Modeling the emergence of contact languages.

Francesca Tria,Vito D.P Servedio,Vittorio Loreto,Salikoko S Mufwene

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0120771

Abstract

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.

Highlights

By definition, one speaks of contact languages [1,2,3] whenever more than one language are in use in the same place, at the same time, and within the same collective population [2]
In the framework of our modeling scheme, we can study how the languages spoken by Mulattos and Bozal evolve in time, and which language will be adopted by the two populations. (Recall that Europeans will not change their language E.) We found that in all the situations either E or C dominates, while A—the substrate language—is never able to spread in the population, due to fractionalization among the African languages. (See the S1 Supporting Information for conditions under which A can dominate, when the same African language is shared by a sufficiently large part of the Bozal slave population.)
We introduced a modeling scheme to investigate the emergence of creole languages in ecologies where language mixing occurred through the interactions of colonizers with slaves, and among the latter, with the Mulattoes/Creoles typically playing an important role in seasoning the Bozal slaves

Summary

Introduction

One speaks of contact languages [1,2,3] whenever more than one language are in use in the same place, at the same time, and within the same collective population [2]. The particular economic poverty conditions of creole language areas (e.g. Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana, Sierra Leone, Cape Verde, etc.) have historically contributed to considering these vernaculars as degenerate outcomes of European languages and to studying them from the perspective of “creole exceptionalism” [18] (i.e., they evolved in their own unusual or exceptional way compared to other languages considered more normal) Such ecological specificities, in regard to which even creoles differ among themselves, do not mitigate the fact that the process of language formation applying to creoles is far more general. These are the languages that the Africans brought with them but could not maintain because they found themselves in ecologies that disfavored their use

Materials and Methods

Results

Discussion