Book Review: Huber, Magnus "Ghanaian Pidgin English..."

[David Robertson]

LhaXayEm, shiks.

The publisher has kindly provided a review copy of Magnus Huber's book
"Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African Context:  A Sociohistorical
and Structural Analysis" [Varieties of English around the World, G24]
(Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999).  Hardbound, xviii, 322 pp. + CD-ROM,
1 55619 722 5, US$95.00.

This book provides a fine model of scholarly investigation of a contact
language, starting with the earliest possible historical attestations of
language use that could be direct precursors of the modern variety.  In
tracing the diachronic development of Ghanaian Pidgin English (GhaPE),
Huber begins with four-hundred-year-old quotations of clearly pidginized
Portuguese on the West African coast.  He considers whether such a pidgin
represents survivals of the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, judges
that the evidence known does not support a view of it as a community
language -- only, rather, as a "medium of intercultural communication" --
and discusses the possibility that West African Pidgin Englishes (WAPEs)
are relexified successors to the Portuguese pidgin.  These questions
occupy Chapter 2, "A sociohistorical account of Pidgins on the Gold
Coast".

Chapter 3, "Excursus:  The settlement of the Sierra Leone peninsula,
1787-1850" shifts the focus to another area of West Africa in order to
investigate the origins of Krio, the English-based pidgin still spoken
there.  By an admirably detailed examination of historical sources, Huber
reconstructs the social structure of the Sierra Leone colony in its
earliest years, providing the basis for much of the ancestry he proposes
for present-day Ghanaian Pidgin English.  An important highlight is the
relatively large role which settlers from the New World, mostly people
freed from slavery here, must have played in the early development of
Krio, as they were presumably speakers of an English-lexified variety
already.

This data informs his Chapter 4, "The origin and development of West
African Pidgin Englishes:  linguistic data", which is largely interested
in how "language restructuring" occurred in order to give rise to WAPEs,
including GhaPE.  What might be called geographical concerns also dominate
this chapter, in that Huber seeks to discern how and in which directions
influences flowed between the contact varieties of English characteristic
of the New World (the Caribbean, North America) and the Old (West Africa),
as well as the path of transmission of WAPE within West Africa.  His
method again is to compare the known attestations of selected features and
items in several WAPEs, from oldest to recent, leading to the conclusion
that Krio of Sierra Leone was the ancestral donor of key features of the
other WAPEs.  Huber follows by comparing the African varieties with New
World English-lexifier varieties (Gullah and Jamaican Creole),
demonstrating a particularly close affinity between Krio and the New
World.  This supports his contention that the New World settlers played a
pivotal role in the formation of Krio, which in ensuing centuries has been
spread throughout West Africa, influencing other English pidgins' courses
of development.  (Of interest is Huber's consideration also in this
chapter of anglophone "foreigner talk" registers, a sort of
uniform sailors' "overseas jargon", and Pacific Pidgin Englishes, by way
of comparison with the present subject.)

"The sociolinguistics of Ghanaian Pidgin English" is the topic of Chapter
5 -- shifting from diachronic to synchronic focus on the present-day
speech variety.  We learn of the linguistic map of Ghana, and of the
general roles of each language, with English being the official tongue of
a multilingual state.  The interesting point here is that there is a
continuum of varieties of Englishes in primarily urban environments, from
Standard Ghanaian English through GhaPE in its "educated" and "uneducated"
(or institutionalized and non-institutionalized) forms.  The first of
these latter two is an in-group language, while the second is used for
"bridging communicative gaps", e.g. between ethnic groups or between
immigrants and Ghanaians.  This chapter is also the first to provide
extensive samples of GhaPE, richly illustrating the structure and
vocabulary of the language.  (The CD-ROM accompanying the book is
invaluable as a means of letting the reader actually hear the varieties of
Ghanaian Pidgin English in use.  It is useful that a selection of
words in isolation, and then several substantial oral texts, are
provided.)

Chapter 6 concludes the book with an outline of the language as it now
exists, "A synchronic-structural description of Ghanaian Pidgin English".
Based on several months of fieldwork, Huber provides a concise
phonological (not neglecting tone, which GhaPE possesses in common with
other West African languages), syntactic, grammatical-categorical, and
incidentally lexical portrait of this pidgin.   Features of interest
include a split between two copulas:  "Locative" /de/ "be somewhere" and
/bi/ "be"; stative verbs such as /ful/ "be full" and /sik/ "be thick";
tenses including past, nonpast, anterior, and sequential; reduplication
(of words) and repetition (of phrases), the latter involving  reset of
tonal downdrift contour; and topicalization particles deriving from native
Ghanaian languages.  Appendices include written texts from newspapers and
transcriptions of the spoken texts appearing on the accompanying CD-ROM
(which also includes relevant photos and maps).

As with almost any ambitious book, there are a few minor quibbles that can
be raised with the present volume.  For the most part these touch on
matters not focal to Huber's main points, as for example his etymology of
certain Portuguese loans in the ancient contact jargon of West Africa:
His <dacao> "gift" (p. 22) as one source of <dash> ~ "idem" seems almost
superfluous given Portuguese <das> "you give".  When he discusses
Southwestern Pacific features of "Traders' English", his gloss of <pigeon>
(p. 133) as "bird" may be a lapsus for intended "business".  And at least
one of Huber's assumptions remains contestable to me on rereading (p. 91)
that "(i)f we subtract some 10 years before there would be any written
record of the item <live for> and another 120 years we arrive at 1750 as
the start date of [WAPE]."  This is based, he says, on recent work by
Philip Baker, but no proof is given here of the viability of techniques
for determining an average course or rate of growth for contact languages.
I daresay that such research may have the sort of impact that the
glottochronology of the 1950's did, i.e. it may stimulate much
reexamination of methodology.

Huber's book represents a school of contact-language studies with which
denizens of say the CHINOOK Internet list will likely not be very
familiar.  It makes a good introduction to an approach which is very
interested in reconstructing as exactly as possible the historical
development not only of a given language variety, but of several varieties
seen as probably related to one another.  ChInuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon)
studies could benefit greatly by taking inspiration from his example,
which along with Peter Bakker's "A Language of Our Own", about Michif, and
Emanuel Drechsel's volume on the Mobilian Jargon, shows how in-depth
sociohistorical as well as synchronic description can shed more light on
contact language genesis and reasons for being.  It is also a pleasure to
be provided with sound recordings of a language as difficult for
Westerners to encounter as Ghanaian Pidgin English, and to be able to
correlate Huber's analysis with what one is hearing.  This book will be a
welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in sociolinguistics,
the historical linguistics of contact situations, and in grammatical
description of existing contact languages.


David Robertson
The CHINOOK List