creoles

[Susan Ervin-Tripp]

I just monitored a local debaate on theories of creole genesis
between John McWhorter and Claire Lefebvre. It struck me that
most of the work on creoles is done on fully mature creoles which
are undergoing normal language evolution. The past of these
languages seems to require reconstruction by inference, history,
demographic records and so on.

Why not study creole genesis as it is going on? Is anyone doing that?
One needs to go to a place where there are lots of people brought
together from a range of language communities, who have to
communicate, and who have minimal access to any dominant variety
and do not have a shared lingua franca. Does this happen now in our
world full of global workers and refugees?

One theory says that in these conditions the first thing to happen is
use of a kind of learner variety which lexicalizes from phonetic material in
the lingua franca /superstrate using the structural apparatus of
the speakers' mother tongues.  Then, as they talk with each other,
levelling occurs and certain features become dominant in the new
shared variety.  Which features dominate is an empirical question.
This kind of process could be fairly rapid. Is anyone
studying such conditions?

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Susan M. Ervin-Tripp                 tel (510) 642-5292
Psychology Department             FAX (510) 642-5293
University of California            ervintrp at socrates.berkeley.edu
Berkeley CA 94720
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ervintrp/
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