DeGraff Creole Exceptionalism: A Summary

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2022

This article investigates Language Making processes in multilingual postcolonial societies where Creole languages are spoken. It raises the question whether or not Language Making in these settings differs from other contexts given the historical preconditions and social, economic, or political inequalities which persist after the colonial period. The paper discusses the potentials of Language Making to support or impede efforts of decolonization. With the help of examples from several Creole-speaking societies, it shows different approaches to conceptualizing Creole languages as linguistic entities with the creation or emergence of norms, different naming strategies or through language policy and planning. It examines the potential contribution of different agents of Language Making and illustrates cases in which Language Making is countered or languages are un-made. As a conclusion, the article shows that the concept of Language Making may need further expansion or nuancing in ord...

Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, 2017

This study examines the potential of phylogenetic analysis in the classification and comparison of Spanish contact varieties, with special focus on three Afro-Hispanic varieties spoken in South America. Our analysis is based on typological and dialectal comparative data. The results of the phylogenetic analysis show clear clusters of standard varieties and creole varieties, while the placement of other contact varieties in the network has to be interpreted in the light of the data collection methods and socio-historical information about the varieties.

PROSPECTS, 2017

This article aims at a deeper understanding of the importance of native languages in education and development, with Haiti as a case study. About half of Haiti's population is illiterate. Among ten children who enter the first grade, at most one (10%) will graduate from high school; a large proportion will drop out of school at an early age. Language is a factor in such academic failure. Education in Haiti is carried out mostly in French, which is spoken fluently by at most 5% of the population, while the language spoken by 100% of the population, namely Haitian Creole (Kreyòl), is by and large excluded from the school system, in spite of legislation, official curricula, and various efforts from civil society to generalize the classroom use of Kreyòl. We hypothesize, based on comparative research on education in the mother tongue, that the systematic classroom use of Kreyòl-at all levels, but especially in early grades-promotes academic success in Haiti, as illustrated in this paper. This article reports on the results of an intervention to improve early-grade reading and writing in Haiti. This intervention is part of a larger project titled "Mother-Tongue Books: Learning to Read in Haiti" (MTB) with Christine 2 of 56 W. Low as principal investigator. The project promotes the collaborative production of books by Haitian school children in their native Kreyòl and the use of these books to enhance literacy gains in early grades. An assessment carried out during academic year 2012-2013 (DeGraff 2013b), using the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) instrument, showed that the first and second graders at Lekòl Kominotè Matènwa (LKM) in La Gonâve, Haiti, performed at a much higher level than their counterparts in five schools nearby. LKM is a pioneering MTB school where Haitian Kreyòl is used as the primary language of instruction. These initial results (referred to below as the "baseline assessment") spearheaded our intervention, whereby the MTB approach was introduced to the five other schools in the study. The final EGRA evaluation data show that the students in the five non-LKM schools, through the MTB intervention, substantially reduced the gap in their reading-and-writing levels vis-à-vis their LKM counterparts. In other words, the literacy skills of the students at the five non-LKM schools rose nearly to the level of those at LKM through the use of an intervention based on child-centered active-learning pedagogy with the systematic use of their native Kreyòl. In this paper, we analyze the data collected in the course of this project and their implications for policies to enhance reading and writing instruction in Haiti.

Language in Society, 2018

Mark Lewis asks that socially engaged linguists go beyond Labov's (1982) principle of error correction (PEC) so that we can enlist critical race theory (CRT) to address ‘more difficult and fundamental questions of the sociohistorical conditions of a representation of language, challenging its premises and showing its connections to racial, economic, or other forms of violence’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 341). The ultimate goal is the actual transformation of the socioeconomic structures responsible for structural violence against speakers of stigmatized languages.

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2022

Existing literature on Philippine languages is rife with references to Chavacano, the hypernym for Spanish-based creoles spoken in various parts of the archipelago. Variants of Chavacano are characterised in historical accounts as ‘a corrupt Spanish dialect’ with depreciative labels such as español de tienda ‘hawker Spanish’ or español de cocina ‘kitchen Spanish’. The concerted assertion of this creole’s degeneracy is a legacy of colonial knowledge production. Since the genesis of the Philippine creoles, much has changed as to their usage both from a linguistic and a social viewpoint. It is in this social dimension that we locate the present study. Of the three main varieties of Chavacano, spoken in Cavite City, Ternate, and Zamboanga respectively, this paper zeroes in on the third as the Mindanaoan variety is the healthiest to date. We wish to interrogate the trajectory of its social status, from its characterisation as a degenerate variant of Spanish to its privileged position in ...

Language Ecology, 2017

Typological approaches involving the study of Creole languages have long triggered an unsettled dispute among creolists. Some claim that Creoles do not differ from non-Creole languages, and can only be defined socio-historically and not structurally, while others claim that Creoles are ʺdistinctʺ in many respects, and/or form a special class with specific typological properties. In an attempt to settle this dispute, Bakker et al. (2011) drew on a phylogenetic approach to provide evidence that Creoles form a structurally distinguishable subgroup within the world’s languages. However, their methods and conclusions appear to be questionable, as they are likely to be flawed. Standing as a challenge to the aforementioned article, this paper will reconsider their methodological and empirical approaches by re-evaluating the sets of Creoles and non-Creoles on the basis of identical or near-identical principles. It will ultimately appear that their conclusion could be an artefact of the sele...

Études créoles

In this article, I revisit two apparently conflicting positions about similarities between the emergence of French creoles and that of the Romance languages. According to Schlieben-Lange (1977), the Romance languages are outcomes of language contact and are creole-like, whereas Faine (1937), Hall (1958), Posner (1985), and Trask (1996) argue that French creoles may be considered as new Romance language varieties. I submit that the positions are reconcilable, insofar as both creoles and the Romance languages emerged under conditions of vernacular shift, by majority populations, to a colonial language; the substrate languages appear to have exerted significant influence on the restructuring of the lexifier; and the latter was likely quite diverse and was diverging structurally from the metropolitan varieties by some sort of protracted basilectalization. On the other hand, the Romance languages appear to have diverged more extensively from their lexifier than the creoles have. However, these are not sufficient reasons for claiming that the Romance languages are also creoles. Whether or not French creoles should be considered new French dialects also depends on what their native speakers claim, not on what linguists think, based on mutual intelligibility. We learn instead that similar contact ecologies are likely to foster similar structural changes in the language being appropriated by an alloglot population. We must indeed bear in mind that the Romance languages emerged in endogenous settings and really after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, whereas the creoles did in exogenous ones; and we have no idea how they will evolve a thousand years from now, subject to unpredictable political and economic conditions.

Linguistics, 2023

This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language acquisition, processing, typology, language contact, language evolution and change, and formal approaches. Gradient approaches have been very fruitful in some domains, such as language processing, but their potential is not fully realized yet. This may be due to practical reasons. We discuss the most pressing methodological challenges in corpus-based and experimental research of word order and propose some practical solutions.