language birth

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:26:06 -0500    Dennis Baron
<debaron at UIUC.EDU> writes

>. Sure, it's unlikely, but my question is this:
>  are there examples of language birth, like that of the Romance
>  languages, only more recent?

Hardly unlikely.

First, a caveat:  whether two tongues are "separate languages" or "dialects
of the same language" is a matter of local custom and politics.  The adage that
"a language is a dialect with an army" is 90% correct (I am still searching
for the Yiddish army, though).

The European out-migration that followed Columbus and Vasco da Gama spawned a
number of pidgins, creoles, and other variants of European languages.  (I
won't try to distinguish between a pidgin and a creole because if I do Salikoko
Mufwene will reach out from my computer screen and bop me over the head with a
copy of _The Ecology of Language Evolution_).

At least one of these variants has by long custom been considered a separate
language rather than a dialect: Afrikaans.

Another candidate is Gullah (MWCD11 defines it as "an English-based creole
...marked by vocabulary and grammatical elements from various African
languages.") There are several members of ADS-L who have written on this list about
Gullah, so I will leave it to them to pontificate on whether it is a separate
language from English.  (Judging by some Gullah quotes posted to this list, I
would not be surprised to find that Gullah and English are NOT mutually
intelligible).

Still another candiate is Melanesian Pidgin, which in my experience gets
described as a language on its own, rather than as a dialect of English.

It is not only European languages that have spawned pidgins etc. since Vasco
da Gama.  There is for example Fanagolo (also known as ."FANAKALO",
"FANEKOLO", "KITCHEN KAFFIR", "MINE KAFFIR", PIKI, ISIPIKI,
"ISIKULA", LOLOLO, ISILOLOLO, PIDGIN BANTU, BASIC ZULU)  which as far as I
can tell is based on several South African languages.  Notice that in the list
above (copied from www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/ethno/Sout.html ) it is
called "Pidgin Bantu".  I suppose it is well-enough known and has been
widely-enough used to be classified as a language rather than as a dialect of Bantu or
Zulu or whatever.

Fanagolo was used for many years as a sort of Lingua Franca for miners from
various African language groups who did not speak either English or some
African language in common.  Not surprisingly it picked up all the negative
emotional baggage of both colonialism and apartheid, which makes it perhaps the only
language on this planet to be Politically Incorrect.  It has also been
officially declared a safety hazard by the South African government (nowadays it is
much more effective, as well as safer, for miners to communicate in English).
It appears, from what I have read, that Fanagolo will die out in the
not-too-distant future, at which time it will also have the distinction of being the
only dead language in the history of this planet to die unmourned.  Its only
literary monument is a translation of MacBeth.

          - James A. Landau