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Features of Creolisation

Previous blog post summarising Pidgins/Creoles here.

Previous blog post about Pidgins here. 

EMERGENCE SCENARIOS OF CREOLES:

• Through monogenisis: an ancestor pidgin.

Creoles are stable natural languages, that are developed from the mixing of parent languages (usually a pidgin). 

Creoles are believed to have been nativised by children as their primary language, with the result that they become a stable language.

Since most creole languages developed in the colonies they are typically based on English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, the languages of the superpowers of the time. However, there are also numerous creoles based on other languages such as Arabic, Hindi, and Malay.

Decreolisation: this occurs when speakers may feel compelled to conform their speech to one of the parent languages.

FT: Foreigner talk - this hypothesis argues that a pidgin or creole language forms when natives attempt to simplify their language in order to address speakers who do not know their language at all. 

Hawaiian Creole English: The Lord’s prayer:

Features of Creoles:

1. Development of derivational morphology: 

Example: Sranan: taki = speak

                             taki- man = speaker

Tok Pisin: bik-pela bisnisman = big businessman

                sam-pela = some patients

    2. Development of tense aspect system:

Example: Sranan: 

mi njan fisi                mi bi-njan fisi

I eat fish                   I PAST MARKER.ate fish

mi o-njan fisi

I FUTURE MARKER.will/might eat fish

McWhorter generalised pidgins/creoles as “young, simple, languages”.

- He argued this because of the absence of inflectional morphology.

- Absence of tone.

- Absence of non-compositional derivational morphology. 

PIDGINS

Brief summary of pidgins in previous post, found here. 

The term pidgin has nothing to do with birds. The word, first attested in print in 1850, is thought to be the Chinese mispronunciation of the English word business. There are other theories about the origin of the term. (About World Languages website).

Features found within most pidgins:

1. A five vowel system: /a e i o u/  
2. Reduction of vowels. 

Example: Tok Pisin (spoken in Papua New Guinea): KOT = /coat/

                                                                                  DOK = /dog/

                                                                               SAPOS = /suppose/

      3. The syllable pattern is usually CVCV (consontant/vowel/consonant /vowel).

Example: Saramaccan (spoken in Surinam): teki = take i.e. te-ki 

so C= t / V= e / C= k / V= i

     4. Simplified consonants: for example fricatives (sounds such as ‘th’ in ‘the’ and ‘th’ in ‘thought’) represented by the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) as : /θ/ /ð/

so these sounds become ‘stops’ i.e. go from  /θ/ /ð/ to /t/ /d/

     5. Tendency to follow an S-V-O word order i.e. subject verb object.

     6. Reduced morphology and grammatical markers:

Example: Nauru (spoken in the Pacific Islands).

mi hásibən flén no wáifu. Finiŝi dái tin yía

my husband’s friend has no wife. (she) died 10 years ago.

Pidgins are not the native tongue of any speech community, but instead is learnt as a second language. 

They usually develop when there is regular, prolonged contact between two languages. 

It is often agreed that pidgins become creole languages when a generation of children learn it as a first language. 

Pidgins are exclusively used for oral communication (as opposed to being written down).