Creole language

A creole language, or just creole, is a well-defined and stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages, typically with many distinctive features that are not inherited from either parent. All creole languages evolved from pidgins, usually those that have become the native language of some community.

History of the concept

Colonial origins

The term creole comes from Portuguese crioulo, via Spanish criollo and French créole. The Portuguese word crioulo is derived from the verb criar (to raise/to create), with a suffix of debated origin. The term was coined in the 16th century, during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade and the establishment of European colonies in Americas, in Africa, and along the coast of South and Southeast Asia up to the Philippines, China, India and Japan, and in Oceania.

The term "Creole" was originally applied to people born in the colonies, to distinguish them from the upper-class European-born immigrants. Originally, therefore, "Creole language" meant the speech of those Creole peoples.

Historical neglect

Because of the generally low status of the Creole people in the eyes of European colonial powers, creole languages have generally been regarded as "degenerate," or at best as rudimentary "dialects" of one of their parent languages. This view, incidentally, is the reason why "creole" has come to be used in opposition to "language," rather than a qualifier for it, so that one would say "a French creole" (rather than "a French-based creole language"), or "the Papiamentu creole" (rather than "the Papiamentu creole language").

This prejudice was compounded by the inherent instability of the colonial system, which led to the disappearance of many creole languages due to dispersion or assimilation of their speech communities. Another factor that may have contributed to the longtime neglect of creole languages is that they do not fit the "tree model" for the evolution of languages, which was adopted by linguists in the 19th century (possibly influenced by Darwinism) and is still the foundation of the comparative method. In this model languages may evolve, split, or die out — but cannot ever merge.

Recognition and renaissance

Since the middle of the 20th century, however, linguists have promulgated the idea that creole languages are in no way inferior to other languages, and that those earlier labels are as inappropriate as saying that French is a "degenerate Latin" or a "Spanish dialect". Linguists now use the term "creole language" for any language that is formed from multiple languages by the same mechanism, without geographic restrictions or ethnic implications.

As a consequence of these social, political, and academic changes, Creole languages have experienced a revival in recent decades. They are increasingly and more openly being used in literature and in media, and many of their speakers are quite fond and proud of them. They are now studied by linguists as languages on their own; many have been standardized, and are now taught in local schools and universities abroad.

Development of a creole language

All creoles start as pidgins, rudimentary second languages improvised for use between speakers of two or more non-intelligible native languages. Keith Whinnom (in Hymes 1971) suggests that pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others. The lexicon of a pidgin is usually small and drawn from the vocabularies of its speakers, in varying proportions. Morphological details like word inflections, which usually take years to learn, are omitted; the syntax is kept very simple, usually based on strict word order. In this initial stage, all aspects of the speech — syntax, lexicon, and pronunciation —tend to be quite variable, especially with regard to the speaker's background.

However, if a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a native language, it usually becomes fixed and acquires a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. The syntax and morphology of such languages may often have local innovations not obviously derived from any of the parent languages.

Pidgins can become full languages in only a generation, as with Tok Pisin, which was born as a pidgin and became a stable language in a period of 90 years. Once formed, Creoles can remain as a sort of second, local standard, like the Crioulo of Cape Verde. Some creoles, like Papiamentu and Tok Pisin, have obtained recognition as official languages. On the other hand, some creoles have been gradually "decreolized" by conforming a parent language, usually as a result of continuing political dominance, and have become essentially dialects of the latter. This has happened a little in Hawai'i, and is one theory of the development of African American Vernacular English from Slave English.

Classification of creoles

Whose creole?

By definition, a creole is the result of a nontrivial mixture of two or more languages, usually with radical morphological changes and a syntax which is not obviously borrowed from either of the parent tongues. The parent tongues may themselves be creoles or pidgins that have disappeared before they could be documented.

For these reasons, the issue of which language is the parent of a creole — that is, whether a language should be classified as a "Portuguese creole" or "English creole", etc. — often has no definitive answer, and can become the topic of heated disputes, where social prejudices and political considerations may predominate.

Substrate and superstrate

The terms substrate and superstrate are often used to label the parent languages of a creole. However, the meaning of these terms is only reasonably well-defined in language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to learn another language (the superstrate). The outcome of such an event is that people will be speaking the superstrate, at least in more formal contexts. The substrate may survive as a second language for informal conversation (as in the case of Venetian and many other European non-official languages). Its influence on the official speech, if detectable at all, is usually limited to pronunciation and a modest number of loanwords.

However, these terms are not as meaningful for creoles, in which the new language is not imposed, but largely fabricated by the very same people for which it will become the mother tongue. Thus those terms often end up being applied according to geographic or historical criteria; for example, the native language is taken to be the substrate, while the colonizers' is the superstrate. However this criterion runs into trouble for languages like Papiamentu, where none of the parent languages was native to the region.

Some linguists may arbitrarily assign different weights to different features. For instance, they may designate as superstrate the parent language whose grammatical structure is more similar to that of the creole; or, alternatively, the parent which most contributed to the lexicon, or whose contribution happened earlier in time. Needless to say, these different views lead to different classifications, and sometimes to heated disputes.

General features

Study of creole languages around the world (in particular by Derek Bickerton) has suggested that they display remarkable similarities in grammar and are developed uniformly from pidgins in a single generation, lending support to the theory of a Universal Grammar; critics, however, argue that his examples are largely drawn from creoles derived from European languages, and that non-European-based creoles such as Nubi or Sango display fewer similarities. Bickerton opposed the previous monogenetic theory of pidgins according to which, most European-based pidgins and creoles came from Mediterranean lingua franca via a "broken Portuguese" relexification in the slave factories of Western Africa.

Even considering only creoles from European languages, the similarities in grammatical structure are striking, especially considering that they evolved in communities which were isolated from one another. For example, these creoles tend to have similar usage patterns for definite and indefinite articles, and similar movement rules for phrase structures even when the parent languages do not.

Creoles by main parent language

Dictionary

Creole Dictionary from Webster's Dictionary

References

Linguistics | Pidgins and creoles

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