected] Abstract This article hypothesizes that French Guianese Creole (fgc) had a markedly different formative period compared to other French lexifier creoles, a linguistically diverse slave population with a strong Bantu component and, in the French Caribbean, much lower or no Arawak and Portuguese linguistic influence.The historical and linguistic description of the early years of fgc shows, though, that the founder population of fgc was dominated numerically and socially by speakers of Gbe languages, and had almost no speakers of Bantu languages. Furthermore, speakers of Arawak pidgin and Portuguese were both present when the colony began in Cayenne. Keywords French Guianese Creole – Martinique Creole – Arawak – tense and aspect – founder principle 1 Introduction French Guianese Creole (hereafter fgc) emerged in the South American col- ony of Cayenne in the late 1600s. The society that created the language was superficially similar to other Caribbean societies where lexically-French cre- oles arose. It consisted of slaves of African origin working on sugar plantations for a minority francophone colonial population. However, from the beginning © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/19552629-00801003Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 09:17:10PM via free access <UN> French Guianese Creole 37 fgc was quite distinct from Lesser Antillean Creole. It was “less ridiculous than that of the Islands” according to a scientist who lived in Cayenne in the 1720s (Barrère 1743: 40). More recently, scholars have identified some of the dif- ferences between the two languages (Hazaël-Massieux 1986, 1990; Baker 1987). This article will take a complementary historical and linguistic approach to investigate and account for the early differences between fgc and the Lesser Antillean Creoles. We will examine firstly how differences arose so soon by comparing the early language contact situation in Cayenne to the more typical situation experienced in other societies in which lexically-French creoles arose. We will then investigate linguistic differences between fgc and Martinican Creole (mac), one of the Lesser Antillean creoles, with particular focus on the tense-mode-aspect (tma) system. An additional aim of the article is to make information about fgc available to an anglophone readership, since most studies of the language, particularly of its structure, have until now appeared in French (e.g. Saint-Jacques Fauquenoy 1972; Peyraud 1983; Schlupp 1997) or German (e.g. Pfänder 2000a). 2 Social History and Linguistics: A Combined Approach The principal debate in creole studies today concerns whether creoles share similar degrees of complexity that distinguish them typologically from other languages. Those who argue in favour of typological distinction believe that creoles have a low degree of complexity as a consequence of their pidgin ori- gins (McWhorter 2001, 2011; Parkvall 2008). Computational linguistic studies have created phylogenetic diagrams separating creoles from non-creoles (Bakker et al. 2011), although the methodology used to produce them has been challenged (Bartoletti, Fon Sing and Leoue 2011).1 Scholars engaged in the debate often neglect the importance of the social history to determine the set- ting in which creolisation took place. Arends (2002) argues that history actu- ally plays the leading role. Even synchronic studies claiming that creoles are typologically distinct cannot ignore the environment in which those languages arose. If the phylogenetic diagrams produced by Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2009, 2011) and Bakker et al. (2011) correctly show creole distinction, then there must be some catalyst that shifts creoles away from the branches of their parent languages towards a creole branch. Such a catalyst is likely to be found in the early social history of the creole. The Founder Principle (Mufwene 2001) 1 Other scholars believe that creoles cannot be distinguished by typology or complexity (DeGraff 2001). journal of language contact 8 (2015) 36-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 09:17:10PM via free access <UN> 38 Jennings and Pfänder accords extra significance to the first members of a creole society, who can influence the linguistic parameters that new immigrants will follow. The importance of studies of the early social history as a complement to linguistics in creole studies cannot be overstated. The most salient example is probably the case of Hawai‘i Creole, a language that was supposed to have emerged in a single generation through the universal grammar of the Language Bioprogram (Bickerton 1981, 1984). Roberts (1998, 2005) and Siegel (2000, 2007) have demonstrated through better knowledge of the social history of Hawai‘i Creole that the language emerged over more than one generation, and that there was initially a generation of bilingual speakers of the substrate languages and versions of the superstrate. Baker and Corne (1982) used a dual historical and linguistic approach in their study of Isle de France Creole and linked a significant Bantu presence to certain structures of the creole. Crowley (1990) showed its utility in his study of Bislama, and Siegel (2008a) emphasises the need for sociohistorical data in the investigation of how pidgins and creoles emerge. Recent comparative work on Surinam creoles has attributed subtle structural differences to varying ethnic proportions in the African population (Huttar, Aboh and Ameka 2013). 3 Cayenne—The Earliest Years The permanent European settlement of Cayenne began in 1654, the perma- nent African slave population began in 1660. By the 1730s, white children born in the colony were native speakers of fgc after being raised by black nurses in that language (Barrère 1743: 40). The environment in which the creole arose differed in many respects from the typical language contact situation experi- enced in other parts of the French Caribbean. This section will outline the early language contact environment, emphasising the major points of differ- ence from more typical environments that occurred in many other French cre- ole societies. 3.1 The Native Americans Native American languages are thought to have had little impact on the genesis of French creoles of the Antilles, apart from contributing lexical items such as the names of local plants and animals. Rapid colonial expan- sion on small Caribbean islands marginalised the indigenous inhabitants, most of whom were killed or expelled from the Antilles by the mid-1600s. In contrast, the Galibi of the Cayenne area maintained regular contact journal of languageDownloaded contact from Brill.com09/30/2021 8 (2015) 36-69 09:17:10PM via free access <UN> French Guianese Creole 39 with traders, settlers and slaves throughout the colonial period. The Galibi spoke at least two languages: Kali’na and an Arawak pidgin that had been used as a diplomatic language across the Caribbean for centuries (Taylor and Hoff 1980). Two seventeenth-century French observers independently sketched what they thought was the native language of the Galibi, but their descriptions show “remarkable similarity” to the Arawak pidgin (Taylor and Hoff 1980: 308). As late as the early 19th century a missionary reported: “The Arawak lan- guage can be of great benefit to a European travelling along the coast of Cayenne from Surinam to the Orinoco and Trinidad because people of that nation can be found throughout the region” (Quandt 1807: 294). The Arawak pidgin may consequently have had a greater influence on fgc formation than on other French creoles. It should also be considered a contributory language to the feature pool for the genesis of the creole. The best source for Arawak pidgin as spoken in Cayenne is an unfinished grammar long attributed to Theodor Schulz. Research in the Herrenhut archives, however, shows it is an incorrect attribution to Schulz going back to Lucien Adam and his colleagues, who were editing a large number of Native American grammars and dictionaries in the 1880s. It seems they did not take enough care to collate copies of grammars they had and thus published them without verification against an original copy. Adam knew that Schulz had left the mission early, leaving behind an unfinished grammar of a Native American language. When he found a copy of an unfinished grammar, Adam assumed it was Schulz’s and edited it under his name. Handwriting compari- son and the reconstruction of letter correspondences allow us to attribute the grammar and the accompanying dictionary to Theophilus Salomo Schuman. This is a most crucial finding, as Schuman lived a century before Schulz. His earliest letters are from 1748, only a few years after Barrère’s refer- ence to the creole of Cayenne. Schuman’s grammar is an invaluable docu- ment for the study of early fgc and shows that the Arawak pidgin needs to be considered as part of the language contact situation in early French Guiana. Guy Hazaël-Massieux (1990) presented the hypothesis that in contrast to the Lesser Antilles, Native American languages like Arawak may have played a role in the genesis of fgc. Historical evidence discussed above combined with the presence of presentative constructions in fgc that are typical of basic interactions such as ‘this is’ and ‘these are’ (Arawak a, cf. Hazaël-Massieux 1990, cf. French c’est, Lesser Antillean Creole se) support this hypothesis, although further research is clearly needed in this area. journal of language contact 8 (2015) 36-69 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 09:17:10PM via free access <UN> 40 Jennings and Pfänder 3.2 The Portuguese The permanent European settlement of Cayenne began with the arrival in 1654 of two small and distinct groups of refugees, one Dutch and the other Portuguese. They had been residents of Dutch Brazil, a prosperous colony with a Dutch administration and an economy run by Portuguese Jewish sugar planters.
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