1LIN407 – Language in Society
Dominique Lottes
Pidgins and Creoles
One of the consequences of language contact is the emergence of Pidgins and creoles. Outline their major distinguishing features paying particular attention to lexis, syntax and pronunciation.
Up to the nineteenth century most people considered pidgins and creoles as "broken languages" and "freakish varieties" of established languages such as English, Portuguese, French or Dutch. However, after the field of Creolistics emerged, linguists became aware of the fact that these languages might provide crucial information on the understanding of language evolution and language change. Hugo Schuchardt, a German linguist [1842-1927] who is rightly acclaimed the father of pidgin and Creole studies, recognized the importance of pidgins and creoles already more than hundred years ago and published his Kreolische Studien (Creole Studies) in the 1880s. By doing so he set the foundations for upcoming generations of pidgin and creole linguists. The field of pidgin and Creole Studies was established about eighty years later in the 1960s when it was recognized as a full academic discipline - a milestone was set in the first international conference on creole language studies which was held in Jamaica in 1959 [Romaine, 1988, p5]. Since that time the interest in the field has increased and scholars such as Suzanne Romaine, John Holm, Loreto Todd and others have contributed with their books and articles to the understanding of these so called contact languages. Todd, for example, provided a reasonable definition. She defined pidgins as marginal languages that emerge to fulfill certain restricted communicative needs among people who do not share a common language (Todd, 1990, p1).
Pidgins and creoles are also considered to be natural languages, which mean that they arise naturally in order to bridge a linguistic gap between speakers of different languages. Most Pidgins and creoles are based on two languages. These two languages are defined as the superstrate language or lexifier language and the substrate language. The superstrate language is the language spoken by the more powerful linguistic group, for instance English, in English-based pidgins and creoles such as Tok Pisin, Jamaican Creole or Guyanese Creole. The substrate language is the native language of the less powerful group, for instance, the West African languages of the slaves on the plantations throughout the Caribbean.
At this point it should be briefly mentioned that throughout my paper I will use the word language(s) to refer to pidgins and creoles, instead of using the term dialect as discussions about this subject haven't delivered an acceptable and agreed solution yet. In addition, I want to inform the reader that I try to treat pidgin and creoles as a single entity with different stages, instead of treating them as two individual entities [Sankoff and Laberge ,1973] [Syea, 2002]. It is my intention to provide the reader with a short introduction to few linguistic features of pidgins and creoles. I will discuss the lexicon, syntax and phonology in particular. However, the range of pidgins and creoles as well as the selection of examples given in this paper only allow me to make vague assumptions which would require further research and comparison to attach any scientific value.
The first section in this part of the paper covers few aspects of the lexicon used in pidgins and creoles. The lexicon of a language can be described as the stock of vocabulary available in that specific language. As mentioned above pidgins and creoles are based on two languages - the superstrate and the substrate language. As far as the lexicon is concerned, the superstrate language is the main source of vocabulary. Two features of the lexicon used in pidgins and creoles are; multifunctionality and circumlocutions.
The first feature which will be discussed is multifunctionality. Sebba states in his book (1997,p51) that the amount of words available in pidgins counts between 100 (in case of very rudimentary jargons) and few thousand words for further developed pidgins such as Tok Pisin which is an English-based pidgin spoken in Papua New Guinea. The small scope of the lexicon requires an excellent use of the existing words. In Kamtok, a pidgin spoken in Cameroon, the feature of multifunctionality can be illustrated in the following sentences [Fromkin, 2014, p305]:
tu bad pikin two bad children
We no laik dis kain of bad We don't like this kind of badness
A liakam bad I liked it very much
These three sentences illustrate that the word bad in Kamtok can be used as an adjective, noun and adverb respectively. The feature of multifunctionality might correspond to the principle of maximum use of minimum lexicon which was coined by Mühlhäusler in 1986 [Sebba, 1997, p171]. This feature of semantic expansion might also function as a sort of compensation for the absence of syntactic categories and the non-existence of inflectional morphology.
Furthermore, it favors the absence of synonyms. The use of synonyms in pidgins and creoles is avoided by the speakers and the semantic transparency is determined by the context. Hence, multifunctionality leads to the extension of meaning. For instance, the Tok Pisin word nil roughly translated as any pointy thing can convey the semantic meaning of the English words; nail, needle, thorn and others [Sebba, 1997, p53).
Another example of multifunctionality is represented by the prepositional system in Melanesian Pidgin spoken in Papua New Guinea. In general, only three prepositions are used in this pidgin; long, bilong and wantaim. Furthermore, it seems like that only long and bilong make up all the semantic possibilities in the language. For instance, long expresses a relationship between a noun and a location in space or time such as in the sentences:
ol meri long kantri woman in the country
bung I bin stat long Mande the meeting began on Monday
In both sentences long is used to establish a relationship between the noun and a location in space (a) and between the noun and time (b) [Sebba, 1997, p52].
The second lexical feature which I would like to point out is the formation of circumlocutions. The forming and use of circumlocutions is a strategy by which the speakers of a language can describe something that has not been attached to lexical item in the language yet. For instance, the Tok Pisin combinations wara bilong skin or gras bilong fes represent the equivalents of the English words sweat and Beard [Romaine, 1988, p36]. At later stages, however, it can be observed that the speakers of the pidgins move away from the use of circumlocutions, which consist of several single words and invent single words or compounds. For instance, the circumlocution wara bilong skin is transformed into the word skinwara [Fromkin, 2014, p307].
The developmental process of pidgins, especially at the stage when they become the first language of children and being used in a multilingual environment, expands the vocabulary and it becomes possible to talk almost about everything. Today there is even a newspaper written in a expanded pidgin - Wantok a Papua New Guinean newspaper entirely written in Tok Pisin.
The second section of this part will deal with few aspects of syntactic features in pidgin and creole languages. Syntax is considered to be a set of rules which allows the speaker to from grammatical correct sentences that are mutual intelligible. One syntactic rule, for example, is the word order in a sentence of a certain language. In the case of English or German declarative sentences the word order demands a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure. That is, syntax combines the words into phrases and phrases into sentences. In most cases pidgins and creoles show the SVO word order. In contrast to the lexicon, grammatical features such as syntax mainly derived from the substrate language. In other words, at an early stage or during the genesis of a pidgin the lexicon is mapped on the syntactic structure of the substrate language [Sebba, 1997, p40].
One linguistic feature of pidgin and creole syntax can be observed in tense, modality and aspect marking (TMA) which is only existent to a very limited scope. At the early stage, pidgins convey most of the grammatical information with reference to the context or by using adverbials, for example, tense markers such as tomorrow or yesterday. The use of content words of the lexifier language might indicate an alternative way for compensating for the lack verbal inflection a method used by most superstrate languages to express TMA marking. For example, in the early Tok Pisin the word baimbai derived from the English by-and-by was used as a sentence adverbial meaning afterwards or later.
However, after a period of time it has become a preverbial particle and subsequently the verb prefix bai which indicates the future, for instance, in the sentence [Romaine, 1988, p58]:
Bung bai pinis long Fraide The meeting will finish on Friday
In terms of aspect marking in pidgins, not enough research has been carried out in order to provide satisfying results. However, it is possible to say that most pidgins lack the grammatical feature of aspect marking [Bakker, 1994, p38]. In contrast, creoles such as the Jamaican Creole (b) or the Guyanese Creole (a) use preverbial particles to mark the aspect of an action. The preverbial particle a, for example, is used to indicate the progressive from [Holm, 200, p181]:
somain mi de a wok sometimes I am working
mi a run I am running
Another feature of most pidgins and creoles can be seen in the fact that both stages show a lack of sentence rearrangement in order to make a distinction between sentence types (statements, questions or commands).
i bai die eg dem he bought the eggs/did he buy the eggs?
yu klinim pis you are cleaning the fish/are you cleaning the fish?
yu lukim wanem? you see what? (What do you see?)
In sentence (a) from Guyanese Creole it is not possible to deduce the type of sentence by merely looking at the linguistic features. It is not obvious whether the sentence fulfills a declarative or interrogative purpose. In sentence (b) from Tok Pisin, it is possible to observe the same kind of impossibility to recognize the sentence type as the word order for statements and questions is the same. However, in sentence (c) also from Tok Pisin the use of the question word wanem might make it obvious that this sentence is a question, but it still lacks the auxiliary and the word order of an English wh-questions inversion. As seen before in the section on the lexicon of pidgins and creoles the context plays an important role in identifying the semantic meaning - even on the level of sentence structure. [Romaine, 1988, p52][Mühlhäusler, 1997, p146]
The last section of this part will cover few aspects of phonology in pidgin and creole languages. The Phonology of a language can be considered as the sound system of a language. In the case of Pidgins the phonological rules appear to be rudimentary, but there are phonological rules as in every human language. However, at the early stage of a pidgin the phonology seems to be more unstable and more dependent on the individual speaker. This derives from the fact that speakers of the pidgin adjust the phonological system of their first language to the pronunciation of the lexical items derived from the superstrate language. Speakers of the pidgin tend to exclude sounds which would be difficult to pronounce for the majority of speakers [Fromkin, 2014, p303]
One aspect of pidgin and creole phonology is connected to the vowel system. The vowel system of pidgins and creoles consists in most cases of five or seven vowels in a symmetrical system of at least five vowels; /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/ and /u/. In contrast, Standard English has fourteen distinct vowel sounds. This type of vowel distribution can be noticed in pidgins and creoles in the Atlantic region as well as in the Pacific region. With regard to Atlantic pidgins and creoles this five-to-seven vowel system can be traced back to the pattern in West African languages such as Yoruba, Bini and Ewe. The West African languages also exert further influence on the syllabic structures as most pidgins and creoles show a Consonant-Vowel (CV) structure such as their West African substrate languages [Fromkin, 2014, p304] [ Sebba,1997, p109].
This fact leads to one feature of pidgin and creoles phonology – the reduction of Consonant clusters. There are various methods that are applied by the speakers in order to break these consonant clusters up. For example it is possible to omit an internal consonant in a word. This method is called Syncope and can be illustrated by an example from Sranan, an English-based croele which is spoken in Suriname. The English word sister becomes sisa. In this example the consonant cluster sister /ˈsɪstə(r)/ is broken up and the [t] sound is omitted. Furthermore, it is possible to observe that the final consonant /r/ is omitted which provides an example of the method called Apocope.
Apocope is the omission of one or more sounds from the end of a word. English-based creoles are dropping the final stop before the next word that starts with another stop. For instance, in the Guyanese Creole sentence given below [Holm, 2000, p141]
wen yu ge kramp when you get a cramp
The last method I want to mention is process of adding a vowel to the end of the word after the final consonant. This method is called Paragogue and can be observed in the Saramaccan Creole word dagu for the English word dog. In this case the speakers add the additional vowel /u/ to the end of the word. This might explain the fact that in Jamaican Creole the vowels /i/,/e/, /a/, /o/ and /u/ can all occur in a final position without diphthongization [Cassidy, 1980, pLV]
Furthermore, in some cases sounds which do not occur in the substrate language will be eliminated. For example the English interdental fricative sounds [ð] and [θ] as in this /ðɪs/ and thing /θɪŋ/ are quite uncommon and are typically replaced. For example, in Jamaican Creole these sounds are converted into the Alveolar sounds [d] and [t], and instead of saying this thing speakers tend to say dis ting [Holm, 2000, p95]
The last phonological feature I want to state is the deletion or the frequent loss of the initial Glottal sound [h]. This feature can be noticed in Jamaican Creole (a) as well as in Guyanese Creole (b).
we ii kom from where he came from
ii nago notn els fu du he wouldn't have anything else to do
It is interesting to observe that both creoles apply the long, high, tense, front unrounded /ii/ vowel instead of /i:/.
In conclusion I would like to express few thoughts which have emerged in the process of writing this paper and correspond to ideas and approaches established by scholars such as Syea and Holm. In his chapter on inflectional morphology in Mauritian Creole Syea states that the concept of elaboration and expansion seems much more relevant for the discussion of pidginization and creolization than the idea of simplification. This is a very interesting statement as the general idea about pidgins and creoles still tends to be misunderstood. For instance, the extension of meaning and the fast development on all linguistic levels does provide a prime example of human creativity and ability to adaptation. Bridging the gaps of missing linguistic features by means of context does not necessarily represent an act of simplification, especially by taking the fact into account that simplification can only be applied when the user has a knowledge about the system that is being simplified [Syea, 2002, p206]. Another example would be the compensation of the non-existence of TMA markers by using adverbs or in more developed creoles by preverbial particles. This represents another effective solution to satisfy the speakers desire to communicate on a larger scale, which should by no means helt as pure simplification.
It is hardly possible to make further assumption as the range of examples is limited and data available does only provide sufficient information for well studied pidgins and creoles such as Tok Pisin or Jamaican Creole. However, the information collected in numerous books and studies provides the foundation for further research on all linguistic and sociolinguistic levels. Finally, it is to say that the distinctive features of the different stages of development in pidgins and creoles might be a regarded as evidence for the fact that language is a non-static, living thing which is subject to certain processes such as elaboration and expansion. (2724)
Bibliography:
Bakker, P., (1994). Pidgins. In: Arends, J., et al., (eds.) Pidgins and Creoles – An Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp 25-39
Cassidy, F.G. and LePage, R.B., (1989). Dictionary of Jamaican English. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Fromkin, V. et al., (2014). An Introduction to Language. 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learing
Holm, J., (2000). An introduction to pidgins and creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Mühlhäusler, P., (1997). Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. London: University of Westminster Press
Rickford, J.R., (1987). Dimensions of a Creole Continuum. History, Texts, and Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Romaine, S., (1988). Pidgin& Creole Languages. London: Longman Group UK
Sankoff, G and Laberge, S., (1974). On the Acquisition of native Speakers by a Language. In: DeCamp, D. and Hancock, I., (eds.) Pidgins and Creoles: Current Trends and Prospects. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 73-85
Syea, A., (2002). Future Developments in Creole Languages: Moving away from Analyticity. In: Glenn Gilbert (eds.) Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, pp 199-229
Todd, L., (1990). Pidgins and Creoles. 2nd ed. Oxon: Routledge
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