16.3225, Review: Lang Description/Pidgins&Creoles:Luffin(2004,2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3225. Tue Nov 08 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3225, Review: Lang Description/Pidgins&Creoles:Luffin(2004,2005)

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1)
Date: 08-Nov-2005
From: John McWhorter < jhmcw5 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Un Créole Arabe: Le Kinubi De Mombasa, Kenya 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:29:23
From: John McWhorter < jhmcw5 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Un Créole Arabe: Le Kinubi De Mombasa, Kenya 
 

AUTHOR: Luffin, Xavier.
TITLE: Un créole arabe
SUBTITLE: Le kinubi de Mombasa, Kenya
SERIES: Lincom Studies in Pidgin and Creole Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1377.html 

AUTHOR: Luffin, Xavier.
TITLE: Kinubi Texts
SERIES: Languages of the World / Text Collections
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2004

John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute, New York

What happens when speakers of Nilotic languages serve in a British 
army under Arabic-speaking commanders battling a revolutionary 
uprising in Sudan, the revolution is successful enough that the British 
withdraw the troops to areas where Arabic is not spoken, and the 
troops stay there permanently, developing a new language based on 
the Arabic words and constructions they have been using to 
communicate with one another?

In terms of language acquisition, the situation is similar to the 
importation of African slaves to New World plantations, and thus we 
might expect a creolized Arabic in which much of the accreted 
elaborations of ancient Arabic varieties would be shaved away. Yet 
two popular schools in creole studies would predict otherwise. The 
Relexification Hypothesis would predict a hybrid of Arabic and Nilotic 
languages, susceptible to analysis as Nilotic grammar with Arabic 
lexicon. Others would predict a combination of features "selected" 
from the contact "ecology," lightly seasoned by Nilotic influence, but 
with so much of the basic machinery of Arabic intact as to render the 
concept of creole unnecessary.

However, Nubi Creole Arabic (Kinubi) is a stark contradiction to both 
of these premises, as Xavier Luffin's grammar amply demonstrates. 
Kinubi emerged among soldiers of southern Sudan, serving a Turko-
Egyptian government controlled by the British. The Mahdists gained 
control of southern Sudan in 1881, and at the end of this decade the 
British transferred these troops to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. 
Meanwhile, a new contact language had developed among them, 
which they carried with them in their exodus. Their descendants still 
speak the language today, some having also settled in the Democratic 
Republic of the Congo. The language that emerged from this situation 
is neither Nilotic grammar with Arabic words nor just one more 
colloquial Arabic variety like Moroccan or Egyptian Arabic. It is a 
creole language -- in the sense that its grammar is a vast subtraction 
of Arabic's, has only fragmentary inheritances from Nilotic languages 
like Bari, Dinka, and Mamvu (or a few Central Sudanic ones), and is 
plainly the result of a people who learned only a rudimentary Arabic 
and expanded it into a new natural language. Nonconcatenative 
morphology, richly productive in all colloquial Arabics, is completely 
extinct in Kinubi, as is grammatical gender, the definite article, 
phonemic length contrast, and other features.

Kinubi has played little part in discussions of creole genesis, partly 
because its literature has rarely been channeled to creolist venues, 
and partly because most creolists are more familiar with European 
languages than with Arabic. Luffin's grammar, with its accompanying 
volume of transcribed texts, joins a growing body of literature on 
Kinubi which contains a valuable lesson for not only creolists but all 
language contact specialists.

That is, it is often suggested that claims about the nature of creole 
languages are premature in that most creoles emerged as the result 
of contact between Romance and Germanic languages and certain 
Niger-Congo ones. The suggestion is generally made with an 
implication that creolization may not be as inherently subtractive a 
process as often assumed and that creoles based on, say, Georgian 
or Warlpiri might be well-inflected and perhaps even ergative or the 
like. Many suppose, for example, that creoles are low on inflections 
simply because Kwa languages like Twi and Fongbe are, rather than 
because creolization entails incomplete acquisition of a target 
language. Similarly, many note that the colloquial Frenches that slaves 
were exposed to are much less inflectional than standard French, 
such that the isolating typology of French creoles is merely a small 
step further along a pathway of ordinary grammar-internal evolution.

There are serious problems with both of those claims, but the very 
nature of Kinubi nicely addresses them by sheer example. Kinubi's 
lexifier, Sudanese Arabic, is a richly inflected language, displaying the 
famous nonconcatentative morphology of the Semitic family. Thus 
Kinubi's analytic structure cannot be treated as a "natural" 
development. Meanwhile, Nilotic languages are hardly chary of 
inflection, and yet again, Kinubi is an isolating tongue. The lesson is 
that creole genesis entails not only mixture, but simplification. All 
Arabist analysts of Kinubi readily see that Kinubi's grammar renders it, 
and its sister Juba Arabic spoken by those who stayed in Sudan, in a 
class apart from colloquial Arabics elsewhere.

Luffin's grammar includes not only the usual sections on phonology, 
morphology and syntax, but a substantial introductory section on the 
language's history and sociological position, a brief discussion of 
schools of thought on creole genesis, one on sources of its lexicon, 
and even a rather extensive discussion of code-switching between it 
and its main adstrate languages Swahili, English and Arabic (the latter 
mostly from the religious literature adhered to by its speakers, who are 
Muslims). Luffin limns a rich portrait of the language as it varies both 
in time and, especially, space, based on fieldwork not only on his 
principal focus, the variety spoken in Mombasa in Kenya, but also in 
Uganda as well as with speakers of the variety spoken in Sudan.

Luffin gives especial attention to adstratal influences as they vary in 
these locations, mostly lexical, and to an extent that renders the 
grammar perhaps excessively listy in places. At times one supposes 
that it may have been more useful to present this lexical coverage in a 
separate article or monograph, as those seeking to use the book 
strictly as a grammar must wade through quite a bit of diligent 
tabulations of lexical variations.

Another questionable aspect of the coverage is the occasional 
exhaustive comparisons of Kinubi with Sudanese Arabic. It is certainly 
not a flaw that the book is as much a comparative presentation as a 
strict description: this makes the tome useful in assessing Kinubi's 
implications for tracing the nature of creole genesis (especially since 
the overlap between creolists and Arabists is very small, meaning that 
presentations of Kinubi will be most useful with ample examples from 
Arabic itself). The problem is simply that the comparison so 
resoundingly reveals again and again that Kinubi has simply flushed 
away so very much of the machinery of Arabic. For example, when 
Luffin takes each Arabic triconsonantal verb pattern one by one and 
lists the handful of Kinubi forms that happen to have been based on it 
rather than the usual source, the simple imperative, he is showing not 
living grammar but what today qualifies as fossilizations: these 
patterns have no grammatical status in Kinubi itself. Or, Luffin carefully 
tabulates the conjugational patterns in Sudanese Arabic with the 
unchanging verb in Kinubi -- which leads one to wonder whether just 
stating that Kinubi has no conjugational patterns would not have 
sufficed.

But the grammatical coverage also reveals assorted interesting 
features that demonstrate that, as many creolists consider so urgent, 
complexity is not alien to creole grammars. Stress alone encodes the 
passive: kútu "put," kutú "be put" and also deverbalizes to create 
nouns: kúruju "cultivate, grow," kurúju "agriculture." (Heine 1982 is 
apparently unique in treating Kinubi as tonal, and thus describing 
distinctions like this as tonally encoded.)  Kinubi pronouns, typically of 
a creole, do not vary for case, but there is a paradigm of bound 
pronominal affixes used in certain contexts, and unlike many creoles 
which have clitic pronominals phonetically still close to the free ones, 
two of the Kinubi ones are suppletively distinct from their free 
equivalents (1S and 2S -i and -ki for free ána and íta). 
Morphophonemic processes include assimilation in the vowel of 
progressive marker gi- to the initial vowel of the verb: gi-
kélem "talking" but gu-úza "buying" and ga-já "coming." Stative verbs 
are rarely modified by tense or aspect markers, and moreover, as has 
proven the case with many creoles, the semantic contribution of some 
of Kinubi's preverbal markers is by no means semantically 
prototypical, conditioned by complex aspects of pragmatic and 
discourse phenomena.

Something else that stands out in the grammar, however, is a striking 
amount of free variation. Words often occur in alternate forms, 
sometimes conditioned by regular processes such as a tendency for 
final /aC/ to become [e] in color terms (áswad > áswe "black), but just 
as often varying randomly (ábyad ~ ábya "white," or alsán ~ 
alshán "because," káfu ~ kófu "fear"). Preverbal gi- does not 
assimilate vocalically to the verb in regular fashion, since there are 
ample exceptions such as gi-só "going." Future marker bi- usually 
does not assimilate -- but does so with a few roots. Stress only 
encodes the passive and the deverbal in a subset of cases, and in 
fact Luffin only finds the latter process marginally in Mombasa: these 
appear to be changes in progress like the English stress variation 
distinguishing between nominal and verbal uses of words like survey, 
record, and permit. It is an especially admirable aspect of Luffin's 
grammar that he pays assiduous attention to this kind of variation, its 
distribution and extent, especially since little of it is a matter of 
gradient influence from the Arabic lexifier; that is, Nubi's variation is 
not of the well-covered sort on view in creole dialect continua in the 
Anglophone Caribbean.

Luffin's portrait of Kinubi can be taken as indicating what a "real" 
language is like, i.e., languages other than the 200 or so that have 
extensive written traditions and norms: a basic pattern varying in fluid 
fashion according to surrounding languages as well as the processes 
of transformation that all linguistic systems undergo as used in human 
mouths over time. However, the sheer amount of variation Luffin 
presents is not typical even of unwritten languages that are old -- and 
is also quite common in creole languages, especially in areas such as 
morphophonemics in which complication usually has no semantic 
function and is obviously the result of phonetic transformations over 
time. Luffin's presentation of Nubi -- although his discussion does not 
occasion specifying this -- has all of the hallmarks of a language only 
a century-plus old, having yet to freeze into the degree of obligatory 
stricture typical of a grammar in which countless speakers over 
countless centuries have converged upon arbitrary 
conventionalizations.

Meanwhile, Kinubi Texts collects transcriptions of the speech of 
twenty speakers, showing the language in all of its reality including 
ongoing code-switching and borrowings. The volume is compact 
enough that ideally it would be an appendix to the grammar.

The grammar's format is user-friendly. The text is clear, except the 
account of Kinubi's hitsory: the political situation of late nineteenth-
century Sudan is remote to most today, and Luffin's description is 
rather difficult to follow without very close reading (and, truthfully, is 
best engaged with supplementary descriptions from elsewhere). 
There is also an unsuitable amount of repetition of the sort that word 
processing allows: certain text blocks were copied into other sections 
without being deleted from their original place.

Notwithstanding, the two books together stand as the most 
comprehensive single source on this creole now available. Luffin's 
presentation presents Kinubi in all of its dynamic variety such that it is 
alive on the page in the same way as Tok Pisin has been in work by 
Peter Mühlhäusler, Suzanne Romaine and other scholars. This will 
hopefully allow Kinubi to play a larger part in scholarship on language 
contact and creolization in the future.

REFERENCE

Heine, Bernd. 1982. The Nubi language of Kibera -- an Arabic creole. 
Berlin: Riemer. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

John McWhorter was formerly Associate Professor of Linguistics at 
U.C. Berkeley and is now Senior Fellow in Public Policy at the 
Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The Word on the Street, The 
Missing Spanish Creoles, The Power of Babel, Defining Creole, and 
the forthcoming Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native 
Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars.





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