Superstrate Languages Research Articles

Detecting angloversal tendencies in the outer circle: a pilot study on a Maltese English speaker

Abstract World Englishes constitute an ever-developing study field where keeping track of the real-time changes which occur in language usage is a challenging task. This chapter aims at broadening the application field of the research on angloversals, described in literature as particular features divergent from Standard English and shared by English varieties across the world regardless of their geographical proximity or cultural affiliation. The present qualitative study hypothesises the presence of angloversals in Maltese English and considers a blended methodological approach to verify the research hypothesis. The study was performed on selected oral excerpts taken from a random interview to a speaker of the Maltese English continuum. Both the interviewee and the interviewer are native Maltese speakers and communicated in English all throughout the interview with no instances of code mixing between the two languages. Syntactical structures containing the overuse of the progressive aspect, article omission and resumptive pronouns, as well as unmarked phonology traits have been included in the angloversal categories by previous research on the matter. Said features are particularly found in contexts where language contact has had an impact on both the substrate and superstrate languages. This is the case for the Maltese context, where explanations for the plausible presence of the above features are to be sought in the realms of transfer from Maltese to English, language universals and pragmatic principles.

Kashubian – its Middle Low German heritage as partial superstrate

Abstract This article is about a Slavic language that has undergone massive lexical and grammatical influence from medieval Low German (MLG). As it has retained its fundamentally Slavic character, we focus on the heritage status of Low German intruding into what essentially remains Slavic typologically. Kashubian is West Slavic with a considerable (Middle) Low German heritage. As expected for a substrate language, such as Kashubian, there is considerable lexical, but minor syntactic German influence in Kashubian. Yet, one main typological characteristic of Slavic Kashubian and Polish, the cross-Slavic aspect and tense paradigm has been expanded by the miec ʻhave’ and the bëc ʻbe’ periphrases expressing tense in the sense of the German perfect tense using the verbal bracket. We trace the change from the pretemporal periphrastic predicative construction (subject-PP-Aux) and the attributive pattern (subject-Aux-PP) in Kashubian (and Polish), as opposed to the superstate German tense periphrasis and the verbal bracket “subject [-Aux-object-PP]” or “subject-object-PP-Aux”; its link to the Polish aspect and simple tense pattern. And we ask the question: are there evolutionary genetic components in the heritage situation that might lead to genetic patterns of natural L-change and grammaticalization? This paper is based on the view that grammar change in a heritage language like Kashubian is not necessarily a case of Darwinian (genetic) evolution in that the targets are seldom cognitively encapsulated procedural parts of grammar (such as the German verbal bracket in dependent clauses of German). The reason is that the latter is structural in Low German, the superstrate language, while it may be used both structurally and relationally in Kashubian and non-structurally (i.e., only relationally) in Polish. Much rather, the cognitively accessible, declarative content of grammars is open for social changes (lexical inventories and their paradigms). Theoretically, the paper is framed under modern heritage considerations (Kelleher, Ann. 2010. What is a heritage language? Davis: University of California. http://www.cal.org/heritage/pdfs/briefs/What-is-a-Heritage-Language.pdf (accessed 26 February 2021); Polinsky, Maria. 2018. Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Polinsky, Maria & Gregory Scontras. 2019. Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 1–17; Scontras, Gregory & Michael T. Putnam. 2020. Lesser studied Heritage Languages: An Appeal to the Dyad. Heritage Language Journal. 152–155).

Bir Roman Lehçesi Olarak Doğu Anadolu Domcasının Biçimsel Örüntüleri

This study is aimed at explaining morpho-lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns in Domani, as two basic features that are related to the lexicon and grammar of this substrate, contact, secret and endangered Romani dialect. The study data was obtained by conducting face-to-face interviews with Doms living in the Van and Ağrı-Doğubayazıt regions in Turkey and making use of their oral narratives. The recordings made between 2017 and 2019 are over 10 hours. Kurmanji, which has a typological affinity with Domani, was used as a mediating language in the communicative process. The structures exhibiting significant permeability from Kurmanji to Domani are izafe, ergative case and the auxillary verb kirin ‘to do’, and its combinations. It is understood that the morpho-lexical and morpho-syntactic affixes such as {-xete-}, {-gev}, {-ole} and {–ote}, which are seen as belonging to Domani, lose their functionality and continue to exist as redundant structures. On the other hand, case markers {-gi} and {-ge} and in predicative domains {-avi(n)} partly maintain their domain of use in Domani. Some derivational morphemes of Turkish, such as {-Iş} and {-CI} are also distinctive in the lexical formation of Domani in the derivation of nevişçi ‘begger’ with the negation prefix of Kurmanji {ne-}. The compositional features in this word should be considered as ‘creative languaging’ for substrate language Domani, that is losing its lexical properties due to contact with superstrate languages.

Transparency and language contact

Abstract When communicating speakers map meaning onto form. It would thus seem obvious for languages to show a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form, but this is often not the case. This perfect mapping, i.e. transparency, is indeed continuously violated in natural languages, giving rise to zero-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one opaque correspondences between meaning and form. However, transparency is a mutating feature, which can be influenced by language contact. In this scenario languages tend to evolve and lose some of their opaque features, becoming more transparent. This study investigates transparency in a very specific contact situation, namely that of a creole, Haitian Creole, and its sub- and superstrate languages, Fongbe and French, within the Functional Discourse Grammar framework. We predict Haitian Creole to be more transparent than French and Fongbe and investigate twenty opacity features, divided into four categories, namely Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning is split in two or more forms,) and Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one). The results indeed prove our prediction to be borne out: Haitian Creole only presents five opacity features out of twenty, while French presents nineteen and Fongbe nine. Furthermore, the opacity features of Haitian Creole are also present in the other two languages.

Inheritance, contact, convergence

AbstractThis article provides a comparative analysis of the suppletive allomorphy of two personal pronouns in the five African English-lexifier Creoles (AECs) Krio (Sierra Leone), Pichi (Equatorial Guinea), Ghanaian Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin, and Cameroon Pidgin. The alternation of the 3sgobject forms=àm(a clitic) andín(a non-clitic) is conditioned by a tonal obligatory contour principle (ocp), a vowel heightocp, animacy, and focus in different constellations across the five AECs. In addition, an epenthetic /r/ is recruited in four of the AECs to ensure that theocpis not breached. The analyses suggest that pronominal suppletion in the AECs has been fashioned by processes of change and differentiation typical of geographically extensive language families, such as migration from linguistic homelands, acquisition by non-founder populations, interlectal cross-diffusion, as well as contact and convergence with adstrate, substrate, and superstrate languages.

Borgarmålet

Borgarmålet ‘language of the townspeople’ was a trade idiom used by the Swedish townspeople and the Sámi during periods of seasonal trade in Swedish Lule Lappmark at the beginning of the 18th century. The analysis of the five sentences in this trade language provided by P. Högström (in a book published in 1747) allows us to suggest that Borgarmålet was a typical pidgin characterized by a vocabulary derived mostly from the superstrate language (Swedish), by a stable simplified grammatical structure without synthetic forms and by direct or transformed grammatical interference from the substrate language (Sámi). Borgarmålet was also characterised by innovations of its own in word-formation as well as in grammar, a feature typical of pidgins. A special feature to differentiate Borgarmålet from other pidgins is a transfer of aspectuality – expressed in Sámi by different suffixes but in Borgarmålet with the help of lexical means from Swedish.

On Berbice Dutch VO status

Berbice Dutch, once the vernacular of the Dutch-owned Berbice and Canje plantation areas of what is now Guyana (South America), is a VO language, even though both its substrate (Ijo, the Kalaḅarị variety in particular) and its superstrate (16th and 17th century Dutch) are taken to be OV (and Verb Second (V2)) languages. Along the lines of Bickerton's Bioprogram hypothesis (Bickerton, 1984, et seq), some universalist analyses have taken Berbice Dutch to be a perfect illustration of OV markedness. Following Kayne's Lexical Correspondence Axiom that states that every language exhibits an underlying VO order and that OV orders are the result of additional object shifts (cf. Kayne, 1994), many scholars have taken OV languages to be syntactically more complex than VO languages. The emergence of Berbice Dutch VO would then be a reflex of a reduction of the complexity of a creole language in comparison to its substrate and superstrate languages (cf. Roberts, 1999).In this article we argue that Kalaḅarị, unlike previous claims, is actually not a V2 language and that therefore the Berbice Dutch substrate language differs from its superstrate in not allowing surface VO structures. This, we subsequently argue, opens up the way to analyze the emergence of Berbice Dutch VO as a result of the interplay between first and second language acquisition. We conclude that VO word orders are actually likely to emerge in the Berbice Dutch contact situation and that, therefore, Berbice Dutch VO status does not constitute evidence in favor of Bickerton's universalism or similar approaches (in line with Mufwene's, 2001 and DeGraff's, 2001, 2003 arguments against creole exceptionalism), nor in favor of an alleged universal VO base order.In short, Berbice Dutch VO may directly result from the fact that Kalaḅarị speakers would not recognize Dutch V2, as their native language lacked it, and that therefore they analyzed SVO orders resulting from V2 as plain VO orders. Children growing up at the plantation would then take this input as evidence for a VO target language. We furthermore argue that such a reanalysis of OV + V2 structures as VO structures by children, both in main and embedded clauses, got facilitated by the existence of so-called VO leakages in 16th and 17th century Dutch (along the lines of Weerman, 1993).

Substrate effects in the phonetic realization of Pidgin vowels

Hawai'i is home to an English-lexified creole, known locally as Pidgin. While much research has focused on the structural development of Pidgin (e.g., Bickerton & Odo 1976), little work has investigated acoustic phonetic variation in the Pidgin vowel system. This talk presents results from an analysis of 854 tokens of /a/ produced by 32 speakers of Pidgin from two corpora—one from the 1970s and one from the 2000s—and investigates factors that contribute to differences in realizations of this vowel. Results indicate that /a/ in Pidgin exhibits a raised nucleus over real time for female speakers (p<0.001) but not male speakers. Additionally, analysis reveals that the youngest group of Pidgin speakers in the 2000s corpus realize /a/ in words of Hawaiian origin as higher in the vowel space than words of English origin (p<0.0001). Possible reasons for the emergence of this fine-grained phonetic difference in the youngest speaker group are discussed, including the role played by Hawaiian language education and the apparent valuation of Hawaiian. Taken together, results suggest that a combination of factors influences the realization of /a/ in Pidgin, including age, gender, and whether a word derives from the superstrate language ( = English) or a substrate language ( = Hawaiian).

From Slang to Acceptability: Style-Shifting Variation in English Language Usage by Students of CRUTECH, Calabar, Nigeria

This paper focuses on informal language usage by students of Cross River University of Technology, Calabar, Nigeria. This includes the use of slang words from primarily the substrate and superstrate language of the mother tongue (MT) and Nigerian Pidgin (NP) respectively. Participant observation was used for this work including lectures and other forums. Focus is on the speech discourse of students. The NP in particular is a contact language which has grown in stature due to factors of relevance as a common language in a pluralistic society like the Cross River State in particular, and Nigeria in general. Its use has also expanded due to urbanization. The MT has been observed to be influential through direct translation of certain expressions. Findings have shown that the informal use of language by the students has inadvertently affected their competence in standard and formal language use.

Folkloric Axis of Relexified Language and the Subversion of Colonial Cultural Hierarchy

Language has an aspect of universality and another aspect of particularity. Ethnic culture is conveyed through the aspect of particularity, and that is the very point which makes a nation particular and its culture distinct. Colonization by imposing colonial language and non-native cultural poetics perishes the aspect of particularity of the substrate language. However, the counteracting strategy of relexification appeals to the universality of superstrate language to transmit the particularity of substrate language. Ethnic folk stories, myths, mythical elements, fables, parables, proverbs, and idioms are interposed on the colonial language to make ethnic colonized culture universally palpable. In this regard, the aspect of universality is provided by the colonial superstrate language and the aspect of particularity by the colonized ethnic language. In general, because of the ubiquity of mythic elements in time and place, the folkloric aspect of relexified language gives nations the sense of dignified historical background and makes the relexified work relevant to a multitude of societies, rather than just one ethnic local community. This paper deals with the way Chinua Achebe uses the folkloric axis of relexified language to bring the particularities of Ibo culture on universal scale and above all to restore the dignity of Ibo cultural identity which was lost through colonial discourse: “Thus, as represented by Chinua Achebe, and contrary to the discourse of colonial anthropology, Umuofia, the primordial Igbo village emerges as a locus of reflective civility” (Irele 9). Achebe’s relexified language gives voice to Ibo experience throughout the English speaking world. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n9p487

Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Agwagune

This paper focuses on the Agwagune language, which belongs to the Niger-Congo phylum and is spoken in Biase local government area of Cross River State, Nigeria. The language has been classified as a minority language because of its paucity in development and demography. The paper examines the phenomenon of lexical enrichment in the language which has been brought about by contact with other languages and the need to develop new vocabulary to cope with new concepts. Such has been achieved through borrowing from other language sources, compounding, hybridization, collocation and so on. Language contact has also led to the phenomena of code-switching and code-mixing. Data for this work was obtained primarily through direct interactions with native speakers and from secondary sources. The language still needs to develop a corpus for the language of technology.Keywords: Code-mixing, collocation, hybridization, metaphorical extensions, superstrate languages.

Possibility and necessity modals in Gbe and Surinamese creoles

In this paper we compare positive possibility and necessity modals in the Gbe languages and Surinamese creoles that emerged out of language contact between European and African languages, most importantly the Gbe languages. We propose that different varieties of Gbe languages played a role in the development of the modals in the creoles. A comparison of the influence of the modals on the temporal interpretations of the sentences in which they occur in the substrate languages with that of equivalent modals in superstrate languages suggest that while there is indeed substrate influence in the development of the modals, the influence from the superstrate cannot be discounted. The findings nuance earlier proposals that explain the emergence of the modality system as deriving from a Gbe model.

Causative and facilitative serial verbs in Asian Ibero-romance Creoles – a convergence of substrate and superstrate systems?

This paper surveys the widespread presence of two types of serial verb – the direct causative and the indirect causative – in Portuguese and Spanish lexically-based creole languages of Asia. The discussion addresses the structural nature of these valency increasing constructions, considering the semantic relations involved in their argument sharing, and contemplates the potential roles of substrate and superstrate languages in their development. It is proposed that the geographic distribution of the serial verbs is owed to a convergence of substrate and superstrates. In the case of the Asian Portuguese lexically-based creoles, the convergence would have begun in India. Subsequently, as the Portuguese progressively established their trade network further east, the serial structures received substrate reinforcement in the different settings where creolization and stabilization occurred. Further reinforcement would have occurred by way of population movements between the communities over a longer period.

Creoles as interlanguages

The idea that processes of second language acquisition (SLA) are highly relevant to an account of creole genesis is far from new or original (see Plag (2008a) for some discussion and further references). However, it is still controversial which kinds of SLA processes are relevant, and how much of a given creole’s structures can be attributed to such processes. In my previous three Columns (Plag 2008a,b, 2009) I discussed a specific hypothesis about the relation of creolization and SLA that I labeled ’interlanguage hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, creoles originate as conventionalized interlanguages of an early developmental stage. The interlanguage hypothesis is highly compatible with scenarios that claim that creolization is at least a two-generation process, which involves at least two successive stages of development. For example, Veenstra (2003) argues that during the first stage, adults acquire the superstrate language to variable degrees, with interlanguages of the Basic Variety type (Perdue 1993) chiefly among them. Traditionally, this stage has also been called the pidginization stage, characterized by rudimentary acquisition of the (socially) dominant language. This stage is followed by a second stage, following the so-called target-shift, in which the next generation of speakers acquires the new medium of interethnic communication (cf., e.g., Baker 1994), and no longer the superstrate language. This next generation of speakers may consist of first language learners and second language learners of the new variety, e.g. newly arrived slaves, as in the case of

‘Give’ and take

The Sranan verb taigi ‘say to, tell’ is used when a dative object is identified, but in the 18th and 19th centuries taki ‘say, tell, speak, talk’ served this function. This paper explores the early uses of taki alongside variants taki gi and taki na, which paired the optionally ditransitive verb with an optional dative marker. Working from a corpus of Sranan texts spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, I consider the distributions of the three variants and the distinctive uses of gi and na as dative markers to argue for the eventual triumph and contraction of taki gi, looking to the superstrate and substrate languages for potential models. I submit that taki gi was idiomatized and the string syntactically reanalyzed with the result that gi was reinterpreted as an obligatory, rather than optional, dative marker, and that this reanalysis resulted in the decline of taki as an optionally ditransitive verb.

Creoles as interlanguages

The idea that processes of second language acquisition (SLA) are highly relevant for an account of creole genesis is far from new or original (see Plag (2008a) for some discussion and further references). However, it is still controversial which kinds of interlanguage processes are relevant, and how much of a given creole’s structures can be attributed to such processes. In my previous two Columns (Plag 2008a,b) I discussed a specific hypothesis about the relation of creolization and SLA that I labeled ’interlanguage hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, creoles originate as conventionalized interlanguages of an early developmental stage. The interlanguage hypothesis is highly compatible with scenarios that claim that creolization is at least a two-generation process, which involves at least two successive stages of development. For example, Veenstra (2003) argues that during the first stage, adults acquire the superstrate language to variable degrees, with interlanguages of the Basic Variety type (Perdue 1993) chiefly among them. Traditionally, this stage has also been called the pidginization stage, characterized by rudimentary acquisition of the dominant language. This stage is followed by a second stage, following the so-called target-shift, in which the next generation of speakers acquires the new medium of interethnic communication (cf., e.g., Baker 1994), and no longer the superstrate language. At this stage, processes of SLA, first language acquisition and dialect levelling may all be going on at the same time. In my previous column, I took a closer look at inflectional morphology and a number of syntactic constructions to investigate whether the linguistic phenomena encountered in these areas lend themselves to an explanation in terms of SLA processes. Starting out with the assumptions of a psycholingistic theory of morphosyntactic development in SLA (Processability Theory, e.g. Pienemann 1998, 2005) I argued that both the loss of inflectional morphology and the preservation (if any) of primarily inherent inflection can be

Verb–subject word order in Albanian English

ABSTRACT: This paper examines some verb–subject constructions which were found in a number of articles in English published in Albanian newspapers and magazines. These inverse‐order constructions are in contrast with the fixed subject–verb word order of English. Based on (the preverbal) sentence‐initial element, three main groups of verb–subject constructions have been identified in the English texts of the Albanian periodicals: the ones preceded by (a) a topicalized adverbial, prepositional object, or subject complement, (b) the introductory it, and (c) the dummy subject there. The data show that these verb–subject constructions are used to render the discourse function of focus, i.e. new information in discourse. The presence of these constructions in Albanian English provides support for the complementary hypothesis on languages in contact, which highlights the competing influences of both the substrate (L1) and the superstrate (L2) languages. It is suggested that the frequent use of verb–subject word order of Albanian to render focus and the saliency of it and there constructions in English may have contributed to the emergence of these types of construction in Albanian English.

The emergence of systems of lexical and grammatical tone and stress in Caribbean and West African Creoles

The complex contact situation that developed among speakers of Niger-Congo and Indo-European languages in the Caribbean during the era of colonial plantation slav-ery gave rise to creoles with similarly complex pitch-related suprasegmental systems. In Afro-Caribbean creoles, the reinterpretation of stress in European superstrate languages in terms of the tone and stress systems that typify West African substrate languages often leads to greater complexity than that found in either the superstrate or the substrate languages. Despite this complexity, the general characteristics of tone and stress in Afro-Caribbean creoles resemble much more those found along the west coast of Africa than those found in other regions where tone systems are commonly encountered, such as East Asia and Mesoamerica. This suggests that in any scenario for the emergence of creole languages, consideration should be given to linguistic and cultural continuity from the substrates.

Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua by Giovan Francesco Fortunio, Brian Richardson

MLR, 98.2, 2003 473 Manuel de linguistique romane. By Jacques Allieres. (Bibliotheque de Grammaire et de Linguistique, 10) Paris: Champion. 2001. xxii + 323 pp. ISBN 2-74530439 -9. Jacques Allieres sets himself the task of providing an introduction to Romance linguistics , the intended readership being French students ofthe subject, using this term in its broader as well as narrower sense. Indeed, the back-cover blurb refers to a pub? lic cultive, while the foreword invokes, no doubt more realistically, the need felt by a teacher fora coursebook that should fillthe gap between, on the one hand (to a French undergraduate), foreign-language texts of a compass similar to the present volume, and more comprehensive but less wieldy tomes, on the other. In other words, this is an intermediate-sized French-languagetextbookof comparative Romance linguistics. Allieres starts the book where any linguist would, with a short firstchapter discussing the origins ofthe Romance languages. This chapter takes a sprint through the relevant varieties of Latin and the substrate, adstrate, and superstrate languages in question. The second chapter is rather mysteriously called 'Les grandes divisions' but, again quite conventionally, compares the Romance languages on the phonetic, morphological , syntactic, and lexical levels, devoting most space to morphology. Chapter 3 takes the complementary approach of providing a linguistic description of each of the languages, with the same breakdown by linguistic level within each language. This is a good idea, as it fills in gaps left in the previous chapter, as well as providing a synthetic overview of each language. The author apologizes early on, and quite unnecessarily, forthe format ofthe book, which was prepared as camera-ready copy. The format is in fact unexceptionable, but this is a furtherexample of cheese-paring by publishers, who have obliged the author to solve the often quite formidable problems of typography inseparable from a book of this sort. The maps are good and plentiful. The redoubtable impression of density that emanates from the volume is largely due to the subject matter and the relentlessly compressed way in which it is treated. All the same, the line-spacing has been squeezed to save on pages, and this gives a cramped look. This book deserves to do well in the niche into which it settles; the most obvious is the French undergradu? ate market, but lecturers of French in anglophone countries might wish to append the volume as supplementary reading, perhaps to improve reading fluency in the linguistics register. Romance linguistics is really too large a subject to lend itself to compendious treatment in a handily sized volume, so that the present book will above all be useful in supplementing the large standard texts. Alternatively, the book will be suitable in offeringa brief, clear treatment of topics discussed in a less searching undergraduate course, but, as ever, the teacher who employs this book will need to be conversant with the bibliography to which it refers. University of Leeds Nigel Armstrong Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua. By Giovan Francesco Fortunio. Ed. by Brian Richardson. Padua and Rome: Antenore. 2001. lxxxv + 254 pp. ?30. ISBN 88-8455-520-5. This is a critical edition of the firstprinted Italian grammar (1516), recently published in facsimile by Claudio Marazzini and Simone Fornara (Pordenone: Accademia di San Marco, 1999). The introduction develops Carlo Dionisotti's studies on Fortunio and deals with the biographical circumstances surrounding the composition of the Regole ('II contesto e la genesi delle Regole', pp. ix-xxvii), the sources and purposes of the text ('II Fortunio grammatico', pp. xxviii-lxi), and its reception ('La fortuna delle Regole', pp. lxii-lxxiii). After recallingFortunio's links with Venice, Brian Richardson 474 Reviews suggests the reasons forboth the delay in the publication of the work (the book privilege was requested in 1509) and its distance from the Venetian cultural environment. An examination of archival sources and of Sanudo's Diarii reveals that Venetian suspicions about the treachery of Fortunio's brother, Matteo da Zara, harmed Giovan Francesco too: he was probably forced to leave the Serenissima and moved to Ancona, where the grammar was published one year before his mysterious suicide. Fortunio's proem addresses 'gli studiosi della regolata volgar lingua', for whom the...

Pidgins and Creoles (review)

Reviewed by: Pidgins and creoles by Ishtla Singh Alan S. Kaye Pidgins and creoles. By Ishtla Singh. London: Arnold/Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 142. The basic question for any reviewer is: How does this volume compare with the competition? Let me state at the outset that it seems as though the voracious pidgin-creole market cannot be satiated. The author explains in the preface that many of her students found much of the field’s literature either too introductory or too advanced (she writes ‘difficult’ [x]). Many of my students have expressed similar sentiments. While pidgin-creole textbooks by such notables as John Holm, Peter Mühlhäusler, Suzanne Romaine, M. Sebba, and Loreto Todd proliferate, this volume was written for undergraduates with little linguistic background. Singh notes that her work is an attempt ‘to bridge the gap: I have tried to move beyond introductory material, present salient theories and arguments in an accessible manner but yet not assume too much linguistic knowledge on the part of the reader’ (x). To this end and quite coincidentally, the present reviewer and coauthor Mauro Tosco have recently produced a work of similar scope with the same beginning student audience in mind (Pidgin and creole languages: A basic introduction, Munich: Lincom Europa, 2001); however, the two works have different emphases in that Kaye & Tosco 2001 focuses on non-European lexified languages, especially pidgin and creole varieties of Arabic (Juba Arabic of the southern Sudan and Ki-Nubi of Kenya and Uganda). S’s short textbook of pidginistics and creolistics developed out of the author’s 12-week course on the topic for undergraduates at the University of Surrey Roehampton. A big plus for the book is that the author, a native speaker of Trinidadian English Creole (TEC), has included many fascinating examples from her mother tongue. In addition to an interesting section devoted to language planning in Trinidad, which makes for absorbing reading (96–109), there is an appendix consisting of texts in TEC from 1827 and 1845 (119–23). Addressing now one of the author’s major theses, viz. that pidgins and creoles are ‘not unusual or atypical’ languages (xi), I believe that the former are, in many ways, atypical by the very nature of their grammatical and lexical reductions from superstrate languages. Sango, one of two official languages of the Central African Republic, will prove illustrative. William J. Samarin (‘The status of Sango in fact and fiction’, in John McWhorter, ed., Language change and language contact in pidgins and creoles, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000) recently hypothesized that all pidgin languages have reduced lexicons (2000:321). Sango has approximately 1,000 words (2000:319). This is very unusual in that no ‘normal’ language has so few words. Turning to the controversial matter of the genetic classification of pidgins and creoles, in her discussion of West African Pidgin Portuguese (WAPP), she asks whether Proto-WAPP is Indo-European or Hamitic (29). ‘Hamitic’ is defined in the glossary as ‘the name of the language family that comprises the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Khordofanian (sic) and Khoisan languages of Africa’ (126). The label ‘Hamitic’ was thoroughly discredited years ago: there is no such family although there is a Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic phylum (= Afroasiatic). WAPP is best seen, in my view, as being related to its lexifier; however, other perspectives are entertained by Singh. Finally, the book contains technical mistakes. Erroneous hyphens abound: re-thinking (24), non-genetic (29), re-defined (34); bi-lingual (34), etc. Mandarin Chinese mà is glossed as ‘abuse’; rather it means ‘scold’ (31). Finally, I will answer the question posed at the beginning of this review. Although the volume does have shortcomings, an introductory student can still profit from the data and analyses presented. The same student will be richly rewarded by delving further into many of the items listed in the comprehensive bibliography (130–36). Alan S. Kaye California State University, Fullerton Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America