EXTINCT Indians and EXTINGUISHING Creoles

[Sally Thomason]

About Mike Cleven's suggestion that English might be a creole:

Classifying English as a creole would mean redefining the notion
of "creole" pretty drastically, I think.  All but about 7% of the
basic vocabulary and almost all the grammatical structures of English
can be traced directly back to Proto-Germanic, which is not the case
for any of the languages usually called creoles -- not even Reunionese,
a French-lexicon language which is sometimes called a semi-creole.
The social situation for English/French contact after the Norman
Conquest was also totally unlike that for any creole language: there
were ca. 20,000 French speakesr among ca. 2 million English speakers.
All indications are that there was never any pressure on the great
majority of English speakers to learn French; but there is contemporary
evidence that French speakers learned English right away -- the
offspring of the conquerors were reported to have "bad French", for
instance.  English was never suppressed in the legal system of England.
Etc., etc.  And once King John of England (I think it was King John)
lost Normandy in 1204 (through a remarkably bumbling move that
infuriated the King of France), the French speakers in England shifted
to English more or less immediately.  Given the fact that French
speakers in England can be shown to have been bilingual in English, but
not (for the most part, aside from courtiers) vice versa, it seems
very unlikely that the French-speaking descendants of the Normans ever
thought, between 1066 and 1204, that French would replace English.
(They may well have thought that French would continue to be spoken
by their class in England, of course.)  In any case, there is no evidence
of any hybridization of French & English among *English* speakers in
England, at any period; if there was hybridization of some kind among
French speakers, it vanished when the French-speaking population
shifted to English.

   The apparently abrupt & drastic  change in English after the Norman
Conquest is the result of two major historical facts: first, the bulk
of written Old English was in the West Saxon dialect, a southern
dialect that basically vanished as a written language upon the Norman
Conquest in 1066, while written Middle English, which flourished after
1204, was based on a different dialect that was significantly different
from West Saxon already well before 1066.  And second, when French
speakers in England shifted to English after 1204, they brought a huge
number of French (and Latin) words along with them -- but those words
cluster very heavily in the non-basic (often "learned") vocabulary, not
in the basic vocabulary.

   The Lingua Franca was a pidgin, to be sure.  Yiddish still looks
like a Germanic language, though it has more structural influence from
other languages -- mainly Slavic -- than (for instance) British or
North American English does.  I don't know much about Ladino, but I've
always heard that its vocabulary and grammar are drawn mainly from
Spanish; if so, it's not a creole either.

   -- Sally Thomason