EXTINCT Indians and EXTINGUISHING Creoles

[Mike Cleven]

At 12:55 PM 12/11/99 -0500, Michel DeGraff wrote:
>I felt moved by Rob Moore, Jeffrey Kopp, Tony Johnson, Phil Cash Cash and
>others' commentaries to share some of my own experience as a Creolist
>creolophone.  I am from Haiti and work on Haitian Creole.  I've often found
>much similarities in attitudes toward Native and Creole peoples.
>
>I was particularly struck by this comment by Phil Cash Cash:
>
>> unfortunately for many of us native peoples, we are plagued by historians
>> who seem to want to evoke an imagined (imaginary) pathos on native history.
>> this kind of pathos (most unique of historians) tends to over dramatize
>> human events in ways that deny and invalidate the experiences of others, as
>> in this case, the Chinook peoples who are survivors in their own right.  as
>> in my own history (Nez Perce) which has been written to death by many
>> well-wishing but misinformed non-native historians, one cannot help but
>> wonder (and question as many have done) if the Nez Perce (or any native
>> people for that matter) can ever represent their own history.
>
>This paragraph could be straightforwardly re-translated to describe works
>on Creole languages and Creole cultural phenomena (e.g. Haitian Vodou).
>
>In fact, there is a whole research industry on Creole languages that goes
>by the name `de-creolization'. The implication is that Creole languages are
>inherently endangered languages as they go down the inevitable path of
>extinction as entailed by their `modernization' and `normal-ization'.  The
>idea is that Creole speakers wait around for the first occasion to abandon
>their native languages in order to adopt (what some view as) the
>structurally superior and expressively more adequate European language.
>Interestingly, such "imagined (imaginary) pathos" is found among the
>best-known Creole `experts'.  In turn, when such "pathos" is shown to be
>mythical and/or ideologically-driven, its critiques are labeled as
>dangerous nationalists...

It's worth remembering that some European languages had their origins as
something like Creoles - English in particular, but also Yiddish and Ladino
and some of the old Greek/Italian-based "lingua franca" of the Eastern Med.
 It's also worth considering that the Norman/Angevin ruling classes of the
English dominions of the 12th-13th-14th Centuries probably also were
expecting that the Anglo-Saxon hybridization with French that was emerging
outside their circle of families was bound for extinction and was inferior
to their own cultivated tongue, and would be abandoned in time......even
though the English court _still_ is fluent in French, post-Norman
"creolized" Anglo-Saxon/English survived and prospered....

Just as New World and African English (and African French and Haitian) may
become the dominant forms of English and French one day.......

Mike Cleven