Tonogenesis in the Gulf of Guinea Creoles

The origin of the Creole languages from the Gulf of Guinea The aim of this article is to identify the origin of the Portuguese-based Creole languages which developed in the Gulf of Guinea in the 16th century. In order to achieve this aim, we shall analyze the socio-historical as well as lingual conditions in which the creolization process occurred. The archipelago Saints Thomas and Prince was discovered by the Portuguese at the end of the 15th century and was populated by the black slaves originating from the African coasts who spoke different languages mainly representing the groups Kwa and Bantu. Under such favourable conditions, the creolization process quickly took place. As a result the Proto-Creole language developed, out of which slightly later four other Creole languages developed.

The forced migration of millions of Africans during the Atlantic Slave Trade led to the emergence of new genetic and linguistic identities, thereby providing a unique opportunity to study the mechanisms giving rise to human biological and cultural variation. Here we focus on the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, which hosted one of the earliest plantation societies relying exclusively on slave labor. We analyze the genetic variation in 25 individuals from three communities who speak distinct creole languages (Forros, Principenses and Angolares), using genomic data from expanded exomes in combination with a contextual dataset from Europe and Africa, including newly generated data from 28 Bantu speakers from Angola. Our findings show that while all islanders display mixed contributions from the Gulf of Guinea and Angola, the Angolares are characterized by extreme genetic differentiation and inbreeding, consistent with an admixed maroon isolate. In line with a more prominent Bantu contribution to their creole language, we additionally found that a previously reported high-frequency Y-chromosome haplotype in the Angolares has a likely Angolan origin, suggesting that their genetic, linguistic and social characteristics were influenced by a small group of dominant men who achieved disproportionate reproductive success.

Previous studies have suggested a lower incidence of ALS in people of African origin. We used a population based register in an urban setting from inner city London postcodes where there is a large population of people of African ancestry to compare the frequency of ALS in people of European and African origin. Population statistics stratified by age, gender and ethnicity were obtained from the 2001 census. Incidence and prevalence were calculated in each ethnic group. Results showed that in a population of 683,194, of which 22% were of African ancestry, 88 individuals with ALS were identified over a seven-year period, including 14 people with African ancestry. The adjusted incidence in people of African ancestry was 1.35 per 100,000 person-years (95% CI 0.72-2.3) and in those of European ancestry 1.97 per 100,000 person-years (95% CI 1.55-2.48). In conclusion, in this small population based study we could not detect a difference in rates of ALS between people of African ancestry and those of European ancestry.

For the last 500 years, the Americas have been a melting pot both for genetically diverse humans and for the pathogenic and commensal organisms associated with them. One such organism is the stomach-dwelling bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which is highly prevalent in Latin America where it is a major current public health challenge because of its strong association with gastric cancer. By analyzing the genome sequence of H. pylori isolated in North, Central and South America, we found evidence for admixture between H. pylori of European and African origin throughout the Americas, without substantial input from pre-Columbian (hspAmerind) bacteria. In the US, strains of African and European origin have remained genetically distinct, while in Colombia and Nicaragua, bottlenecks and rampant genetic exchange amongst isolates have led to the formation of national gene pools. We found three outer membrane proteins with atypical levels of Asian ancestry in American strains, as well as alleles that were nearly fixed specifically in South American isolates, suggesting a role for the ethnic makeup of hosts in the colonization of incoming strains. Our results show that new H. pylori subpopulations can rapidly arise, spread and adapt during times of demographic flux, and suggest that differences in transmission ecology between high and low prevalence areas may substantially affect the composition of bacterial populations.

Santomense originated on the island of São Tomé (Gulf of Guinea) at the beginning of the 16th century out of the contact between Portuguese and West African languages, especially from Nigeria and Angola. Contrarily to what has been claimed until now, I believe that Santomense is a tonal language with two tones, H and L, whereby some low tones might be better defined as neutral. In Santomense, tone is used for lexical distinctions, but also for grammatical purposes, especially for the distinction between nouns and verbs. As all of the known substrate languages of Santomense are tonal, there is no doubt that the origin of the tonal system of Santomense lies in the substrate languages. However, more research is needed in order to find out how Santomense’s tonal system functions and how this system is related to the system of one or more of its substrate languages.

Creole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung’Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-based creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung’Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory. Since rising and falling tones are contrastive on long vowels, the tone must be marked underlyingly. While it is clear that tonal indications are needed, Lung’Ie reveals two properties more expected of an accentual system: (i) there can only be one heavy syllable per word; (ii) this syllable must bear a H tone. This raises the question of whether syllables with a culminative H also have metrical prominence, i.e. stress. However, the problem with equating stress with H tone is that Lung’Ie has two kinds of nouns: those with a culminative H and those which are toneless. The nouns with culminative H are 87% of Portuguese origin, incorporated through stress-to-tone alignment, while the toneless ones are 92% of African origin. Although other creole languages have been reported with split systems of “accented” vs. fully specified tonal lexemes, and others with mixed systems of tone and stress, Lung’Ie differs from these cases in treating African origin words as toneless, a quite surprising result. We consider different analyses and conclude that Lung’Ie has a privative /H/ tone system with the single unusual stress-like property of weight-to-tone.

Creole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung’Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-lexifier creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung’Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory. Since rising and falling tones are contrastive on long vowels, the tone must be marked underlyingly. While it is clear that tonal indications are needed, Lung’Ie reveals two properties more expected of an accentual system: (i) there can only be one heavy syllable per word; (ii) this syllable must bear a H tone. This raises the question of whether syllables with a culminative H also have metrical prominence, i.e. stress. However, the problem with equating stress with H tone is that Lung’Ie has two kinds of nouns: those with a culminative H and those which are toneless. The nouns with culminative H are 87% of Portuguese origin, incorporated through stress-to-tone alignment, while the toneless ones are 92% of African origin. Although other creole languages have been reported with split systems of “accented” vs. fully specified tonal lexemes, and others with mixed systems of tone and stress, Lung’Ie differs from these cases in treating African origin words as toneless, a quite surprising result. We consider different analyses and conclude that Lung’Ie has a privative /H/ tone system with the single unusual stress-like property of weight-to-tone.

Neste artigo, investigaremos os processos morfológicos de itens lexicais nas línguas crioulas de base portuguesa do Golfo da Guiné e no kabuverdianu. Segundo McWhorter (1998), as línguas crioulas são mais simples do que as línguas não crioulas. De forma análoga, Thomason (2001) apresenta a hipótese da transparência semântica, segundo a qual nos casos em que a morfologia aparece em pidgins e crioulos (algo que não é comum), ela tende a ser regular, transparente, sem as irregularidades comumente encontradas em línguas não crioulas. A despeito desses estudos e de outros que descrevem os mecanismos gramaticais dos crioulos como “simples” e “sem complexidades”, apresentaremos dados que comprovam o uso variado de recursos morfológicos autóctones das línguas estudadas para a criação de novos itens lexicais.

This article deals centrally with the role that creole languages can be expected to play in four West Indian territories : The Dutch Antilles, Guadeloupe, Saint-Lucia and Haiti. Creole languages are defined on the basis of their origin from a pidginized variety of a West-European language in a situation of language contact and from their current socio-linguistic status in communities where they are spoken. While creole languages share with substandard varieties of such languages of culture as French or English an inferior status vis-à-vis the standard dialect, they can be distinguished from substandard varieties by the special circumstances of their genesis. Can a creole language attain a status equal to that of the official language with which it coexists today ? To answer this question for the four territories selected, four sets of criteria are posited : (1) Intensity of use of the Creole as reflected by the percentage of speakers ; (2) attitude of authorities — proscription or toleration ; (3) attitude of monolingual speakers and members of the bilingual elite toward the creole and degree of loyalty toward the creole and the official language ; (4) absence of a linguistic gradient between the creole and the official language. These criteria make possible predictions about the amount of language engineering undertaken in behalf of the creole, and it comes as no surprise that only in the Dutch Antilles and Haiti have the creole languages been endowed with a relatively stable orthography, for instance. Because of economic conditions that result in very low percentages of school attendance by children and, consequently, in a high proportion of creole monolinguals, it is only in Haiti that the creole may be expected to displace, or at least attain equal status with, the official language, French. But this new role will require, in addition to recognition of Haitian Creole as an official language and normalization of the orthography, extensive standardization. The establishment of a standard norm will require more rigorous observation of the sociolinguistic setting of creole in Haiti and of the attitude of various types of speakers toward geographical and social dialects.

In this article, I analyse the word-prosodic system of Drubea and Numèè, two of the rare tonal Oceanic languages. Building on Rivierre’s (1973) seminal work, I show that the word-prosodic system of these two languages can be analysed as involving only register features: an underlying downstep and a postlexical epenthetic upstep. Drubea and Numèè are thus tonal languages without tones stricto sensu. This new type of word-prosodic system has both theoretical and typological implications: (i) register features, defined as in Snider’s (1999) Register Tier Theory, need not be subordinate to or associated with tones, and may exist in the absence of tone, including in underlying representation; (ii) tonal systems come in two types: tone-based systems in which the tonal contrasts are defined paradigmatically, as in most tone languages, and register-based systems where tonal contrasts are defined syntagmatically, as in Drubea and Numèè.

Background and aimsHelicobacter pylori colonises the stomach in half of all humans, and is the principal cause of gastric cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death worldwide. While gastric...

This article examines how Asian and African Jews who immigrated to Israel adjusted their sex preferences to a modern Israeli society without preferences. Most immigrants of Asian and African origins arrived in Israel during the late 1940s and 1950s. Findings indicate that earlier Jewish marriage cohorts of North African and Middle Eastern origin had clear preferences for male children. Data were obtained from a 1974-75 fertility survey among a random sample of married urban Jewish women aged 18-54 years. The sample is divided into women who married before and after 1960. Hazard analyses of the initiation of contraceptive use or abortion reveals that women of Asian or African origin who married before 1960 and had a parity of 4 and mostly boys were 4 times more likely to use birth control than women with more girls. Women with balanced sex ratios of boys and girls were 6 times more likely to use birth control as women with more girls than boys. Women with 4 or more children and mostly boys were less likely to have a fifth child than women with 4 children and mostly girls. Asian or African origin women born after 1960 had lower fertility than women born before 1960. Contraceptive use among women with two children was unrelated to son preference. There was evidence of a preference for a balanced sex composition among European or American origin women in earlier or later marriage cohorts. It is concluded that son preference changed as part of the immigrants social adjustment to their new socioeconomic and cultural living conditions.

This chapter provides an overview of diachronic studies and data sources focusing on three Creole languages: Sranan, Cabo Verdean, and Haitian Creole. Our main objective is to encourage diachronic research on Creole languages by highlighting available data sources and studies that have used diachronic data judiciously to explore the developmental processes shaping Creole languages. Despite the scarcity of historical documentation regarding the exact demographics of the populations involved in the genesis of these Creoles, scholars have carefully examined diverse sources such as court records, governmental proclamations, and plays, not only to unveil the developmental paths of particular linguistic features but also to identify the original agents of creolization and the languages they spoke. As we review the scholarship on the diachrony of Creoles, it becomes evident that, like other natural languages in contact situations, Creoles undergo both contact‐induced change (involving substratal transfer, for instance) and language‐internal development (including grammaticalization), leading to linguistic innovations that make Creoles stand independently from their source languages.

Recent reports have suggested that leprosy originated in Africa, extended to Asia and Europe, and arrived in the Americas during European colonization and the African slave trade. Due to colonization, the contemporary Colombian population is an admixture of Native-American, European and African ancestries. Because microorganisms are known to accompany humans during migrations, patterns of human migration can be traced by examining genomic changes in associated microbes. The current study analyzed 118 leprosy cases and 116 unrelated controls from two Colombian regions endemic for leprosy (Atlantic and Andean) in order to determine possible associations of leprosy with patient ancestral background (determined using 36 ancestry informative markers), Mycobacterium leprae genotype and/or patient geographical origin. We found significant differences between ancestral genetic composition. European components were predominant in Andean populations. In contrast, African components were higher in the Atlantic region. M. leprae genotypes were then analyzed for cluster associations and compared with the ancestral composition of leprosy patients. Two M. leprae principal clusters were found: haplotypes C54 and T45. Haplotype C54 associated with African origin and was more frequent in patients from the Atlantic region with a high African component. In contrast, haplotype T45 associated with European origin and was more frequent in Andean patients with a higher European component. These results suggest that the human and M. leprae genomes have co-existed since the African and European origins of the disease, with leprosy ultimately arriving in Colombia during colonization. Distinct M. leprae strains followed European and African settlement in the country and can be detected in contemporary Colombian populations.

The history of race in the nineteenth-century United States is often told as a story of black and white in the South, and white and Indian in the West, with little attention to the intersection between black and Indian. This article explores the history of nineteenth-century America's “little races”—racially ambiguous communities of African, Indian, and European origin up and down the eastern seaboard. These communities came under increasing pressure in the years leading up to the Civil War and in its aftermath to fall on one side or the other of a black-white color line. Drawing on trial records of cases litigating the racial identity of the Melungeons of Tennessee, the Croatans/Lumbee of North Carolina, and the Narragansett of Rhode Island, this article looks at the differing paths these three groups took in the face of Jim Crow: the Melungeons claiming whiteness; the Croatans/Lumbee asserting Indian identity and rejecting association with blacks; the Narragansett asserting Indian identity without rejecting their African origins. Members of these communities found that they could achieve full citizenship in the U.S. polity only to the extent that they abandoned their self-governance and distanced themselves from people of African descent.