DOCSLIB.ORG

Pidgins and Creoles

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Pidgins and Creoles Announcements Good news: INTD0112 It’s the final week of classes. Bad news: Introduction to There’s still some work you have to do: a research paper and the final. Linguistics Good news: In ten days or so, you won’t have to worry about this any more. Lecture #22 Bad news; May 8th, 2007 You have to worry about this for ten more days or so. Today’s agenda Pidgins and Creoles A pidgin is a system of communication used by people who do not know each other’s More on language variation, this time from languages but need to communicate with one language varieties that arise in unusual another for trading or other purposes. It’s like circumstances. a lingua franca. By definition, then, a pidgin is not a natural language. It’s a made-up “makeshift” language. Notice, crucially, that it does not have native speakers. Some pidgins die quickly; The lexicons of Pidgins are typically others get killed based on some dominant language While a pidgin is used by speakers of different Some pidgins may not last for very long, typically languages, it is typically based on the lexicon of what dying once the reason for using them diminishes or is called a “dominant” language in the area where it is disappears. spoken. For example, the pidgin French that was used in Dominant languages were typically those of the Vietnam disappeared after the French left. Same for European colonialists, e.g., French, English, Dutch, the pidgin English during the Vietnam war. etc. Pidgins may also disappear due to government The dominant language is called the lexifier, or the interference, as in the cases of Chinese Pidgin English superstratum language. The native languages of and the pidgin spoken in New Zealand by the Maoris. pidgin users are called substratum languages. 1 Pidgins are linguistically Pidgins are linguistically simplified systems simplified systems Since pidgin vocabulary is pretty limited, meanings As you should expect, pidgins are very simple in their are extended. linguistic properties. So, stick is not only used for sticks, but also for trees, in Solomon Islands Pidgin. Lexicon: a. Words from lexifier languages; In Korean Bamboo English, grass is used in “gras bilong head” to mean “hair”, and in “gras bilong b. Words belong to open classes (nouns, verbs, mouth” to mean “moustache”. adjectives); Compounds are also frequent, e.g., dog baby for c. No or few closed class words (like “puppy”, or prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, etc.) “Him cow pig have kittens?” Pidgins are linguistically Pidgin examples simplified systems Phonology: Neo-Melanesian: a. Phoneme inventory: Consonants and vowels that mi stap lçNN bIglajn, mi k´tim kopra are phonetically easy. b. Syllable structure: Typically CV or CVC. “I was in the work-group, cutting copra.” c. Stress: fixed stress location. Morphology: Chinese Pidgin English: Little morphology. For the most part, no tense or aspect marking; no agreement, either. Before my sell-um for ten dollar Syntax: Past I sell-transitive for ten dollar Sentences are simple and short with no embedding. “I sold it for ten dollars.” A pidgin example Kids? Suppose you’re a child born in a speech community Nauru Pidgin English: where a pidgin is spoken (either by your parents or by Mi hasIb´nflEn no waifu some of the older kids in the neighborhood). my husband friend no wife The pidgin utterances are your primary linguistic data (PLD). “My husband's friend has no wife.” But remember that a pidgin is not a natural language. So, what language are you going to end up learning on the basis of these PLD? 2 Creole: The birth of a language Where does “creole” come from? As it turns out, kids impose structure on the language The term comes from the Portuguese crioulo, input they receive, ending up with a language that has and originally meant a person of European prepositions, articles, tense marking, aspect descent who had been born and brought up in a morphology, embedded clauses, etc.. colonial territory. Later, it came to be applied Wow, miracles exist? to other people who were native to these areas, No, UG does.. We’ll get back to this later, though and then to the kind of language they spoke. When a pidgin is acquired as a first language by a Creoles are typically classified based on their generation of children, it becomes a creole. A creole lexifier language, e.g., English-based, French- thus, unlike a pidgin, is a natural language. based, etc. When a pidgin becomes a creole, ... When a pidgin becomes a creole, ... Compare the linguistic properties of Hawaiian Articles: Pidgin English (HPE) and Hawaiian Creole HPE: definite/indefinite articles if existent are English (HCE). used fairly randomly. Word order: HCE: Definite da used for all and only known HPE: S always before O. specific references. Indefinite wan used for all and only unknown specific references. Other HCE: basically SVO, but allows other orders NPs have no article. for pragmatic use. When a pidgin becomes a creole, ... When a pidgin becomes a creole, ... HCE: complementizers fo vs. go, where the former is HCE: bin marks tense and stei marks aspect. used with hypothetical events, and the latter with Wail wi stei paedl, jaen stei put wata insaid da events that actually happened. Notice the embedding kanu—hei, da san av a gan haed sink! as well. “While we were paddling, John was letting water into Mo beta a bin go hanalulu fo bai maiself. the canoe—hey, the son-of-a-gun had sunk it!” “It would have been better if I’d gone to Honolulu to buy it myself.” As tu bin get had taim reizing dag. Ai gata go haia wan kapinta go fiks da fom. “The two of us used to have a hard time raising dogs.” “I had to hire a carpenter to fix the form.” 3 Cross-creole similarities Cross-creole similarities Interestingly enough, many creole languages exhibit Creoles also show similar patterns for articles, the same linguistic properties that we noted for HCE. as noted for HCE. For example, they all use fronting for emphasis or contrastive focus, as shown in the following examples Consider these data from GC for illustration; from Guyanese Creole (GC): a. Jan bin sii wan uman. a. Jan bai di buk ‘John bought the book (that you ‘John had seen a woman.’ already know about).’ b. A Jan bin sii wan uman. b. Jan bai wan buk ‘John bought a (particular) book.’ ‘It was John who had seen a woman.’ c. A wan uman Jan bin sii c. Jan bai buk ‘John bought a book or books.’ ‘It was a woman that John had seen.’ d. buk dia fi tru ‘Books are really expensive.’ Cross-creole similarities Cross-creole similarities Similarities also appear in the tense-modality- Mauritian Creole (MC): al (realized; or Ø), pu (unrealized; or pu al) aspect system of creole languages, where a. li desid al met posoh ladah preverbal free morphemes are typically used. she decide go put fish in-it ‘She decided to put a fish in (the pool).’ Complementizers are also typically of two b. li ti pe ale aswar pu al bril lakaz sa garsoh-la me lor sime kinds: one for realized events, and the other for ban dayin fin atake li hypotheticals, as already seen in HCE and on he TNS MOD go evening for go burn house that boy-the but the next slide from French-based Mauritian on path PL witch COMP attack him ‘He would have gone that evening to burn the boy’s house, Creole. but on the way he was attacked by witches.’ Where do pidgins and creoles come Monogenesis? from, then? Perhaps pidgins and creoles all came from the same One view is that every creole is a unique ancestor language then? independent development, a product of This is the monogenesis view. A candidate common language contact in a particular area. origin has actually been suggested: a 15th-century The problem with this polygenesis approach is Portuguese pidgin, which may have in turn descended that it does not account for the fact that creole from the Mediterranean lingua franca known as Sabir. languages around the world share a lot of Evidence for this view comes from the fact that there similarities with regard to their linguistic is a considerable number of Portuguese words in the pidgins and creoles of the world. properties. 4 Monogenesis? Bickerton (1981) Bickerton’s view is that creolization provides Main Problem for the monogenesis view is that there are pidgins and creoles that do not strong evidence for a bioprogram for seem to have any Portuguese effect of any language. kind, e.g., Chinook Jargon in the Pacific Kids learn a language even in the face of non- Northwest in the USA. language input. This is an extreme case of the poverty of the stimulus argument. A biological approach to language may actually provide us with an explanation for Under this approach, a creole is as close a why creoles are so similar even though they reflection of the bioprogram for language as evolve in different speech communities. possible. Nicaraguan Sign Language Nicaraguan Sign Language An often discussed case of creolization took place in The children who were brought together came Nicaragua, though this time with the sign language of without a sign language. There was no sign language the deaf. of Nicaragua. At best, the children came with a limited number of “home signs,” signs that they had Remember that sign languages are natural languages, been using at home with their families and with their just like all spoken languages.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Case of Nominal Plural Marking in Zamboanga Chabacano
    Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 19 Documentation and Maintenance of Contact Languages from South Asia to East Asia ed. by Mário Pinharanda-Nunes & Hugo C. Cardoso, pp.141–173 http:/nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/sp19 4 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24908 Documenting online writing practices: The case of nominal plural marking in Zamboanga Chabacano Eduardo Tobar Delgado Universidade de Vigo Abstract The emergence of computer-mediated communication has brought about new opportunities for both speakers and researchers of minority or under-described languages. This paper shows how the analysis of spontaneous contemporary language samples from online social networks can make a contribution to the documentation and description of languages like Chabacano, a Spanish-derived creole spoken in the Philippines. More specifically, we focus on nominal plural marking in the Zamboangueño variety, a still imperfectly understood feature, by examining a corpus composed of texts from online sources. The attested combination of innovative and vestigial features requires a close look at the high contact environment, different levels of metalinguistic awareness or even some language ideologies. The findings shed light on the wide variety of plural formation strategies which resulted from the contact of Spanish with Philippine languages. Possible triggers, such as animacy, definiteness or specificity, are also examined and some future research areas suggested. Keywords: nominal plural marking, Zamboangueño Chabacano, number, creole languages Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 142 Eduardo Tobar Delgado 1. Introduction1 Zamboanga Chabacano (also known as Zamboangueño or Chavacano) is one of the three extant varieties of Philippine Creole Spanish or Chabacano and totals around 500,000 speakers in and around Zamboanga City in the Southern Philippines.
    [Show full text]
  • Making Sense of "Bad English"
    MAKING SENSE OF “BAD ENGLISH” Why is it that some ways of using English are considered “good” and others are considered “bad”? Why are certain forms of language termed elegant, eloquent, or refined, whereas others are deemed uneducated, coarse, or inappropriate? Making Sense of “Bad English” is an accessible introduction to attitudes and ideologies towards the use of English in different settings around the world. Outlining how perceptions about what constitutes “good” and “bad” English have been shaped, this book shows how these principles are based on social factors rather than linguistic issues and highlights some of the real-life consequences of these perceptions. Features include: • an overview of attitudes towards English and how they came about, as well as real-life consequences and benefits of using “bad” English; • explicit links between different English language systems, including child’s English, English as a lingua franca, African American English, Singlish, and New Delhi English; • examples taken from classic names in the field of sociolinguistics, including Labov, Trudgill, Baugh, and Lambert, as well as rising stars and more recent cutting-edge research; • links to relevant social parallels, including cultural outputs such as holiday myths, to help readers engage in a new way with the notion of Standard English; • supporting online material for students which features worksheets, links to audio and news files, further examples and discussion questions, and background on key issues from the book. Making Sense of “Bad English” provides an engaging and thought-provoking overview of this topic and is essential reading for any student studying sociolinguistics within a global setting.
    [Show full text]
  • A Discrete Co-Systems Approach to Language Variation on the Panamanian Island of Bastimentos
    University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 7 Issue 3 Papers from NWAV 29 Article 20 2001 A Discrete Co-Systems Approach to Language Variation on the Panamanian Island of Bastimentos Peter Snow Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl Recommended Citation Snow, Peter (2001) "A Discrete Co-Systems Approach to Language Variation on the Panamanian Island of Bastimentos," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 7 : Iss. 3 , Article 20. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol7/iss3/20 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol7/iss3/20 For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Discrete Co-Systems Approach to Language Variation on the Panamanian Island of Bastimentos This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol7/iss3/20 A Discrete Co-Systems Approach to Language Variation on the Panamanian Island of Bastimentos 1 Peter Snow 1 Introduction In its ideal form, the phenomenon of the creole continuum as originally described by DeCamp (1971) and Bickerton (1973) may be understood as a result of the process of decreolization that occurs wherever a creole is in direct contact with its lexifier. This contact between creole languages and the languages that provide the majority of their lexicons leads to synchronic variation in the form of a continuum that reflects the unidirectional process of decreolization. The resulting continuum of varieties ranges from the "basilect" (most markedly creole), through intermediate "mesolectal" varie­ ties (less markedly creole), to the "acrolect" (least markedly creole or the lexifier language itself).
    [Show full text]
  • Describing Creole: Researcher Perspectives on Endangerment and Multilingualism in the Chabacano Communities
    Describing creole: researcher perspectives on endangerment and multilingualism in the Chabacano communities Eeva Sippola University of Helsinki This paper discusses perspectives on language description and endangerment in creole communities, with a special focus on Chabacano-speaking communities in the Philippines. I will show how, from the early days of research on these varieties, linguists with an interest in Chabacano often present the varieties under study as endangered in a moribund state or aim to describe a ‘pure’ Chabacano system without Philippine or English influences, silencing a great deal of the daily multilingualism and hybrid language practices that have always been present in the communities. In general, this paper sheds light on the complex dynamics of discourses on endangerment and authenticity in research about multilingual communities. It also contributes to the discussion on how these types of contexts challenge common Western assumptions about language loss and on authenticity in multilingual communities. Keywords: Chabacano, linguistic research, ideology, authenticity, multilingual communities. 1. Introduction This paper examines practices and ideologies of language description and documentation in the Chabacano-speaking communities in the Philippines. Chabacano is the common name used for creole varieties that have Spanish as the lexifier and Philippine languages as the adstrates and that have historically been spoken in several locations in the Philippines. There is documentation of varieties in Zamboanga, Cotabato, and Davao in Mindanao in the southern Philippines, and in the Ermita district of Manila, Cavite City, and Ternate in the Manila Bay region of the northern island of Luzon. They are for the most part mutually intelligible, but there are sociohistorical circumstances and linguistic differences that distinguish them (Lesho & Sippola 2013, 2014).
    [Show full text]
  • Nominal Contact in Michif. by Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen , with Verna De - Montigny
    806 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 9 5, NUMBER 4 (201 9) Corbett, Greville G. 2009. Canonical inflection classes. Selected proceedings of the 6th Décembrettes , ed. by Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé, and Jessie Tseng, 1–11. Online: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb /6/paper2231.pdf . Dahl, Östen . 2004. The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity . Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harley, Heidi. 2008. When is a syncretism more than a syncretism? Impoverishment, metasyncretism, and underspecification. Phi theory: Phi-features across modules and interfaces , ed. by Daniel Harbour, David Adger, and Susana Béjar, 251–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, Jeff, and Andrea D. Sims. 2020. Irregularity, paradigmatic layers, and the complexity of inflection class systems: A study of Russian nouns. Morphological complexities , ed. by Peter Arkadiev and Francesco Gardani. Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear. Sagot, Benoît, and Géraldine Walther. 2011 . Non-canonical inflection: Data, formalisation and com - plexity measures. SFCM 2011: The second workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology , ed. by Cerstin Mahlow and Michael Piotrowski, 23–45. Berlin: Springer. Stump, Gregory T . 2016. Inflectional paradigms: Content and form at the syntax-morphology interface . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zwicky, Arnold M. 1992. Some choices in the theory of morphology. Formal grammar: Theory and imple - mentation , ed. by Robert Levine, 327–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Department of Linguistics 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210 [[email protected]] Nominal contact in Michif. By Carrie Gillon and Nicole Rosen , with Verna De - montigny . (Oxford studies of endangered languages.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 202. ISBN 9780198795339. $88 (Hb). Reviewed by Sarah G.
    [Show full text]
  • Pidgins and Creoles
    Chapter 7: Contact Languages I: Pidgins and Creoles `The Negroes who established themselves on the Djuka Creek two centuries ago found Trio Indians living on the Tapanahoni. They maintained continuing re- lations with them....The trade dialect shows clear traces of these circumstances. It consists almost entirely of words borrowed from Trio or from Negro English' (Verslag der Toemoekhoemak-expeditie, by C.H. De Goeje, 1908). `The Nez Perces used two distinct languages, the proper and the Jargon, which differ so much that, knowing one, a stranger could not understand the other. The Jargon is the slave language, originating with the prisoners of war, who are captured in battle from the various neighboring tribes and who were made slaves; their different languages, mixing with that of their masters, formed a jargon....The Jargon in this tribe was used in conversing with the servants and the court language on all other occasions' (Ka-Mi-Akin: Last Hero of the Yakimas, 2nd edn., by A.J. Splawn, 1944, p. 490). The Delaware Indians `rather design to conceal their language from us than to properly communicate it, except in things which happen in daily trade; saying that it is sufficient for us to understand them in that; and then they speak only half sentences, shortened words...; and all things which have only a rude resemblance to each other, they frequently call by the same name' (Narratives of New Netherland 1609-1664, by J. Franklin Jameson, 1909, p. 128, quoting a comment made by the Dutch missionary Jonas Micha¨eliusin August 1628). The list of language contact typologies at the beginning of Chapter 4 had three entries under the heading `extreme language mixture': pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed lan- guages.
    [Show full text]
  • Notes on the History and the Syntax of Mauritian Creole1
    Notes on the history and the syntax of Mauritian Creole1 PIETERA. M. SEUREN Abstract The central question behind the various topics discussed in this paper is the question of the LINGUISTIC status of Creole languages. They do have similar historical backgrounds, but do they also have linguistic features in common, and if so, how can they be explained? Certain features of the history and syntax of Mauritian Creole (MC) are used to bring more light to this problem area. The view is defended that MC was not, or not significantly, influenced by any West African languages. Verb serialization and predicate clefting, two clearly West African linguistic features found in the Caribbean Creoles, are notably absent in MC. No other convincingly West African features can be identified. The highly particular features common to MC and the French-based Caribbean Creoles are tentatively attributed to a French-based nautical pidgin and/or Creole in French trading posts in East and West Africa. Against this background a few MC-specific grammatical phenomena, in particular the rule of verb apocope, in connection with phenomena of verb complementation, the formation of WH-words, and the system of preverbal markers for tense, modality, and aspect, are described and analyzed. MC appears to have two raising rules, predicate raising and subject raising, which alternate in such a way that SVO word order is not disturbed. It is shown that all the phenomena in question manifest a tendency to maximize semantic transparency (in the sense that the amount of process- ing required to get from semantic structures to surface structures and vice versa is minimized).
    [Show full text]
  • Cg 2018 Sarah Schieferstein
    c 2018 Sarah Schieferstein IMPROVING NEURAL LANGUAGE MODELS ON LOW-RESOURCE CREOLE LANGUAGES BY SARAH SCHIEFERSTEIN THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Adviser: Associate Professor Julia Hockenmaier ABSTRACT When using neural models for NLP tasks, like language modelling, it is difficult to utilize a language with little data, also known as a low-resource language. Creole languages are frequently low-resource and as such it is difficult to train neural language models for them well. Creole languages are a special type of language that is widely thought of as having multiple parents and thus receiving a mix of evolutionary traits from all of them. One of a creole language's parents is known as the lexifier, which gives the creole its lexicon, and the other parents are known as substrates, which possibly are thought to give the creole language its morphology and syntax. Creole languages are most lexically similar to their lexifier and most syntactically similar to otherwise unrelated creole languages. High lexical similarity to the lexifier is unsurprising because by definition lexifiers provide a creole's lexicon, but high syntactic similarity to the other unrelated creole languages is not obvious and is explored in detail. We can use this information about creole languages' unique genesis and typology to decrease the perplexity of neural language models on low-resource creole languages. We discovered that syntactically similar languages (especially other creole languages) can successfully transfer learned features during pretraining from a high-resource language to a low-resource creole language through a method called neural stacking.
    [Show full text]
  • The Classification of the English-Lexifier Creole Languages
    DigitalResources SIL eBook 25 ® The Classification of the English-Lexifier Creole Languages Spoken in Grenada, Guyana, St. Vincent, and Tobago Using a Comparison of the Markers of Some Key Grammatical Features: A Tool for Determining the Potential to Share and/or Adapt Literary Development Materials David Joseph Holbrook The Classification of the English-Lexifier Creole Languages Spoken in Grenada, Guyana, St. Vincent, and Tobago Using a Comparison of the Markers of Some Key Grammatical Features: A Tool for Determining the Potential to Share and/or Adapt Literary Development Materials David Joseph Holbrook SIL International ® 2012 SIL e-Books 25 2012 SIL International ® ISBN: 978-1-55671-268-5 ISSN: 1934-2470 Fair-Use Policy: Books published in the SIL e-Books (SILEB) series are intended for scholarly research and educational use. You may make copies of these publications for research or instructional purposes free of charge (within fair-use guidelines) and without further permission. Republication or commercial use of SILEB or the documents contained therein is expressly prohibited without the written consent of the copyright holder(s). Series Editor George Huttar Volume Editor Dirk Kievit Managing Editor Bonnie Brown Compositor Margaret González Abstract This study examines the four English-lexifier creole languages spoken in Grenada, Guyana, St. Vincent, and Tobago. These languages are classified using a comparison of some of the markers of key grammatical features identified as being typical of pidgin and creole languages. The classification is based on a scoring system that takes into account the potential problems in translation due to differences in the mapping of semantic notions.
    [Show full text]
  • Portuguese- and Spanish-Based Creoles and Typologies
    PAPIA 16, 2206, P. 53-61 53 PORTUGUESE- AND SPANISH-BASED CREOLES AND TYPOLOGIES John Holm, U. of Coimbra 1. Introduction The present study is intended to cast light on the question of whether creole lan- guages in general share structural similarities that could be said to constitute a typo- logy. Although there is mounting evidence that they do not, especially when Atlantic creoles are compared to those of Asia and the Pacifi c area, the question is still open as to what degree particular groups of creoles refl ect the typological similarities of their superstrate and substrate languages, thus forming typological groups of their own. This study builds on a previous article (Holm 2001) comparing nearly 100 mor- phosyntactic features in three creoles with Spanish as their lexifi er: Zamboangueño (now based on Lipski and Santoro fc.), Papiamentu (Kouwenberg and Michel fc.) and Palenquero (Green-Pichard and Schwegler fc.). This comparison has been expanded to survey the same features in Portuguese-based creoles from various subgroups: Cape Verdean and Guiné-Bissau CP (Baptista, Mello, and Suzuki fc.), Angolar (Lorenzino fc.), and Korlai CP (Clements fc.). 2. The data The point of this study is to draw conclusions from the quantifi cation of struc- tual similarities within groups of creoles, particularly by superstrate and substrate. For the latter purpose, the comparison includes a seventh creole which does not share ei- ther Iberian superstrate, but does share the Austronesian substrate of Zamboangueño: Tok Pisin Pidgin/Creole English (Faraclas fc.). The structures surveyed include the verb phrase, examining such features as the time reference of tense markers, the se- mantics of aspect markers, how these can co-occur, etc.
    [Show full text]
  • Language Labels and Language Use Among Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana
    University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 9 Issue 2 Papers from NWAV 31 Article 8 2003 Language labels and language use among Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana Thomas A. Klinger Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl Recommended Citation Klinger, Thomas A. (2003) "Language labels and language use among Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 9 : Iss. 2 , Article 8. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol9/iss2/8 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol9/iss2/8 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Language labels and language use among Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol9/iss2/8 Language Labels and Language Use among Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana Thomas A. Klingler 1 Introduction Francophone Louisiana has often been noted for the complexity of its lin­ guistic situation. In addition to English, the dominant language both in status and number of speakers, observers have typically recognized three French­ related varieties, commonly referred to in the literature as Colonial French, Cajun French, and Louisiana Creole. 1 Colonial French is a variety that dif­ fers little from Standard French in syntax and morphology, though depend­ ing on the speaker it may diverge from Standard French phonologically and lexically. The term "Colonial French" is something of a misnomer for this variety, since it did not become fmnly implanted in Louisiana until the nine­ teenth century, after the end of the French and Spanish colonial regimes.
    [Show full text]
  • Creole Formation As Language Contact: the Case of the Suriname
    Creole formation as language contact : The case of the Suriname Creoles Bettina Migge To cite this version: Bettina Migge. Creole formation as language contact : The case of the Suriname Creoles. John Benjamins, 2003. hal-01494340 HAL Id: hal-01494340 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01494340 Submitted on 23 Mar 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Copyright Migge, B.; (2003) Creole formation as language contact : The case of the Suriname Creoles . Amsterdam : John Benjamins. Chapter 1 Introduction 1. Introduction One of the oldest and most vigorously discussed questions in the research on creoles is the origin of these languages. According to McWhorter (1997a:1), “this question can be said to be one of the prime motivations for the conception of creole studies as a distinct subdiscipline.” Despite continuous heated discussions on this topic and the accumulation of a great deal of linguistic and sociohistorical data that bear on the genesis question, disagreement still exists about several pertinent issues: 1. the main linguistic inputs to creole formation, 2. the linguistic processes and mechanisms involved in creole formation, 3. the nature of the linguistic outcome of creole formation.
    [Show full text]