26.1065, Review: Socioling; Typology: Buchstaller, Almoaily, Holmberg (2014)

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Subject: 26.1065, Review: Socioling; Typology: Buchstaller, Almoaily, Holmberg (2014)

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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2015 16:39:30
From: Bettina Book [book at phil.uni-mannheim.de]
Subject: Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-578.html

EDITOR: Isabelle  Buchstaller
EDITOR: Anders  Holmberg
EDITOR: Mohammad  Almoaily
TITLE: Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters
SERIES TITLE: Creole Language Library 47
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Bettina Book, Universität Mannheim

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This book is an edited collection of papers that represent topics from the
area of pidgin and creole studies. The outstanding aspect of those papers is
that they go beyond the usual African-Europe-connection, meaning their topics
concern pidgins and creoles that have been taken into consideration quite
rarely in an academic context. It is an interesting book for Creolists who
want to broaden their horizons and get to know pidgins and creoles with
non-European lexified contact languages. Therefore this book offers a new
perspective on an old known matter: pidgins, creoles and language contact
phenomena. This volume contains six articles plus an introduction by the
editors.

Criticizing the fact that the majority of the research on pidgins and creoles
is European-centric, the editors Mohammad Almoaily, Anders Holmberg and
Isabelle Buchstaller show the consequences of this focus in their
“Introduction” (p.1-5) to this book. They do not only state the effect on
nomenclature and research traditions, but also warn that due to this process
“many contact languages have become extinct without having been documented or
they persist, but under-described or even unknown outside their local context”
(p.1). That is the reason why this book aims at giving a platform to research
on non-European language based contact languages. The introduction ends by
summarizing each paper of this volume briefly.

The paper “Ethnohistory of speaking. Maritime Polynesian Pidgin in a trilogy
of historical-sociolinguistic attestations” by Emanuel J. Drechsel (p.7-40)
introduces the method of ethnohistory in the context of non-European pidgin or
creole studies. Giving the example of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin, which has
not survived into modern times, he explains this process of historical
analysis that combines philology with the interpretation of historical
material using ethnological criteria. The authors uses data from three
different sources to show that this pidgin existed as a lingua franca among
eastern Polynesian islanders and that, even though it didn’t survive, there
are still traces to be found in Parau Tinitō in Tahiti. His sources are: 1.
observations of “Tahitian” by a German naturalist and his son, 2.
Spanish-British verbal exchanges with a Tahitian servant-sailor under British
command, 3. conversations by a Māori and a British Military Surgeon. Analyzing
this data, the author shows how Europeans and Americans interacted
linguistically with Polynesian-speaking people. Furthermore he derives several
features of the Maritime Polynesian Pidgin by cataloguing the features and
comparing them to known and current phenomena. 

“The ‘language of Tobi’ as presented in Horace Holden’s Narrative. Evidence
for restructuring and lexical mixture in a Nuclear Micronesian-based pidgin”
(p.41-55) by Anthony P. Grant introduces the reader to the vocabulary and
short sentences in “the language of Tobi” (p.41), collected by an American
sailor and trader named Horace Holden. Grant shows that a large number of the
lexical items can be traced to Tobian, a language that is part of a subgroup
within Austronesian. Above all, the author states that especially the
syntactic features show few if any resemblances to the features of modern
Tobian. Therefore the article aims at showing that Holden’s data can be seen
as a probable pidgin with influences from Malay, Palauan and Spanish. To prove
this hypothesis he gives interesting insights into the historical background
of Tobian, as well as his source, Horace Holden. By analyzing the orthography,
the morphology and the lexicon of the collected data, he critically describes
all the found phenomena. His results substantiate his assertion by manifesting
a resemblance of the data to modern Tobian and to English and by demonstrating
the structural features that serve as an argument for a pidgin.

In “Language variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic” by Mohammad Almoaily (p.57-83)
an analysis of five different phenomena depicts the factors that influence
variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA): “free vs. bound object or possessive
pronouns”, “absence vs. presence of the Arabic definite marker al”, “presence
vs. absence of Arabic conjunction markers aw and wa”, “presence vs. absence of
the GPA copula fi, and “presence vs. absence of agreement in the VP and the
ADJP” (p.59). The goal of this article is to find out if there is an impact of
the first language (L1) on the choice, rather the occurrence, of the mentioned
phenomena and a possible shift toward the L1 language, the lexifier language
Gulf Arabic or GPA. Furthermore the author is interested in establishing a
connection between the linguistic choice of his informants and their number of
years of residency in the Gulf. He analyzes a homogenous group of speakers
from the three largest substrate groups in Saudi Arabia, Bengali, Punjabi, and
Malayalam. All three languages have different morpho-syntactic structures,
which marks the shifts that might occur as even more interesting.

As a result the author states that “significant correlation between the
morpho-syntactic properties of the substrate languages of GPA and the choice
individual native speakers of these languages make [...] can only be found in
the informants’ use of conjunction markers (p.82). Furthermore all the facts
indicate that the target language is not the lexifier Gulf Arabic, but Gulf
Pidgin Arabic.

“How non-Indo-European is Fanakalo pidgin? Selected understudied structures in
a Bantu lexified pidgin with Germanic substrates” by Rajend Mesthrie
(p.85-100) is a study on a southern African pidgin whose main lexifier is
Zulu. Comparing the structure of both languages, the author shows that there
exist forms from the lexifier that are used with a different meaning, function
and distribution and therefore are significant evidence in favour of a
restructuring-hypothesis. Because of the social situation in the phase of
contact that gave rise to the pidgin, the author considers Zulu to be the main
lexifier and superstrate, and English and Afrikaans the main substrates. In a
second step the author compares Fanakalo features to those of Atlantic creoles
and gives a surprising result: Fanakalo presents the opposite and is therefore
“typologically different from Atlantic restructured varieties. These
differences hinge on the fact that some of the features do not occur in the
superstrate (Zulu or Xhosa), that the substrate was mainly English (also
Afrikaans), and that the substrate-superstrate relations were inverted in
Fanakalo at the times of its origins, compared to the Atlantic world” (p.93).
In addition the author shows on the basis of a tense-aspect-comparison that
most of the restructuring appears to be in the direction of a basic English.
But there is also clear evidence for that fact that there is a genuine
building of a pidgin grammar, rather than a relexification of basic English
with Zulu lexemes. Therefore Mesthrie concludes that Fanakalo can be seen as
lexified by a non-Indo-European language and additionally shows grammatical
complexities from Zulu, English and Afrikaans.

The paper “Language change in a multiple contact setting. The case of Sarnami
(Suriname)” by Kofi Yakpo and Pieter Muysken (p.101-140) invites the reader
into the world of multiple language contact in Suriname, a well known region
among creolists for the three existing clusters of creoles. The most important
aspect of this case study is that analyzed Sarnami is not a creole in the
traditional sense and certainly not a pidgin (p.102). The authors base their
analysis on the assumption that Sarnami is the only Indian diaspora language
in the Caribbean that still shows a stable speaker community. Yakpo and
Muysken focus in this paper on the changes induced by trilingualism. This
trilingualism is based on two dominant languages, namely Sranan Tongo and
Dutch, and other languages of the country, e.g. Sarnami. After giving three
principal contact scenarios as theoretical background, the authors present the
results of their corpus study. The extensive description of the historical
background and the role of Dutch and Sranan Tongo as lingua francas, as well
as the data on multilingualism in Suriname, presents an ideal basis for the
argumentation that Sarnami shows traces of koineization and effects of
multilingualism. Several comparisons with Indian languages and an detailed
chapter about codeswitching and e.g. structural borrowing (SOV to SVO)
supports the authors’ assumption and leads to the conclusions that also
differentiate Sarnami -- at least partly -- from the Suriname creoles, namely:
Sarnami has essentially maintained its Indic typological profile, but shows
also systemic restructuring. It shows less radical departure from its
contributing languages because of their similarities with each other.
Furthermore the different socio-economic circumstances play a crucial role in
the development of Sarnami. At long last, the authors discuss the possible
further development of Sarnami, giving two opposite scenarios: the fall into
disuse or the maintaining.

The final paper, “Pidgin verbs. Infinitives or imperatives?” by Kees Versteegh
(p.141-169), examines the difference between Arabic-based pidgins/creoles and
West European-based pidgins concerning the derivation of verbs. In
Arabic-based varieties verbs seem to derive from imperative-forms, whereas in
West European-based varieties verbs derive from infinitives. The author gives
the frequency of commands in early pidginization contexts as a possible reason
for these phenomena. Depending on the language, commands are expressed by an
imperative or an infinitive form, rather an infinitive that functions as a
directive. The author sees first and second language acquisition as inherently
similar processes (p.164). Therefore he uses both processes to verify his
hypothesis that “the input provided [...] is a crucial factor in the
development of foreigner and child speech” (p.143). During his argumentation
he states that the general belief that the infinitive as the least marked form
is the first to be learned is unwarranted, because of the lack of awareness of
the learner towards the morphological structure of the target language. He
furthermore concentrates on the talking-up vs. talking-down dichotomy as an
argument for preferring certain structures in a communicative context.
Dedicating an extensive chapter to Arabic foreigner-directed speech and then
comparing it to verbal forms in child language, he concludes as follows: the
difference between those forms of language lies in the transitory stage of
child speech vs. the static stage of foreigner speech. The similarity is to be
seen in the above mentioned command-input-context.

The volume concludes with an area index, a language index and a subject index.

EVALUATION

The aim of this book is to give a platform to research on non-European
language-based contact languages (p.3). This volume succeeds in this goal and
thereby sharpens the awareness of these “lesser known languages” making them
attractive for further research. The book coheres very well because it gives a
nice overview of selected languages from non-European-based contact
situations.

Furthermore it is successful because of several qualities and strengths:

- The book is a rich source of empirical case studies that should appeal to
researchers from different areas of Pidgin and Creole Studies. 

- The high-quality empirical papers concerning different pidgin and creole
scenarios make the book interesting not only for experts on non-European
pidgins and creoles, but also to researchers of language contact in general or
European-based pidgin and creoles. The fact that all the examples have an
English gloss and/or translation equivalent makes the papers accessible to
researchers with little to no knowledge of any of the discussed languages. 

Some aspects deserve special emphasis:

The extensive extract of the original data in Drechsel’s paper helps the
reader to follow the argumentation and to see all the analyzed phenomena. The
detailed comparison of Holden’s material with modern Tobian and the results of
other researchers in Grant’s paper make it easy to understand the several
features and see the similarities and differences. Yakpo and Muysken situate
their paper perfectly among the known literature on pidgin and creole
languages and provide a significant number of bibliographic references for
further research.

In sum, this volume is an interesting resource for anyone working on or
interested in language contact, particularly in pidgins and creoles. This book
met my expectations, and I was able to find valuable contents that broaden
research in the field and show potential for future research. Especially the
abundance and variety of diverse languages and contact situations analyzed in
this book reflect the kaleidoscope of pidgin and creole studies and shows that
there is more than European-based pidgins and creoles.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Bettina Book is a scientific researcher at the Institute for Romance
Languages at the University of Mannheim, Germany. She finished her doctorate
thesis on the creole language Papiamentu in 2013. Her main interests are in
the fields of creole languages, syntax and historical linguistics.





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