Slavery as a factor in language contact

[David D. Robertson]

Dell, Dave, khanawi-lhaksta,

As most of my training and study is outside the discipline of anthropology,
let me ask you who know more:  Has there been much study specifically of
slavery as a factor in language contact?  And specifically in the
Northwest, have researchers happened to learn very much from Native people
about who spoke what language in which slaveholding households?

That is, has anyone methodically looked into what influence, if any,
slavery has on people's language use?

It's a routine claim in "creolistics" (you can call the discipline by other
names, or leave out the shock quotes) that conditions like plantation
slavery and indentured servitude have had a decisive role in birthing
contact languages.  On the surface it's obvious that for example
extirpation from Africa, followed immediately by permanent stranding as a
slave in the New World, in constant contact with a significant population
not speaking your mother tongue, would compel you to improvise some way of
communicating.  Presumably, you'd adopt some simplified form of somebody's
language(s)--a pidgin, let's say.

But has this been proven beyond doubt to be true?

And does the same intuition apply to the kinds of slavery practiced along
the Pacific Northwest coast?

Or did the common situation, in which at least one person in a village had
a multilingual household, and there was a continual trend of marrying
outside the ethnic group, provide a weaker stimulus for pidgin genesis than
the "plantation" model?  (Because there'd very often be someone around who
could interpret Language X, the speaker of X might have small need to learn
the local Language Y.)  In the latter case, was it only from approximately
the time of Contact with non-Indians that pidgin genesis (from Chinookan,
English, Haida, 'Nootkan' sources and so on) was strongly motivated?

-- Dave