Pidgins and Creoles

Ishtla Singh

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317836117
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Sous-sujet: Sprachwissenschaft

Pidgins and creoles have always attracted a great deal of interest - academic and otherwise - but in recent decades they have become increasingly important as a field of linguistic inquiry. Placing pidgins and creoles in the wider setting of linguistic theory, this book bridges the gap between introductory material and primary material, revising students' knowledge of the field as well as acquainting them with key areas of debate in pidgin and creole studies. The author provides a carefully balanced introduction to theoretical aspects of creolistics as well as an even-handed discussion of influences on pidgins and creoles which is well illustrated with rare examples of longer texts.

1

Definitions

Once when we went to Europe, a rich old lady asked, ‘Have you no language of your own?’

(Edward Brathwaite, The Arrivants)

1.1 Introduction

The enquiry made by Brathwaite’s rich old European lady (a metaphor for an old, now possibly barren, colonial power) is directed to a young man from an ex-British, Caribbean territory (the developing, virile, New World culture) who speaks both his native creole and English. We can therefore assume that her question is double-pronged: she may be implying that his creole is not a language but instead a ‘broken’ appropriation of English; or that as a citizen of the New World (as opposed to the Old), he should not be using a language (English) that belongs to another culture. Brathwaite’s narrator does not have an answer for his interrogator who essentially wonders, like many who know little about these languages and the societies they serve, ‘what exactly is this creole and how “real”, how useful is it?’ As a native creole speaker, I think that the answer is an involved one, lying in the story of creoles and of creole studies. To understand what creole languages are and what makes them distinctive, we need to explore their history and look at the circumstances and the peoples that bring them into being. To understand their ‘reality’ as languages, we need to look not only at their linguistic viability but also at the kinds of issues and concerns their native speakers have. All of this constitutes a narrative that encompasses social histories, linguistic data, theories and postulations, and socio-political issues. Before ‘settling in for the tale’, however, we need to put their story into context. Section 1.2 therefore sets out a basic definition of a creole, and Section 1.3 looks at the role creoles have come to play in other areas of linguistic enquiry.

1.2 What is a creole?

Since creoles are often discussed in conjunction with pidgins, which are generally thought to be an early stage of creole development, we shall begin our definition there.

For many people, the term pidgin describes what is commonly perceived as ‘broken’ speech. For example, the attempts of non-fluent, non-native speakers of English to use that language to its native speakers for some specific purpose (such as asking for directions) is often described variously as broken English, pidgin English or pidgin. A general perception of pidgin, then, is that it is something that arises spontaneously in situations where communication between groups that speak mutually unintelligible languages is needed; and because it is unplanned it is also, by its very nature, random. In other words, it is often assumed that pidgins have no structural or grammatical rules to speak of.

To some extent, these perceptions are not totally untrue: linguists agree that pidgins are one outcome of language contact between speakers of different native languages who need to communicate. They are therefore sometimes termed auxiliary languages, since they ‘help along’ communication in such difficult circumstances. However, a lack of linguistic structure is not characteristic of a pidgin, although the latter may emerge out of a system that is ‘unstable both linguistically and socially’: a jargon (Mühlhäusler 1986: 147). Jargons, created and used in an ad hoc manner, show a high degree of lexical and grammatical variation from speaker to speaker. They also have a limited range of functions since they are often used for certain purposes only. A commonly cited example of a jargon (though not an uncontested one: see Romaine 1988: 124) is Russenorsk, once spoken by eighteenth- to early twentieth-century Russian sailors and Norwegian fishermen meeting for trade (on the Arctic coast of northern Norway) in the brief Arctic summer. The two groups therefore met annually for a very short space of time for a very specific purpose. However, in the periods of no contact, each group came to include new members and lose others. Thus, Russenorsk was essentially ‘re-created’ each year (Sebba 1997: 63) for the same purpose. Such reconstitution of the system meant that aspects of its vocabulary, phonology and grammar were changeable, with variation largely being determined by the speaker’s native tongue. For example, a Russian Russenorsk speaker might use I ‘and’, while a Norwegian might use og. Russian lacks the phoneme /h/, and so Russenorsk words with a Norwegian etymology, such as hav ‘sea’, would be pronounced by a Russian Russenorsk speaker as gav. The latter would also reduce Norwegian consonant clusters in accordance with Russian phonotactic rules: mnogo li ‘many’ would become nogoli (Holm 1989: 623–4).

As is evident in the case of Russenorsk speakers, the people who use a jargon need to speak to each other but do not constitute a stable speech community who together develop and share consistent linguistic norms. What they create instead in their jargon is a form of communication which mixes two systems: a secondary hybrid (Whinnom 1971). In biology, a primary hybrid is one which has had an uneventful evolution from one ancestral species; while secondary hybrids are the result of species interbreeding. Linguistics treats many of the world’s languages as primary hybrids. English, for example, is classified as having evolved from West Germanic, which in itself is descended from Proto-Germanic, a daughter of Proto-Indo-European (see the discussion of the family tree model in Section 1.3). A form such as Russenorsk, which ‘interbreeds’ Russian and Norwegian, is therefore linguistically akin to the biological secondary hybrid. According to Whinnom (1971), a major reason why linguistic secondary hybrids, like some of their biological counterparts, are inherently unstable systems is because one set of speakers sees the language of the other group as a target (another name for Russenorsk, for example, is moja pa tuoja ‘me according to you’ or ‘I talk in your way’ (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 167)), but may be unable to have unlimited access to it. Thus Gastarbeiterdeutsch ‘guest-worker German’, which is spoken in Germany by migrant workers from Mediterranean countries, can also be classed as a secondary hybrid. Many of these foreign workers inevitably view German as a target language, given their status as a minority group living and working in that country, but have no means of formally acquiring it. Consequently, their resultant Gastarbeiterdeutsch is viewed by some scholars as a jargon, or a ‘collection of personal “versions” of German showing different degrees of success at second language learning’ by individual migrant workers (Sebba 1997: 80).

It is possible that the social context that gave rise to many of the world’s pidgins and creoles, that of slavery and colonization, also evolved secondary hybrids in early stages of contact. Initial contact between those with socio-political power (in this case, the Europeans: the superstratal group) and those with little or none (such as the African slaves: the substratal group) may have led to a situation where the European language was set up as a ‘model’ for the less powerful. Given the balance of power and the purposes of the slave trade, European traders and slavers would have been unlikely to spend time learning African tongues or teaching their own. They would therefore have used their native European language in communication with the Africans who, in turn, would have had to accommodate to this, all in a context of social distance and undoubted hostility. Thus members of the substratal group would not have had easy access to the superstratal target and, indeed, some may not have fundamentally wanted it. The initial result of such contact, therefore, would very likely have been jargons based heavily on the superstratal language, but which would vary from substratal speaker to speaker, depending on their access to, and motivation to acquire, the presented target.

In some contact situations however, both linguistic and biological, evolution continues with the involvement of other ‘species’. This Whinnom (1971) terms the tertiary hybridization process. In a linguistic setting, this metaphorically refers to the use of the secondary hybrid (or jargon) as a primary means of communication by a group who do not speak the original target language, but who have no other language in common. When this occurs, the jargon has to increase in stability in order to adequately serve the needs of an emerging speech community. Its speakers therefore begin to ‘fix’ their norms of usage.

Stabilization of a jargon, or tertiary hybridization, is under way when the following linguistic processes begin to take place:

• the reduction of variability found in preceding jargon stages;

• the establishment of relatively firm lexical and grammatical conventions;

• the development of grammatical structures independent of possible source languages (that is, the creation of structures not based on those in speakers’ native languages).

(after Mühlhäusler 1986: 176)

We can illustrate this with reference to our example of European–African contact in the context of slavery. It is likely that a jargon was used in the initial contact between European master and African slaves, for specific purposes. However, in certain cases, such as on the sugar and cotton plantations of the New World, substratal groups frequently comprised speakers of different, often mutually unintelligible languages since each plantation owner, working on the premise of ‘no communication, no revolution’, often tried not to buy slaves from the same or related tribes. Slaves were also forbidden, on pain of punishment, from using their native languages once on plantations. Substratal speakers, therefore, had no language in common but were forced to live and work together. Given that the jargon was the only form of communication they had in common, it is highly likely that they began using it amongst themselves and so turned it (perhaps within the course of a generation) into a fairly stable form: a pidgin. The prerequisites for Whinnom’s process of tertiary hybridization are clearly present here: the secondary hybrid (jargon) is turned into a more developed form by a community who do not natively speak the target (superstratal) language, but who are also linguistically diverse.

This tertiary hybrid, the pidgin, is likely to quickly replace the jargon as an auxiliary language between masters and slaves. Like its physical counterpart, the pidgin is a narrow ‘bridge’ that in connecting ‘sides’ (such as substratal speaker ↔ substratal speaker; substratal speaker ↔ superstratal speaker) also highlights the distance and the gap between them. In other words, a pidgin will allow diverse speakers to communicate but the very fact that it needs to be used reflects and maintains the socio-cultural and linguistic differences that obtain among its speakers. This is perhaps most true of substratal ↔ superstratal speaker communication: whereas the pidgin eventually comes to serve a ‘bonding function’ among the members of the substratal community shaping it, who are, after all, sharing a common social experience, it is unlikely to decrease the gap between its respective socially powerful and powerless speakers.

Sebba (1997: 54) states that pidgins, as relatively stable forms, tend to have the following general features.

1 Lack of surface grammatical complexity. Grammatical categories, such as plurals and past tense, for example, will not be signalled in speech. In addition, speakers may use invariant word order, so that questions in an English pidgin, for example, are signalled by intonation rather than by subject–verb inversion (as in You see she? vs Did you see her?). They will also use more coordination of clauses, as opposed to subordination.

2 Lack of morphological complexity. This is linked to the last point. The stock of inflectional morphology (which in many languages allows for plural and tense marking, for example) will be small. Speakers are unlikely to make use of derivational morphological processes (comparable, for example, with the English ‘-er’ suffix that derives nouns from verbs: write → writer).

3 Semantic transparency. Pidgin speakers will make use of compounds where the meanings are signalled quite explicitly by the morphemes used. For example, the equivalent of where in an English pidgin might be what place; of why, what for; of tears, eye-water; of nostril, nose-hole.

4 Vocabulary reduction. The pidgin will have a small stock of lexical items (typically ‘short’ words), including very few function words; that is, items such as pronouns and pre-/post-positions.

Pidgins are therefore not as linguistically complex as other languages. Their ‘minimalist’ structure is one of the reasons why many people think of pidgins as ‘broken’ versions of ‘full’ languages, and has led to their categorization as simple forms of communication. This is actually quite misleading, since simple in linguistics does not denote naivety but instead grammatical regularity. In other words, we could say that a language like English has a simple (or regular) number marking system in that the majority of plural forms are inflected with ‘-s’. Mühlhäusler (1986: 4) therefore suggests that pidgins should alternatively be described as impoverished systems, given their reduced structure.

Despite linguistic impoverishment, however, speakers of stable pidgins will follow norms of usage, though there is likely to be interference from individual native languages. If speakers restrict its use (for example, primarily to, and relaying, the limited communication between masters and slaves), then it will remain impoverished, since the ‘emphasis is on the referential or communicative rather than the expressive function of language’ (Romaine 1988: 24). However, if the majority of its speakers (such as the substratal community) continue to ‘push’ the pidgin, using it in an ever-increasing range of functions, its linguistic resources will also expand simultaneously. This is known as the extension or expansion phase, and it puts the pidgin ‘on course to become a language, with the full referential and expressive capabilities of any other language’ (Sebba 1997: 106). Its speakers may start to use it in new ways such as, for example, story-telling. They will therefore develop its linguistic and stylistic resources, so that it can effectively convey past, present and future imagined events; create colourful imagery and vivid characters; make use of metaphorical language and fulfil genres such as tragedy and romance – all this and more from a system that may have started life as a trading jargon!

Overall, expansion affects every level of structure: in terms of vocabulary and phonology, speakers come to use lexical items that are structurally more complex and to incorporate multifunctional terms (comparable with, for example, English réject_noun/rejéct_verb); in morphology and syntax, the use of derivational and inflectional processes increases, as does that of subordination in utterances, which in itself leads to the development and use of complementizers such as which or that. One of the major consequences of this is that speakers now have a range of stylistic options to choose from and so, essentially, have a language which they can use for a number of functions in many aspects of their daily lives.

At this point, the expanded pidgin is a short step away from becoming a creole and, indeed, many of the former’s linguistic features are also characteristic of creoles. However, one of the crucial differences between the two is that pidgins have no native speakers, while creoles do. Thus, the first generation of an extended pidgin-speaking community that adopts it as its first language are creole-speakers. Interestingly, that creole is still a pidgin for their predecessors, as in the case of Tok Pisin, or New Guinea Pidgin English (Sebba 1997: 107). Pidgin English has been in use in the Pacific islands roughly since the 1700s, and has evolved in different areas (in different socio-historical circumstances) into related pidgins. The New Guinea variety, Tok Pisin, has had a long and gradual evolution through the stabilization and expansion phases. The fact that there are over 750 indigenous languages in Papua New Guinea made Tok Pisin an indispensable lingua franca for a large percentage of the adult population and so fostered its expansion into an extended pidgin. Given its importance in such a multilingual setting, and the fact that it came to function as effectively as a ‘full’ language, Tok Pisin gained social prestige and was even recognized as an official language of the Republic of Papua New Guinea. However, even though it enjoyed (and still enjoys) status as a main language of communication, it was not until the 1960s that it became nativized: children began to acquire Tok Pisin as a first language. Movement of the rural populace into urban areas created families where adults with different native languages set up home together, with the result that Tok Pisin came to be u...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Maps
• 1 Definitions
• 2 Once long ago, not too long ago: theories of genesis
• 3 An’ den de news spread across de Ian’: the creole continuum
• 4 Crick crack, monkey break ‘e back for a piece of pommerac: language planning
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index