L'émergence des parlers créoles et l'évolution des langues romanes

Abstract

In this article, I revisit two apparently conflicting positions about similarities between the emergence of French creoles and that of the Romance languages. According to Schlieben-Lange (1977), the Romance languages are outcomes of language contact and are creole-like, whereas Faine (1937), Hall (1958), Posner (1985), and Trask (1996) argue that French creoles may be considered as new Romance language varieties. I submit that the positions are reconcilable, insofar as both creoles and the Romance languages emerged under conditions of vernacular shift, by majority populations, to a colonial language; the substrate languages appear to have exerted significant influence on the restructuring of the lexifier; and the latter was likely quite diverse and was diverging structurally from the metropolitan varieties by some sort of protracted basilectalization. On the other hand, the Romance languages appear to have diverged more extensively from their lexifier than the creoles have. However, these are not sufficient reasons for claiming that the Romance languages are also creoles. Whether or not French creoles should be considered new French dialects also depends on what their native speakers claim, not on what linguists think, based on mutual intelligibility. We learn instead that similar contact ecologies are likely to foster similar structural changes in the language being appropriated by an alloglot population. We must indeed bear in mind that the Romance languages emerged in endogenous settings and really after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, whereas the creoles did in exogenous ones; and we have no idea how they will evolve a thousand years from now, subject to unpredictable political and economic conditions.