What's a "creole"?

[David Robertson]

Khanawi lhaksta: lhush chxi pulakli, shiks,

Michel's remarks are most welcome.  While "pidgins" might be more easily
defined, and "contact languages" a less controversial label, "creoles" may
well be at the receiving end of, may I say, an imperialist power
relationship.  Not to get political or anything.  :-)

The very term "creole" in its nonlinguistic senses has applied almost
exclusively, I think, to communities which came into being as a result of
colonization by imperial powers.  Perhaps by extension, the technical
linguistic usage of the same term has tended to be associated with the
languages of such communities.

The best use for the term "creole language" may indeed be in reference to
language varieties owing their existence to the coming into contact, in a
relatively brief period of time, of two or more speech communities not
previously significantly connected with each other -- but remaining
connected with one another over some significant span of time.  It's
rather a diachronically-oriented term, that is, one which gets its meaning
from a view of language change across time.

"Pidgin" is a contrasting term, I suppose, by dint of its synchronic
reference to a language variety also owing its existence to newly
interacting speech communities, but not seen as having changed much in the
course of its (presumably brief) existence.

Both of these terms, as well as "jargon", not only can but indeed tend to
be used in ways reflective of imperialist cultural attitudes toward
out-groups.  Racism is one of the manifestations of such attitudes, fairly
obviously.

Reading some of (especially) Michel's recent postings here, a person might
understand that there is a notion held by some people that e.g. Spanish is
a "genetically descended" daughter language of Latin, while e.g. Chinook
Jargon is unrelated to Old Chinook, having only borrowed some basic
linguistic building materials from the older language.  As I interpret
your remarks of today, Michel, there may be grounds indeed for seeing the
essential differences among "genetic descendant" languages, "creoles", and
"pidgins" as being predicated upon sheer tempo of language change.

I find that an exciting idea.

I also am quite tired as I write this, so dret sIk tEmtEm nayka pus na
munk c'Em cipi.  Please indulge my mistakes.

Itka mEsayka tEmtEm?

Dave



> Over the years, I've become quite skeptical about how people define
> "creoles" (in opposition, say, to the results of "ordinary language
> change").  It now seems to me that, if the term "creole" has any validity,
> then this has much more to do with socio-history, politics and ideology,
> than with linguistic structures per se.  (Mufwene and Alleyne, among
> others, have made similar points.)
>
> One of the clearest cases of ideological `double standards' being applied
> to "ordinary language change" vs. "creole creation" is found in Meillet's
> writings.  (This is actually so blatant that it's funny --- at least in
> retrospect.)  In a couple of papers, Meillet compared the inflectional
> erosion in the history of Romance to a similar phenomenon in the history of
> Creoles.  For Meillet, the loss of case inflection in Romance is a sign of
> intellectual progress toward abstract thought, but the loss of verbal
> inflection in Creoles is a sign of severe and abnormal grammatical decay!
>
> In fact, it can be posited that both phenomena arose as a result of second
> language acquisition in contact situations --- and Meillet was quite
> familiar with this notion.  To repeat my now-familiar line: both "ordinary
> language change" and "creolization" reduce to similar sort of cognitive
> processes --- modulo differences in the socio-linguistic and historical
> circumstances.  Of course, the differences in treatment (in Meillet's
> writings, say) are also related to the socio-history of `creole'
> vs. `non-creole' speakers, and to our distinct attitudes toward these
> groups.  The differences in treatment are subtle, but real nonetheless.
> (The reactions to Sally's classification of Afrikaans as a "creole" are
> obviously not so subtle.)
>
>                                  -michel.
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