Pidgins and Creoles

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Important Terminology

3. Theories of Origin
3.1 The superstratal language
3.2 The substratal language
3.3 The Universalists theory

4. Development from Pidgin to Creole

5. The Creole language Papiamentu
5.1 Text sample from Papiamentu
5.2 General information
5.3 Origin of the language
5.4 Lexicology of Papiamentu
5.5 Grammatical features of Papiamentu
5.6 Papiamentu in current affairs

Conclusion

Bibliography

1. Introduction

The field of sociolinguistics deals with the relationship between language and society. According to the commentary for the seminar, “sociolinguists study the social and situational variables that govern variation within a language.” Pidgins and Creoles seem to be very interesting and fascinating for sociolinguists because this topic contains several areas of research like the origin of language, language loss, social contact and language prestige and definitely the rapid development and change of these languages.

The development of Pidgins and Creoles has a long history. It is said to have started with the European colonization overseas in the fifteenth century, although it is supposed that there must have been lots of language contact before. “Indeed, language contact seems likely to be nearly as old as language itself” (Holm 2000: 14). Mark Sebba does therefore give his book the title “Contact Languages” and the subtitle is “Pidgins and Creoles”. It is about the contact between people speaking different languages who need a certain language to get in contact. An example therefore is “Russennorsk” that developed from the need of Russian sailors and Norwegian fishermen who needed to communicate somehow (Singh 2000: 2). However, this language does not exist any longer and has died. Research questions would be: Why did this “language” die or how did it develop; which language was responsible for lexicon and which one for grammar; were there any grammatical rules at all?

In the first chapter, I will give definitions and explain important terminology. After that, I will deal with several theories of the genesis of Pidgins and Creoles and how the development of the “new” language from the beginning to a Post Creole Continuum does proceed. In the final chapter, I will exemplary describe the Spanish-based Creole language Papiamentu in detail.

2. Important Terminology

When people get in contact with the terms Pidgins and Creoles, they somehow might have thought “of a mixture of two languages” (Sebba 1997: 25). To describe these languages with more vulgar words, Holm uses terms like nigger French or bastard Portugese to explain what Pidgins and Creoles might stand for (Holm 2000: 1).

According to Holm, a Pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common. (Holm 2000: 5). Singh confirms this statement by explaining that “they are therefore sometimes termed auxiliary languages, since they ‘help along’ communication in such difficult circumstances” (Singh 2000: 2). Sebba describes Pidgins with four principles: They lack of surface grammatical complexity, what means that the learner does not learn complicated grammatical construction. Furthermore there is a lack of morphological complexity, meaning that the learner has only few, regular forms to learn and can make direct connections between forms and functions (one word - one morpheme). A semantic transparency allows the learner to make direct connections between forms and meanings and a last principle is the vocabulary reduction meaning the learner has a smaller number of words to learn (Sebba 2000: 55). In other words, features of a Pidgin are small vocabulary, only few syntactic rules, a limited range of subjects, mainly commands and high use of gestures to reinforce or clarify meanings.

This minimalist structure is one main difference to a Creole language. But even more important is the fact that a Pidgin language does not have any native speakers, i.e. it is no one’s native language (Holm 2000: 5).

And that is exactly what Todd says by defining a Creole: “A Creole arises when a Pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a speech community” (Todd 1990: 2). To describe the features of a Creole language, a quotation by McWorther gives as an idea of how a Creole works: “Creoles are distinguished synchronically by, though being full languages, retaining signs of their pidgin ancestry, such as virtual absence of both inflection and tone, and highly transparent derivational processes” (McWorther 2001).

The English word “Creole” is said to have derived from the French “créole” or the Portuguese version “crioulo” which have their origin in the Latin word “criar” meaning “to nurse, to breed” (Todd 1990: 22)

Bickerton’s Creole universals:

a) Use of TMA marker: tense, mood and aspect are expressed by morphemes in front of the main verb (examples cf. Bakker et al. 1994: 251-252).
1) “Mi njan di fisi”
“I ate the fish”
2) “Mi bi-njan di fisi”
“I had eaten the fish”
=> past before past tense marker
3) “Mi bi-o-njan di fisi”
“I would have eaten the fish”
=> irrealis mood marker
4) “Mi bi-o-ta-njan di fisi”
“I would have been eating the fish
=> tense, mood and aspect marker

b) Double negation:
5) “Non dag na bait non kyat”
“No dog bit any cat”

c) Movement rules to put words into initial position for emphasis
6) “O daet wan ai si”
“Oh, that one I saw ó Oh I saw that one

d) No relative pronouns introducing relative clauses
7) „Da gai (Ø) gon lei da vainil for mi bin kwot mi prais“
“The guy who his going to lay the vinyl […] had quoted me a price“

e) No typical passive constructions (not valid for Papiamentu Creole)

f) Questions: No syntactic change in word order; often two morphemes
8) “Bo ta bini manan”
“Jij komt morgen” and “Kom je morgen?”

(cf. Sebba 1997: 173-174)

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