History of English

S. Gramley, SS 2009English Pidgins and Creoles

The Early Modern English (EModE) Period (1500 – 1700) Foreign Involvement:

First overseas expansion in this came with

• the planting of the first North American colonies (Roanoke (1581 – unsuccessful); Jamestown (1607); Plymouth (1621), Massachusetts Bay (1628), etc.

• Ireland (esp. after the Civil War, 1650s)

• the Caribbean (Jamaica 1655)

• Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (1788)

• West and East Africa and South Asia (non-settler colonies) (1808)

The Early Modern English (EModE) Period (1500 – 1700) Foreign Involvement:

Eventually, however, English was to spread to many more countries, esp. in the second major phase of colonialization and imperialism.

In the 19th and 20th centuries the two major English-language powers, Great Britain and the United States, extended their empires to numerous territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific(see maps on the next slides).

Of the other English-speaking countries only Australia became involved inasmuch as it extended its sphere of influence northward to Papua-New Guinea.

British colonial expansion (various periods)

US Territorial Expansion (1st half of 19th century); later Alaska, then Hawaii as well as Puerto Rico are added

MidwayWakeGuam HawaiiThe PhilippinesSamoa

US Caribbean Expansion

Guantánamo

Puerto Rico

Virgin Islands

Panama Canal Zone

The Expansion of English beyond the British IslesBasic Language Situations

The planting of settler colonies led to the establishment of GenE as a mother tongue of the majority (or a major proportion) of the population in Ireland, North America, the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand.

In the non-settler colonies English was used as an officallanguage of administration and education, but did not supplant the native languages of such countries as Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, or the Philippines. Singapore is an exception in its wide use of English thru-out the (non-settler) population yet without displacing the native languages of the majority of the people.

Contact between English and various substrate languages also led to language mixing in which native grammatical structures and English lexical items were combined, first in pidgins and then in creoles.

The historical background of pidginization and creolization during colonization

• The phenomenon of pidginization and following creolization is a result of the social contact between colonial powers and the countries they occupied

• Results from communication attempts between Master (superstrate) and Slave (substrate) and Slave (substrate) and Slave (substrate)

• Contact was not intensive enough to acquire the full language system of the superstrate language

The historical background of pidginization and creolization during colonization

In the emergence of pidgins, the following European languages have thus served as superstrate languages, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, which dominated a variety of African, American, and Asian-Oceanian substrate languages.

Definitions. Pidgin: a type of language which involves contact between speakers of several different languages. Historically, chiefly in the context of trade or of plantation labor. In this sense it is a contact language.

Possibly a temporary make-shift means of communication or possibly a more or less permanent and relatively fixed language code. Because of this, often referred to as a marginal language.

In no case is it the native language of any one of its speakers or groups of speakers. For this reason, a non-native language.

It makes use of words, sounds, constructions, and strategies of communication which it may borrow from any of the native languages of its speakers as well as non-native languages the speakers may be in contact with. Hence, pidgins are often called mixed languages or Mischsprachen.

What is borrowed is often borrowed in a reduced version. This reduction affects not only the systematic syntactic aspects of language, but also the nature of language use. That is, pidgins are used in fewer situations and allow less stylistic variation. For this reason they are also termed reduced languages.

Some examples of HPE (Hawaiian Pidgin English) (Bickerton 1981):

difren belifs dei get, sam gaiz"Some guys have different beliefs" (21) [differing WO]

haus, haus ai stei go in, jaepan taim"When I lived in Japan I stayed inside the house" [non-creole use of stei, not as aspect marker] (27)

go tak tu fala go hapai dis wango take two men go carry this one"Take two men and carry this away" [go not used as an indicative complementizer, but as a marker of the imperative] (31)

syntax: not Englishmorphology: only partially English pronunciation: not easy to interpret vocabulary: more or less English (only the word hapai is clearly not English in the examples given above)

Chiefly because the vocabulary comes to such a large extent fromEnglish is such a pidgin called Pidgin English: English is what is called the lexifier language.

The lexifier language is usually the language of the economically or militarily more powerful and more prestigious.

Such a language is called the superstrate language; its contributions are visible in the vocabulary used.

In contrast, the native languages of the suppressed and less powerful people are referred to as substrate languages; their influence is less obvious, but present in phonology and communicative structures, less in syntax, morphology, and lexis.

If pidgins are mixed languages and non-native ones, how can they be referred to as, for example, English pidgins? What is Englishabout them?

As the remarks just made show, a definition of pidgin has to take into account elements which are linguistic, i.e. reduction and mixing as well as social and historical, i.e. contact, often marginal, among people who do not share a native language.

Conventionally they are nativized pidgins, i.e. languages adopted by children growing up in environments where a pidgin is their primary input language and therefore their native language.

In becoming a native or a primary language, a pidgin changes in its nature. It does not remain reduced; rather, it shows lexical, syntactic, and morphological expansion.

This includes the number and quality of the contexts in which it is used; it gains in stylistic differentiation, often finding expression in written texts. It may eventually become standardized. As a result it can no longer be regarded as marginal.

The mixing that went into the pidgin and the contact that characterized the genesis of pidgins is now only historical, and for this reason it cannot be counted as definitive.

Creoles

The Life-Cycle Theory (Rickford 1987: 32-5)

Some people see a connection between the (synchronic) continuum and diachronic development. This need not be the case.One assumption is the development of a creole from an original pidgin and then its decreolization along a continuum towards thestandard. In such a model (à la Hall) the mesolects are younger varieties than either pole.

pidgin → basilect → mesolect → acrolect

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as spoken in the United States is, according to some people, an example of what ultimately happens to a creole as it blends into the mainstream of the language more and more.

The continuum

In countries in which English is the official language and the majority of the population speaks either English or an English creole, there is a variety of forms that lie between the two extremes of the standard language (the acrolect) and the broadest creole (the basilect) as well as the various forms which lie inbetween (the mesolects).

Just what determines what degree of creole a speaker will produce? This seems to be a fairly complicated equation involving education and social status, the social situation (official or familiar) including solidarity, urbanity, age, gender.

Where only two distinct varieties exist, one will generally have more prestige and be the High or classical language. The other is the Low language, the demotic/vernacular. Such relationships are cases of diglossia.

There are remarkable similarities between creoles all over the world that have never been in direct contact (cf. Voorhoeve 1973):

(a) similarities in verb inflexion

(b) persistence of grammatical morphemes such as locative na

(c) widely shared lexical items such as sabi (135)

We will look at some evidence in the following.

The problem of origins: or, how English are English creoles?

Putative European-language etymological sources for the verbal markers

Anterior: CP tava < estavaCF te < était / étéCE bin < been

Progressive: CP ka < cá "here" or ficar "stay"; ta < está; CF ka < Port; ap(e) < après "after" (or < ?au près "near"); CE da / de "there"; also stei "stay"

Habitual: CE doz < do / does (habitual marker in dialect)

Completive: CP kaba < acabar "finish, complete"; ja, za < já "already" CF fin(i) < fini(r)CE don < done

Irrealis: CP ta and ka (cf. progressive)CF ke < ka (prog) + ay "go"; (v)a < va goes"; CE (g)o < go; sa < shall; wi < will; gwõI < going

English Pidgins and Creoles: similar or parallel forms

Most of the theories of the origins of pidgins and creoles set out to account for the fact that the these languages share a large number of parallel, similar, or even identical forms, forms different the standard forms of their lexifier languages.

This is explained in three largely differing ways:

(1) the influence of the superstrate

(2) similarities in the substrate languages and cultures

(3) universal processes of human language processing

• dialect • regional English • baby talk• maritime or nautical jargons

This is the attempt to trace back to non-standard English regional dialects or to non-standard urban usage the features found in the pidgins or creoles.

(1) European model: influence of superstratumPidgins (and indirectly creoles) came about under massive influence (transfer, borrowing) from:

(2) Polygenesis or parallel development

• African substrate• plantation situation under conditions of slavery• baby talk / simplified imput• imperfect L2 learning

Cultural and linguistic similarity are presupposed. Along with this goes the selective survival of forms. The similarity in the plantation situation in America then led to parallel development.

Common African HeritageCultural uniformity beneath the surface in WAfr existed in the form of similarities in folklore, religion, kinship structure, music, as well as language (Alleyne: 175).

Linguistic similarity seems, in the case of the English-and French-based creoles to go back to the Akan and Ewe groups. Early trading was concentrated in this area. Akan influence in the West Indies may go back to Coromanti leadership in many early slave revolts.

Selective survival of forms: African technology, political organization, clothes largely disappear; religion, magic, music, superstition, forms of amusement remained in pure or in syncretized form. Language relics remained in the deep structure. Even some low-level lexical items are retained - almost all related to the private sphere (176).

Hypothesis of parallel developmentThis may account for much similarity beyond a mere common origin; in language, family system, survival of the animal trickster in folklore - as opposed to the non-survival of other elements (Alleyne: 178). This has been credited partly to the "culture of poverty" (Lewis1961) (179). "The fact is however that in the areas where the same linguisticmodel continued to exist, there is no real stability but a continuing variation caused by increasing modification in the direction of the model language" (180).

Assimilation was favored in Antigua, U.S., Barbados, less so in Surinam (Bush), Gullah area. Antigua and Jamaica show a linguistic continuum; some societies have a religious continuum,too, ranging from Cumina (in Jamaica, pure) to shango and shouters (Trinidad, mixed) to Christianity (pure) (181).

Summary: There has been a process of interpretation of English (or French) in terms of native patterns under varied conditions of linguistic integration and social stability:

• the greatest numbers have spoken a creole (Alleyne: 182). • change is occurring or has occurred in the direction of the

standard European language (but see Surinam, where thecreole is English and the superstrate language is Dutch).

• Sranan and Papiamentu are languages, not creoles because this orientation is missing.

The standard languages and the creoles have no common ancestral stock, as with European languages and their dialects even tho' both Sranan and Papiamentu have a creole history (183).

(3) Universals-of-language approach (bioprogram)This approach explains the similarities across languages / creoles as a part of the way the human mind is structured (rather than similarities in cultural background or in the strength and nature of the influence of the superstrate).

Relative sequence of TMA particles in Sranan

ben-sa waka "would have walked"ben-sa-e waka "would have to keep walking"ben-e waka "was walking"ben waka "walked"sa-waka "will walk"waka "have walked" (completive present)sa-e-waka "will be walking"e-waka "is walking"

(Voorhoeve 1962: 38-40)

The lexical learning hypothesis

• a single set of universal syntactic principles• no variation possible• part of the human neurological equipment• instantiation comes via lexis and morphology of the

available languages (the superstrate).

The "simplicity" of creole grammar is greater because of the results of "millennia of diachronic change" which have been lost (Bickerton 1988: 274).

Bickerton's work shows that the pidgin (HPE) was so rudimentary and unordered that it was not suited for the "pidgin-creole cycle."

What we have is "second language learning with inadequate input" - with radically reduced structural properties (Bickerton 1988: 272). Where the non-European population quickly outnumbered the Europeans fewer European linguistic properties were maintained.

Children handled this situation very differently from adults because the latter had a viable language already; the former made one (ibid.: 273).

Loss, retention, and reconstruction

Initially, too many morphemes were missing for the morphology to survive in its original function. Some free grammatical morphemes did survive.

Morphemes with numerous allomorphs were easily lost, e.g. French definite article (gender, number, morpho-phonemic forms).

Articles were sometimes retained as a part of the noun: lamer "sea"; lamer-la "the sea" (Bickerton 1988: 276)

Universal grammatical categories. Some morphemes, if lost, will not be reconstituted; others must be. If the source language morphemes for "certain minimal functions" are lost, lexical forms will be found for them. They include:

a) articlesb) TMA (tense-modality-aspect)c) Wh-wordsd) pluralizerse) pronouns (all persons and number)f) oblique case markersg) a genitive locative prepositionh) an irrealis complementizeri) a relativizing particle j) reflexives and reciprocals

What universal principles apply to pidgins or creoles?In the case of pidgins, there are universal means in which humans reduce language, in particular any distinctions not essential to communication may be easily lost.

In the case of creoles, there are universal principles of language expansion. In the ideal case the human language acquisition device sets in when the language input from the environment is too meager.

Reduction according to universal principles would mean that all that is accidental is lost while what is essential is retained. For example there is: • loss of inflections• fluidity of word classes (incl. polysemy and multifunctionality)

This should perhaps be seen as dynamic.

Example of the category of plural. It need not be present in a pidgin/creole. But if it develops, then it will first develop

(a) in subject position and (b) with humans

Further extension will then be to other sentence positions and to other degrees of animacy according to implicational relations(as demonstrated above in connection with the continuum).

The evidence

I. From creoles. Example: HPE was so diverse in itself that universal principles could not be observed (rather, there was L1 interference, i.e. the substratum).

II. Yet HCE shows structures which are

(a) not derived from the substratum or from English andb) shared with other historically unrelated creoles.

The conclusion drawn is that the source of these structures must be the bioprogram (the innate human language acquisition device).

References:Alleyne, Marvyn C. "Acculturation and the Cultural Matrix of Creolization" in: D.Hymes (ed.) Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. Cambridge; CUP, 1971, 169-186.

Bickerton, Derek (1981) Roots of Language. Ann Arbor ; Karoma.

Bickerton, Derek (1988) "Creole Languages and the Bioprogram" in: Frederick Newmeyer (ed.) Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. vol.2 Linguistic Theory. Extensions and Implications. Cambridge; CUP, 268-84.

Rickford, J.R. (1987) Dimensions of a Creole Continuum. History, Texts, and Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole. Stanford (SUP).

Taylor, D. (1977) "The Caribbean Creoles" in: Languages of the West Indies. Baltimore (Johns Hopkins UP), 151-4.

Voorhoeve, Jan (1962) Sranan Syntax. Amsterdam.

Voorhoeve, Jan. (1972) "Historical and Linguistic Evidence in Favour of the Relexification Theory in the Formation of Creoles" LangSoc 2, 133-45.

Maps

Britsh Empire:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/British_Empire_Anachronous_8.png

US Territorial Expansion (continental): http://www.lrc.salemstate.edu/hispanics/images/us_territorial_growth_1810.jpg

US Territorial Expansion (Pacific):http://www.globalpolicy.org/images/maps/empire/79pacificexpansion4.jpg

US Territorial Expansion (Caribbean):https://learninglatinamerica.wikispaces.com/file/view/CaribbeanMapCarte.jpg

Atlantic Slave Trade: http://www.aarweb.org/syllabus/syllabi/a/altany/rst280A/AtlanticSlaveTrade-display.jpg

Example of Creole (Guyanese Creole English)From a conversation between two field workers on a sugar plantation in Guyana (1975-1976). The speaker is Reefer, who finished only four years of school, but is "literate, articulate, and well informed on political matters" (Rickford: 149). He consciously uses the basilect (but also has a command of the acrolect). He felt the need to be free of an external norm:

Abi no waan dem ingglish maan tiichin an tingall-we NEG-want PLUR-English man teaching and thingsWe don't want the English people's teaching and so on

da no moo, maan. dem ting da mos don. there any more, man PLUR-thing there must PASS-done.any more, man. Those things must come to an end.

yu sii, dem a rait de hoon buk fu suut de hoon self, you see, they all write their own books to suit they-own selvesYou see, they write their books to suit themselves,

an abi mos laan from dem, on sobjuu ondo dem! and all-we must learn from them and subdued under them!and we must learn from them, and be subdued under them!

Grammatical markers

dem = plural marker of nouns (placed before the noun), e.g. dem ingglish maan "the English people"

fu = infinitive marker of purpose (future), e.g. fu suut de hoonself "to suit themselves"

de = locative, progressive, temporary marker, "be at the moment" e.g. mi de ya nou "I am here now"

a = marker of progressive or habitual, e.g. somain me de a wok"sometimes I am working (progressive); yu badi na a muuv"your body does not move (habitual)"

gu = future irrealis ii gu rob "he would rub"

Personal pronounssingular plural

first person mi abipossessive mi

second person yu(u) yúpelapossessive yoor

third person iiobject am