Creole Genesis Research Articles

Guyanais vs. Gardiol: Broken transmission vs. grammatical continuity

Inherent to the debate on creole genesis is the question of grammatical continuity between creoles and their lexifier languages. This issue, in turn, relates to the disputed claim that creoles descend from pidgins: proponents of that claim postulate a negligible degree of grammatical transmission from the lexifier into the creole and no genetic relatedness between them; opponents claim the reverse. To shed light on the issue, this article compares two contact varieties (Guyanais, a French-lexified creole, and Gardiol, a diaspora variety of Occitan) to their respective lexifiers. The comparison shows that although Guyanais and Gardiol can both be called contact varieties, the latter has clearly inherited the grammar of its lexifier, whereas the former gives the appearance of a break in transmission, as predicted by the pidgin-creole cycle theory.

Testing the effects of congruence in adult multilingual acquisition with implications for creole genesis

Linguists from across sub-disciplines have noted that congruence (i.e., form-function mapping) across languages in contact seems to affect acquisition and play a role in language emergence (e.g. Creole genesis). However, because congruence is often confounded with other variables (e.g., frequency, language type, speakers' proficiency levels, perceptual salience, semantic transparency), it remains unclear whether congruence per se benefits learners. In this paper, we provide an experimental test of the effects of congruence on acquisition through an artificial language-learning experiment involving English (L1) and two artificial languages (Flugerdu and Zamperese). English-speakers who identified as “native” (i.e., first-language) speakers (N = 163) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, varying which of the three languages expressed negation with congruent forms: all three languages; only Flugerdu and Zamperese; only English and Flugerdu; or none. Our findings show that participants better acquired the negation morpheme when the form was congruent with negation in English but not when the two artificial languages alone shared a congruent form. We likewise found unanticipated spillover effects in which participants better acquired the vocabulary and grammar of the artificial languages when all three languages had congruent negation forms. These findings provide insight into the effects of congruence on language acquisition in multilingual environments and Creole language formation.

Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region by Norma Rosas Mayén

Reviewed by: Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region by Norma Rosas Mayén Álvaro Ramírez Rosas Mayén, Norma. Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region. Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2021. Pp. 189. ISBN: 978-84-9192-170-7. The Afro-Mexican population of the Costa Chica region of southern Mexico, that unjustly remained invisible since the end of the colonial period, has lately drawn the attention of scholars, generating many ethnological and anthropological monographs. Norma Rosas Mayén’s Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region is the latest study that brings to light the rich cultural landscape of this geographical area. She, however, shifts the focus to the linguistic heritage found among the Black population of Collantes and La Boquilla in the state of Oaxaca, two of the nearly thirty-seven Afro-Mexican towns of Costa Chica which straddles the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. The book comprises six chapters and an appendix. The first three chapters center on socio-historical, theoretical, and methodological matters. While the last three take up the analysis of linguistic data the author gathered during her field work. In the opening chapter, Rosas Mayén lays out a brief history of the presence of Afro-Mexican Spanish in Mexico, emphasizing our lack of knowledge concerning the language of the slave population due to their oral tradition and illiteracy. The few written examples that exist come from colonial legal documents and literary texts such as “villancicos” written by writers from the dominant class, perhaps as imitations that ridiculed the language of the slaves. Nonetheless, the author is interested in exploring the degree to which a creolized variety of Spanish existed and whether there are remnants in Mexico. Additionally, Rosas Mayén cites the urgency of researching and recording this Spanish dialect as globalization and migration are quickly transforming the linguistic characteristics that define “el español negro de la Costa Chica.” Like many other Indigenous languages in Mexico, she believes this Afro-Mexican Spanish is in danger of extinction. In Chapter 2, “Creole Genesis and the Rhizomatic Linguistic Model,” the author briefly reviews seven theories of the etiology of Creole languages highlighting their theoretical advantages and disadvantages. She underscores the lack of agreement among scholars on the genesis of Creole; then, moves on to postulate theories that explicate the absence of creolized Spanish in the colonies. Next, she traces the socio-historical trajectory of Papiamentu in Curaçao concluding that it is a Creole language that emerged from a mixture of Portuguese and other languages in West Africa. From there, it migrated to Curaçao with the slaves, New Christians, and Sephardic Jews, where it was lexified toward Spanish. Rosas Mayén finishes by positing a view of language based on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizome theory. She proposes that languages exist in a rhizomatic ecological system that privileges a horizontal structure of connections linking them all together. Thus, allowing for linguistic development with multiple points of connection. Rosas Mayén proposes that this model can best help appreciate the multilinguistic origins of Papiamentu and other Afro-Spanish varieties such as those found in la Costa Chica. [End Page 641] In the following chapter, “Methodological and Historical Remarks,” the author refers to the scarcity of studies of Afro-Mexican Spanish in the Costa Chica. Then she presents a thorough explanation of the methodology she employed in her study and a description of the subjects and geographical area where she conducted her research. She closes by giving a brief history of the Afro-Mexicans in Oaxaca. Interestingly, Rosas Mayén contrasts the folkloric version the people tell of their arrival on a ship from where they claim to descend, and the quasi-historical information known. In this point she appears to contradict herself when she asserts Blacks arrived from West Africa, yet later she posits that scholars have not been able to specify exactly from where Afro-Mexicans of this region originate. Chapter 4, “Phonological Characteristics of Costeño Spanish,” details the sounds that distinguish this costal variety of Spanish. Rosas Mayén notes an...

Negation and its bearing on creole genesis

For the past 20 years, the question of a ˋˋcreole prototype'' has been at the center of heated debates. Among features that are claimed to be typical of creole formation is the placement of negation, which usually appears preceding tense, aspect and mood markers (e.g. McWhorter 2018). In this paper, I examine diachronic data, in particular, French compound tenses and show that the position of negation in at least French-related creoles is nothing but the result of regular grammaticalization given input. As such the expression of negation typically exemplifies coalescence of the already grammaticalized negator pas into an inflectional exponent in the creoles.

Competition, selection, and the role of congruence in Creole genesis and development: Supplemental materials: Online appendices

Competition, selection, and the role of congruence in Creole genesis and development: Supplemental materials: Online appendices

Competition, selection, and the role of congruence in Creole genesis and development

Competition, selection, and the role of congruence in Creole genesis and development

What multiethnolects reveal about creole genesis

Abstract Recent theories of creole genesis propose that creole languages did not emerge via the expansion of pidgin varieties (DeGraff, 2001; Mufwene, 2001, 2008). This paper argues that the multiethnolects that have formed in many European cities constitute a demonstration case of the genesis scenario these new creolist theories reconstruct. Crucially, however, the multiethnolects, while displaying a modest degree of grammatical simplification and restructuring, exhibit this to nothing approaching the degree that creoles do. This supports the idea that creoles form from a break in transmission rather than simply hybridization.

Bilingual children as “laboratories” for studying contact outcomes: Development of perfective aspect

AbstractThis paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of ‘already’ into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still serve as powerful “laboratories” for studying contact outcomes at the communal level.

Non-French lexicon in Guianese French Creole

AbstractGuianese French Creole1(GFC) is one of the least studied French Creoles, which is especially true with respect to its non-French-related input. Combining sociohistorical, demographic and linguistic data, this contribution gives a first lexico-etymological account of the GFC lexicon of non-French origin, including Amerindian and Portuguese influences and especially the quantitative and qualitative nature of the contribution made by different Niger-Congo languages. These findings are discussed in light of controversial hypotheses on the particular influence of early numerical and/or socially dominant ethnolinguistic groups on the creole lexicon (i.e.Baker 2012), as well as with regard to word classes and semantic domains to which the different groups contributed. Whereas Gbe and non-Gbe languages clearly diverge with regard to their semantic contribution, the early dominance of presumably Gbe-speaking slaves in French Guiana is not reflected in the numerical proportion of Gbe-related lexical items in GFC, at least on the basis of my still limited data. This study thus tentatively confirms the lesser explanatory power of the lexicon for creole genesis scenarios and points to the fact that sub- or adstrate-related lexical items may have taken very complex etymological routes, which clearly need further study.

Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches ed. by Peter Bakker et al.

Reviewed by: Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches ed. by Peter Bakker et al. John McWhorter Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches. Ed. by Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen, and Eeva Sippola. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. Pp. 414. ISBN 978902721249. $143 (Hb). Creole studies has a well-deserved reputation, well known even to linguists with no special interest in the area, of being highly contentious. Many are aware that the main disagreement in our time is no longer over whether universals (Bickerton 1981) or substrate contributions (Holm 1988) were most important in creole genesis—a major debate in the 1980s into the 1990s—but over whether creoles constitute a type of language at all. Influential publications by Mufwene (2001, 2008), DeGraff (2001a), and more recently Aboh (2015) argue that creolization is simply a kind of language hybridization, qualitatively indistinct from that which produced Romanian or Yiddish, especially considering that second language acquisition, while clearly important in creole genesis, is hardly irrelevant to the histories of perhaps most languages. The idea is that the classification of creoles as a kind of language, born from a radical break in transmission such as pidginization, has been an impressionistic reification, informed by racism and colonialism, and unmoored from the procedures of modern science. The work chronicled in Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches serves as a counterpoint to this tempting reconception of creole studies and language contact. While other studies have attempted to demonstrate that creoles are unique in combining certain features (McWhorter 2011, 2018, Daval-Markussen 2013), this book evidences a computational phylogenetic approach to the question, in line with an approach increasingly de rigueur in linguistic work overall. Presenting the work of a project overseen by Peter Bakker at Aarhus University, this volume now stands as a key statement in the debate over the nature of creole languages. Claims that creoles are not a kind of language will henceforth qualify as incomplete without engagement with the works in this book. The phylogenetic approach tabulates a set of features in a range of languages and then represents the data in diagrams generated by programs such as SplitsTree (Huson & Bryant 2006), graphically revealing clusterings between languages. According to the commonly asserted idea that creoles are not a kind of language, creole languages should not cluster together in diagrams like these. This computational approach, presumably, should show creoles distributed randomly amid other languages, with the folly in the supposed essentialization of creoles duly and conclusively revealed. But this is not the case, and this volume collects a now imposing amount of evidence in illustration. After three introductory chapters summarizing the general project outlined in the book, creole genesis theories past and present, and the phylogenetic approach, Ch. 4 and Ch. 6 neatly communicate, through various experiments published previously, the weight of evidence in support of the claim that creoles do constitute a structural type of language. Bakker, Daval-Markussen, Parkvall, and Plag (2011) began with the data in Holm & Patrick 2007, comparing ninety-seven features from eighteen creoles. They winnowed that set of features down to sixty-nine, eliminating those not shared by two thirds of the creoles. Phylogenetic analysis shows that in these features, regardless of their lexical base, creoles cluster quite clearly compared to other languages—that is, that there are indeed features typical of creole languages (123). It is reasonable to wonder whether the 'creole' features in question are simply those of analytic languages in general. However, in Ch. 4, Peter Bakker, Eeva Sippola, and Finn Borchsenius find the same result when creoles are compared only with analytic languages (72). Parkvall (2008) compared forty-three complexity-gradient structures from The world atlas of language structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) in order to avoid possible bias in proceeding from a source like Holm & Patrick 2007, which is focused on features common in creoles. Parkvall's study compared, on the [End Page 710] basis of these features, 188 creoles and older languages, and the creoles clustered similarly. This supports the claim that creoles display less grammatical complexity than older languages, presumably due to their ancestry in broken transmission and pidgins (123). Further chapters strengthen the...

Chocó Spanish and the Missing Spanish Creole debate

AbstractThis study offers a linguistic and sociohistorical analysis of Chocó Spanish (CS), an Afro-Hispanic variety spoken in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work in gold mines during the colonial era. This research also tackles the many questions arising from the much-debated origins of the Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs) (McWhorter 2000;Lipski 2005). It provides an account of the evolution of CS that is rooted in the recently proposed Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (Sessarego 2015,2017a). In so doing, this article tests to what extent such a hypothesis makes valid predictions for a variety like CS, which developed in a region described by many as ‘remote’ and ‘on the frontier’ (cf.Whitten 1974;Sharp 1976), thus far away from legal courts and where law was not likely to be properly enforced.

On the importance of legal history to Afro-Hispanic linguistics and creole studies

This paper claims that legal history has much to offer to the study of the Afro-European languages that developed in the Americas. In particular, it is suggested that a comparative analysis of colonial slave laws may help us better understand why certain colonies were more conducive to the formation/preservation of creole languages than others. This study builds on the recently-proposed Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (Sessarego, 2015, 2017) and, in so doing, it provides data that weaken the assumptions on which the Afrogenesis Hypothesis was based (McWhorter, 2000).

Competing I-grammars in creole genesis

Competing I-grammars in creole genesis

Creoles and sociolinguistic complexity: Response to Ansaldo

In an earlier article in this journal, Umberto Ansaldo states that creoles are sociolinguistically the most complex of languages, equalled only by the situation in South India. In our article we show that this claim is not supported by facts about global multilingualism, creole societies, creole language structures and theories of language contact. The vast majority of the world’s population is multilingual: the average human speaks almost two languages. Nothing in the sociolinguistic situation of current creole societies is exceptional vis-à-vis situations of other minority languages. Yet, creoles differ structurally from the other languages of the world. That finding is supported by all empirical studies that include data on creoles and non-creoles, despite exceptionalists being accused of being inspired by ideology. The “feature pool theory” (cf. Mufwene 2001), analyzing creoles as simply language hybrids like a great many other languages, does not predict the relative analyticity of creole languages, since several equally analytic creoles and pidgins have come about from contact between morphologically rich languages. Crucially, adherents of this theory, including Ansaldo, have not responded to criticisms along these lines. Sudden language contact, as in situations of pidginization and creole genesis, leads to loss of irregularities and morphological paradigms. We argue that Ansaldo's claims are based on an insufficient familiarity with the relevant literature, as well as frequent misquotations.

Competition and selection in creole genesis

Competition and selection in creole genesis

The legal hypothesis of creole genesis

The origins of the Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs), the languages that developed in Latin America from the contact of African languages and Spanish in colonial times, are extremely intriguing, since it still has to be explained why we do not find creole languages in certain regions of Spanish America, where the socio-demographic conditions for creole languages to emerge appear to have been in place in colonial times. Nowadays, in contrast, we can find such contact varieties in similar former colonies, which were ruled by the British, the French or the Dutch (McWhorter 2000). Despite the fascinating implications of this phenomenon, our knowledge of the AHLAs remains extremely limited. Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for this situation, but no common consensus has yet been achieved (Chaudenson 2001;Mintz 1971;Laurence 1974;Granda 1968;Schwegler 1993,2014;Lipski 1993; etc.). The pull of different views on the issue has been labelled in the literature as the ‘Spanish creole debate’ (Lipski 2005: ch.9).The current study is aimed at casting new light on the Spanish creole debate by relying on a comparative analysis of slave laws in the Americas. This article highlights the role that legal differences played in shaping colonial societies and the Afro-European languages that developed in the New World.

Creole complexity in sociolinguistic perspective

In this paper I argue that Creoles are sociolinguistically some of the most complex language ecologies. Based on an analysis of sociolinguistic profiles as given in APiCs I illustrate the complex multilingual competencies typical of Creole speakers. As this thesis casts doubt on the assumed correlation between Creole grammars and simplicity, I revisit the notion of simplification in Creole genesis and offer a different perspective in which sociolinguistic complexity correlates with a grammatically complex ecology.

On the intonation of Afro-Bolivian Spanish declaratives: Implications for a theory of Afro-Hispanic creole genesis

This paper analyzes the spontaneously produced intonation of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) declaratives. ABS is an Afro-Hispanic language of the Americas (AHLAs) spoken in the region of Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. The main findings indicate the presence in ABS of certain intonational features that diverge from those of other native varieties of Spanish. In line with recent hypotheses on the genesis and evolution of ABS and other AHLAs (Sessarego, 2013a,b), we propose that our results reflect advanced second language acquisition processes, which do not imply any previous (de)creolization phase for these Afro-Hispanic varieties.

Creolization in Context: Historical and Typological Perspectives

We provide a selective overview of the state of pidgin and creole language studies, with a focus on the different ways in which the question of creole genesis—especially of European-lexifier creoles—is approached: from the perspective of the demographics and periodization of the (early) life of the colonies and from the perspective of the role of typological concepts such as analyticity/syntheticity and simplicity/complexity in the mechanisms of creolization and their linguistic outcomes. We conclude that substrate speakers are most likely to have an impact on the grammar of a creole language if they are among the first to shift to the incipient contact variety, and we find that processes of early second language acquisition and of functional transfer in creolization favor free rather than bound expression of grammatical categories.

Afro-Peruvian Spanish in the context of Spanish Creole Genesis

This study presents linguistic and sociohistorical data on Afro-Peruvian Spanish (APS), an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in the province of Chincha (coastal Peru) by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work on sugarcane plantations in the seventeenth century. The present work provides new information on the origin of APS. In so doing, it casts new light on the genesis and evolution of Afro-Hispanic languages in the Americas and shows that, in light of recent works on the nature of Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Bolivian slavery (Díaz-Campos & Clements 2008; Sessarego 2013a, 2014), colonial coastal Peru did not represent a “canonical breeding ground” (McWhorter 2000,7) for a creole language to form.