SOCIOLINGUISTICS - Unit 7

SOCIOLINGUISTICS
UNIT 7
TRƯƠNG VĂN ÁNH
TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SÀI GÒN
UNIT 7: CREOLES AND CREOLIZATION
I. INTRODUCTION
A pidgin develops and becomes the variety of language which is used by parents whose children grow up in the environment of pidgin and acquire it as the first language. Gradually, a pidgin becomes a creole or it may be said that the process of creolization takes place. A creole is the native or first language of some of its speakers – the children of people having made use of a pidgin for a long time. Creoles are languages of circumstance. They come into being as forms which have become acceptable





because in the communication process it seems the best possible way of getting the people together. The concept, nature and processes of creolisation in sociolinguistics will be observed and examined. No matter what origin it is, a pidgin which is generally acknowledged is almost always involved in the earliest stage of a creole. The pidgin comes about from the need to communicate, particularly when those who need to communicate using a variety of languages. Then a creole comes into being. However, not every pidgin eventually becomes a creole, i.e., undergoes the process of creolization. In fact, very few do.





II. GENERAL OVERVIEW
Having done research on pidgins and creoles, linguists have discovered that pidginization can occur quickly in the early stage. The processes of relexification and simplification of complex grammar also seems to be very rapid. Conversely, creolization can take at least two generations (Parents who develop a pidgin and children who acquire a creole as their first language). The particular mixture of language and social contact that gives rise to pidgins and creoles seems also to have occurred frequently in the history of the human races.







A creole is a stable language that originates seemingly as a common-used pidgin. This comprehending of creole’s genesis culminated in notions of the pidgin-creole life cycle. It is argued that creoles share more lexical and grammatical similarities with each other than with the native languages. Up to now it has been too difficult for linguists to form a theory to explain creole phenomena universally acceptably. No theory can be found successfully to cover the rules to regulate and form grammatical features (or sets of features) which are exclusive to creoles so far.





The notion of creolisation initially became significant, after Columbus discovered the Americas, to describe the process by which Old World life forms became indigenous in the New World. Nowadays, the global population has increased and the need of communication and contact between peoples develops greatly. Therefore the ‘creolisation’ appears and speeds all ove the worlds. Creolisation does not refer centrally to mixture or combination, but only to the new adaptation of human beings in a new environment.






The linguists from many fields such as historians of science/medicine, linguistics, anthropology, and literary/cultural studies get together to define creole and creolisation. They have raised a lot of questions: Does a creole relate to a land where it appears? Does a creole affect and harm the native language of people in the community? When do creoles renounce the homeland, claim independence, or become so utterly different from the native language? Can people eliminate a creole?



The following list of features of a Creole has been proposed:
i) no inflectional morpheme (or no more than two or three affixes added to words)
ii) only monotonous syllables
iii) no opaque context when people contact each other
It is assumed that a creole is a language with these three features, and every creole must have these three features. However, linguists have been against this hypothesis of the creole features in two different perspectives:
a) It is discussed that languages such as Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, French, German, etc. have all these three features, but they are natural languages or native languages. These languages indicate none of the socio-historic traits of creoles.
b) Many other linguists have listed one or the other creole language with one of the three features.


III. HISTORY OF CREOLES
The term creole derives from French créole, from Spanish criollo, and from Portuguese crioulo, having stem from the verb criar (‘to breed’) from the Portuguese, or creare from Latin (`to produce, create`). The term was invented in the sixteenth century during the great development of European maritime power and trade and the establishment of European colonies in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania. Indigenous people born in the areas are called creoles be different from the upper-class European-born immigrants. Therefore, “Creole




language” came from the speech of those Creole peoples.
As a result of colonial European trade types, many creole languages are found all over the world. Creoles were mixtures of European languages with substrate elements from Africa, Indian Ocean Creoles languages. It is excitedly debated to identify the significant substrate features in the genesis or the description of creoles.
According to their external history, there are four types of creoles: plantation creoles, fort creoles,



maroon creoles, and creolised pidgins. Concerning their internal history, two preconceived assumptions are adduced: Creoles show more internal varieties; Creoles are simpler than native languages. Because European colonial powers generally looked down on the Creole peoples, creole languages have generally been regarded as substandard or rudimentary dialects of one of their parent languages. This is the reason why “creole” has come to be used in opposition to “language” rather than a qualifier for it. In the late 19th century, linguistics took a great step when new linguistic theories came into





existence in order to shape new rules on morphology, syntax, semantics and other branches of linguistics. At that time, it was generally thought that under the influence of new discovery in the linguistics, creoles could not be formed and develop in the world or at least, they could not grow as quickly as they had before.
However, creoles evolved very fast not only in European colonies but also in modern societies such as Europe, Asia and Americas.


From that time on global linguists have encouraged and developed creole into a new branch of linguistics, creolistics so that they can promulgate the idea that creole languages are not inferior to other languages. Then “creole” or “creole language” has undergone creolisation in the way that there have been no geographic restrictions or ethnic prejudice.
Thanks to the social, political, and academic changes, creole languages have overcome a revival in recent years. Writers and journalists have applied them to literature and media more and more increasingly, and they have occupied a


prestigious in the world. Linguists have studied them as languages on their own. As a result, creoles have already been academic, and are now taught in schools and universities the world over.



IV. THEORIES OF CREOLES
Nowadays a variety of theories on the origin of creole languages have been coined in order to attempt to explain the similarities among them. Three linguists, Arends, Muysken and Smith, outline a fourfold classification of explanations concerning creole genesis: (1) Theories on European input (2) Theories on non-European input (3) Gradualist and developmental hypotheses (4) Universalist approaches. These theories have been examined as below:
A. Theories on European input
1. The mono-original theory of pidgins and creoles
The theory suggests a hypothesis on a single origin for creoles and pidgins, deriving them through relexification from a West African Pidgin Portuguese of the 17th century and finally from the lingua franca of the Mediterranean area.
In the late 19th century the linguists formed the theories and in the late 1950s and early 1960s they became popular.
2. The Domestic Hypothesis
Hancock (1985) proposed the Domestic Hypothesis for the development of a local form of English in West Africa. In the Origin Hypothesis it is argued that at the end of the 16th century, from
the mixtures of peoples of different races pidgins appeared in many areas. Later on the English creoles emerged and became universal in these areas.
3. European dialect origin hypotheses
Languages such as French, English, Spanish, Russian, etc. have affected other languages and coined new creoles in many parts of the world. For example, the French creoles appears in French colonies, Canada (mostly in Québec), the Prairies, Louisiana, Saint-Barthélemy in the United States of America; the English creoles in Philippines, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, South

Africa; the Spanish creoles in Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia. Descendants of the non-creole have used these languages until now.
4. Foreigner Talk or Baby Talk
It is hypothesized that foreigner talk (FT) comes from the fact that a pidgin or creole language are formed when native languages are simplified in order to address speakers who do not know them at all. The conversations from these creoles and pidgins are usually directed at children, so this phenomenon is also sometimes called baby talk.
B: Theories on non-European input
Pidgins and creoles developed from the substrate
languages based on the similarities amongst creoles and African substrate languages. It is often assumed that these features are transferred from the substrate language to the creole or to be preserved invariant from the substrate language, in the creole through a process of relexification: the native lexical items are replaced with lexical material from the superstrate language; however, the native grammatical categories are retained. According to Bickerton, the number and diversity of African languages and the paucity of a historical record on creole genesis makes corresponding lexis.





Dillard discovered the term “cafeteria principle” to refer to the practice of arbitrarily attributing features of creoles to affect the substrate African languages or classified substandard dialects of the languages in Europe.
C: Gradualist and developmental hypotheses
Pidgins as rudimentary second languages improvised for use between speakers in trading and communicating lead to the start of creoles. According to Keith Whinnom (in Hymes (1971)), pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the





others. The lexis of a creole is usually small and drawn from the vocabulary of its speakers, in varying proportions. The tendency of morphological simplification usually takes years to take place; creole syntax becomes very simple ultimately. In the beginning, the variation of all aspects of the speech – syntax, lexicon, and pronunciation – occurs, especially concerning the speakers` background.
Naturally, a pidgin might be developed to a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and embedded syntax when children learn it officially. That is a pidgin can






become a full language as a native. A creole is developed in the second stage. Then the vocabulary will be expanded according to a rational and stable system. These words are based on the formation processes between the languages.
D: Universalist Approaches
All the parts of language such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse, etc. have been evolved from generation to generation and from speaker to speaker via universal approaches. This is processes of variation where





languages experience the changes towards more and more simplified forms in every aspect of language. Bickerton’s work suggested the main source for the universalist approach. His statement is that creoles are inventions of the children growing up on newly founded colonies. Then children learn pidgins spoken around them and they used their own innate linguistic capacities to adapt the pidgins into their new full languages – creoles.







In the last decade some new approaches to creole studies have appeared, which makes more contribution to the complicated question of creoles named exceptional languages.








V. LEVELS OF CREOLES
To label the source and the target languages of a creole, linguists use the terms substratum and superstratum. A native language is defined as a substrate, while the other which is another language is called a superstrate. In communications the speakers of the substrate will be speaking a version of the superstrate, usually in more formal contexts. In the conversations the substrate is considered a second language or non- official language. Under the influence of the superstrate on the official






speech, usually limited to pronunciation and a modest number of loanwords, gradually parts of the substrate might even disappear altogether with leaving no trace.
These terms, however, are not very meaningful where the emerging language is refined from multiple substrata and a homogeneous superstratum. The continuum of substratum-superstratum process becomes slow when multiple superstrata develop very fast and when the substratum is very slow, or when the substratal evidence is thought mere typological






similarities. The process undergoes two stages: the substratum as the receding or already replaced source language and the superstratum as the replacing dominant target language clearly identified. Then the superstratum has made some respective contributions to the resulting compromise language which can be weighed in a scientifically meaningful way.
With Asian Creoles, “superstrate” usually means American or European and “substrate” non-American or non-European or Asian. A post-






creole continuum is considered to take place in a context of decreolisation where a creole is under the pressure from its superstrate language. The users of the creole will be forced to be against their language to superstrate usage on a large scale of variation and hypercorrection.







VI. CONCLUSION
The controversy of the linguistic matter is the creoleness of a particular creole. Under the influence of pidgins the parent tongues may themselves become creoles when pidgins have disappeared. When a language should be classified as an “English creole”, “French creole”, “Russian creole”, “Spanish creole”, “Arabic creole”, “Chinese creole”, “Portuguese creole” etc., it often has no definitive answer, and can become the topic of long-lasting controversies. It is said that social prejudices and political point of views may affect







scientific discussions. When creole languages are different from other languages, they should have a set of features which clearly make them different from “other” languages. Although several characteristics have been suggested, linguists have no uncontestable unique creole features true of all (or most) creole languages, in fact, true of all separate languages. So far linguists have not proposed such features necessary and sufficient to distinguish creole languages from non-creole languages.







VI. SUMMARY
Sociolinguists have regarded creole grammars as the world`s simplest grammars, but they have not regarded them as the simplest languages. It is the lack of progressive creoles morphology and syntax that has led to question the value of Creole as a typological class. Creole languages are not different from any other language in structure. In fact, it is a socio- historic concept encompassing displaced population and slavery. The difference is that a creole is not a genetic language because the language shift has no normal transmission. Linguists have questioned the abnormal







transmission of creole languages. The controversy of creoleness has been on both morpho-syntactic and evolutionary grounds. Many publications are against creoles when it is argued that it is only history that changes languages into potential creoles.
VII. EXERCISES
1. Are there any creoles in Vietnam?
2. What are the three features of a creole?
3. In how many different perspectives have linguists been against this hypothesis of the creole features?
4. How many types of creoles are there according to their external history?
5. Do creoles evolve only in colonies?
6. What are the theories of creoles?





Good luck!