Creoles

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Jan 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> > >Creolization requires either aggregations of wealth or very active trade.

> > -- I don't think this follows.

> > Any situation of contact will produce linguistic effects; simple folk-
> > migration will give you the same prolonged bilingualism and need to
> > communicate in imperfectly understood versions of somebody else's language
> > that a trade-diaspora does.

>         Contact does not typically lead to creolization. If it did, there
> would be a lot more of it.

>From my experience and study, creolization is a product of slavery and
colonization.  I don't think that a single example of creole has been
demonstrated that does not involve one of these factors (almost always the
former, but also with the latter).  Slaves being forced to communication with
one another (I count the Hawaiian indentured sugar cane and pineapple workers
as "slaves") is the classic case.  New Guinea's Tok Pisin involved the forced
communication of a people with the superior authority who refused to speak
anything but English.  If there are widely accepted cases of creolization
outside of these two very specific social environments, I'm not aware of them.

John McLaughlin
Utah State University