Creole Language

"Creoles" are general linguistic phenomena (some examples are given below). They arose mostly during European colonial expansion where a ruling minority of some European nation caused a language shift: locals had to use basic words and phrases from the European language to communicate. Thus a "pidgin" language arises, which since learnt by adults is not a true, extensible language in its own right, but a set of words and phrases which are simply slammed together to give minimal communication.

In the next generation growing up in this environment, a remarkable thing occurred. They were not adults learning a foreign language; their brains were geared to learning language from anything they heard around them. And they took the words and phrases from the European language, mixed with mispronunciations and words from their parents native tongue, and a new language was born, a fully expressive and extensible language; this is what we call a "Creole".

In general then, the term Creole is used to refer to any language which was once a Pidgin and which subsequently became a native language; some scholars have extended the term to any language, ex-Pidgin or not, that has undergone massive structural change due to language contact. -- PaulMitchellGears

Examples:

Creole is a language spoken in the Caribbean. It is a mix of FrenchLanguage and African dialects, resulting from the immersion of African slaves in a French environment.

I thought Creole is French spoken in the South of North America. And then the people of French descent even if they don't speak French .. you never know ..

They do speak creole in New Orleans, USA. But it is not the same language at all...

Mauritians refer to their native tongue as Creole.

Most Creoles are fairly similar. They are usually divided into English and French creoles. The French ones are spoken mostly in the Caribbean and some parts of west Africa. The English ones are spoken in some African countries that used to be under British rule and assimilated English words into their local languages (like Sierra Leone).

But there are Creoles that have nothing at all to do with English and French.

Some people consider English to be a German / French creole, which emerged after the Norman conquest of England.

Those people would be utterly and completely wrong, then, and should look the term up in a linguistics book. Creoles are full-fledged languages that form spontaneously when children grow up in an environment where the adults are speaking a pidgin. The basic vocabulary comes largely from the pidgin, augmented with inventions, while the grammar is 100% invented and shows nothing but chance resemblence to any of the parent languages that the pidgin had been based on.

(Pidgins have no grammar; they consist of a vocabulary borrowed from multiple parent languages, and each speaker tends to use the grammar of whatever their own native tongue is, so that different pidgin speakers use different grammar in speaking to one another.)

The rough similarity in grammar of every Creole ever studied is a very interesting body of evidence for some form of the innateness of grammar.

English itself is derived from what's usually called Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language. The Vikings had invaded Normandy, and some generations later, those Normans, who spoke French influenced by Viking borrowings, conquered England, and for the next couple hundred years contributed an enormous amount of vocabulary to English, but did not affect the grammar of English much to speak of at all. And that's the whole basic story. There is no question about "creoles" in that at all; there was no pidgin ancestor stock to start from.

So this isn't a matter of different opinions -- which do vary widely from one linguist to another -- this is a matter of violating the very definition of the word "creole".

-- DougMerritt

A recent book, ISBN 158811516X , by a professor, Claire Lefebvre, at the University of Quebec in Montreal makes a strong case that the Creole languages of Haiti and Martinique are basically French vocabulary (with some Africanising of the phonetics) and a West African syntax, where the African languages involved are clearly the Ewe (I think she said) group of languages. There is one syntactic form in Creole (verb duplication) that shows up nowhere else in the world than in this particular language group. --PaulMorrison

If the syntax is at all close to Ewe, then it should be recategorized as a descendent language of Ewe rather than being called a creole. Presumably the syntactic issue is hotly debated by other specialists; such things usually are.

This verb duplication phenomenon sounds interesting, and doesn't ring a bell right off... do you have examples?

I don't have the book in front of me - but I do remember a similar construction in Trinidadian English, which I have been told practically translates 1:1 into Creole: "Is go you going?". I'll try to get hold of the book and give the actual Creole form. --PaulMorrison

Cool, thanks. BTW it helps to give them a longer name to disambiguate which one you mean, since "creole" is the category name for all such languages, yet in local regions where they are spoken, many of them are just called "Creole" even though they are genetically unrelated to similar languages just called "Creole" elsewhere.

You're right, of course - I meant Haitian Creole. BTW In Mark Abley's recent book, ISBN 061823649X , he refers to Kriol, which is based on Australian Aboriginal languages, and seems to be gaining ground in Northern Australia.

And the phenomenon of reduplication in general (as opposed to whatever the one is that you are referring to as unique for verbs) is very, very common in creoles worldwide, e.g. something literally translated "fast fast" to mean "very fast" in most creoles, regardless of the word for "fast".

Professor Lefebvre has a long section on verb-doubling, also referring to this form as predicate cleft, and the constructions closely follow the Ewe constructions. For instance, in Haitian: se manje Jan manje pen an (it-is eat John eat bread DET), closely parallels the Fongbe construction: du we Koku du ason o (eat it-is Koku eat crab DET), resembling also the Trinidadian form referred to above.

Interesting. The term "predicate cleft" may well be more descriptive, since this is different than run of the mill reduplication, and seems instead to roughly parallel other cleft constructions such as English e.g. "as big as".

Plus many other parallels, e.g. similar distinctions among pronouns and demonstratives, although these are perhaps not quite so specific to Ewe.

Although (as usual) some linguists regard his hypotheses as controversial, still Bickerton's book on creoles is a real landmark and well worth reading.

I'm pretty sure I've read him, several years ago. However, apparently there are considerable differences between his views and those of Professor Lefebvre. It would be interesting to hear your views on her book. --PaulMorrison

I'd love to, but at $120 that's too expensive for me, especially since right now I'm in computer-, rather than human-, language research mode. Maybe it'll turn up at the library later this year. I put it on my wish list; offhand it seems like a must-read.
Thanks for the additional info.

I have since reborrowed the book, and find it very persuasive. Based on the many examples of parallels between Ewe and Haitian Creole, Prof Lefebvre makes IMHO a strong case that the basic mechanism in the formation of Haitian Creole, and many similar Creoles, was relexification by mature adults speaking the substratum languages. Speaking a number of different languages, they drew on the superstratum to build a new lexicon, but kept the substratum syntax and, very often, semantics, as well. BTW, In Prof Lefebvre's view, pidgins and creoles are not created by different processes - the difference being mainly due to the amount of time the language continued to coexist with the substratum languages.

I believe that these days that (pidgin/creole process) is the majority view.

Another example supporting this view is provided by the Haitian Creole deictic particles sa and sila: although they certainly seem to be drawn from French phonetic strings, they parallel exactly the syntax and semantics of Fongbe elo and ene, respectively, while their usage is totally different from that of French ce, celle, ces, ceci, cela.

Makes sense. "Sa" is the near-deixis and "sila" is the far-deixis?

Close! Oddly enough, "sila" and "ene" are far, while "sa" and "elo" are unspecified as to distance. All 4 particles can be used both for animate and inanimate objects.

There's no such thing as an exact synonym, so what distinguishes the use of each member of those pairs?

If the person or thing is far, you can use "sila" or "sa"; if it is near, "sa" only. Prof Lefebvre translates "sila" as "that", and "sa" as "this/that". I guess when it's far, it's personal taste!

In my experience, humans are good at learning new lexicons, but not at learning new syntax. Experience with multilingual communities also supports this. I have been studying French since I was 8, and I still cannot remember which adjectives follow their nouns, and which go in front! --PaulMorrison

Indeed. :-) How about when to use determiners? I've seen a research paper on the context for when L' is used versus not, and it's surprisingly complex. Certainly more so than the similar difference between American and British English. -- DougMerritt

Are creoles phonetic? That's one of the nicest properties of Spanish but I'd despaired of French ever becoming phonetic with its ver, verre, vers, vert; le ver vert va vers le verre. Well, I'd despaired until I saw the name 'Batay Ouvriye' which I assumed was Haitian script. In a final reverse, google can't seem to find any other such script, just more acursed French script. -- RK

Creoles evolve as spoken languages from precursor pidgins in a single generation. They don't, however, evolve a writing system. Historically their writing system derives from whatever system is chosen by missionaries for the first translation of the bible into that particular Creole. There's no hard and fast rule. However, inevitably there's little reason for spelling complexities, so usually the only ones used are the ones that seem so natural as to be intuitive to whoever translated the bible.

Note that an oddity of Creoles is that, even when they demonstrably arose completely independently of each other, any two are largely inter-intelligible iff they arose primarily from the same root vocabulary. E.g. if French donated the majority of the vocabulary to two Creoles, they will tend to end up being rather similar languages, and will tend to have similar writing systems, all other things being equal. Many Creoles that derived the majority of their vocabulary from English heavily use the word "belong", for instance, but the spelling is chancy; it may be spelled "bilong" or "beelong" or whatever the missionary thought was reasonable.

So you can't assume that something that looks Haitian is in fact Haitian, only that it may have derived from a similar Creole (one that, like Haitian, borrowed a lot of vocabulary from French). -- DougMerritt

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