What's a "creole"?

[Michel DeGraff]

Over the years, I've become quite skeptical about how people define
"creoles" (in opposition, say, to the results of "ordinary language
change").  It now seems to me that, if the term "creole" has any validity,
then this has much more to do with socio-history, politics and ideology,
than with linguistic structures per se.  (Mufwene and Alleyne, among
others, have made similar points.)

One of the clearest cases of ideological `double standards' being applied
to "ordinary language change" vs. "creole creation" is found in Meillet's
writings.  (This is actually so blatant that it's funny --- at least in
retrospect.)  In a couple of papers, Meillet compared the inflectional
erosion in the history of Romance to a similar phenomenon in the history of
Creoles.  For Meillet, the loss of case inflection in Romance is a sign of
intellectual progress toward abstract thought, but the loss of verbal
inflection in Creoles is a sign of severe and abnormal grammatical decay!

In fact, it can be posited that both phenomena arose as a result of second
language acquisition in contact situations --- and Meillet was quite
familiar with this notion.  To repeat my now-familiar line: both "ordinary
language change" and "creolization" reduce to similar sort of cognitive
processes --- modulo differences in the socio-linguistic and historical
circumstances.  Of course, the differences in treatment (in Meillet's
writings, say) are also related to the socio-history of `creole'
vs. `non-creole' speakers, and to our distinct attitudes toward these
groups.  The differences in treatment are subtle, but real nonetheless.
(The reactions to Sally's classification of Afrikaans as a "creole" are
obviously not so subtle.)

                                 -michel.
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