Creole studies and linguistic typology: Part 2

In this article, I take account of the disciplinary, linguistic, and historical differences that determine the various uses of the “creole” concept, whether as “creole,” “creolization,” or “créolité.” Beginning with anthropological critiques of the concept as exclusionary or theoretically flawed, I attempt to clarify these limitations by examining E. K. Brathwaite’s, the Creolistes Bernabe, Chamoiseau and Confiant’s, and finally Edouard Glissant’s contributions to understandings of creolization. My approach attempts to clarify certain overlooked slippages in the language, and through these slippages redefine the “debate” over the concept as a process of continuous translation. Rather than valorize either the impossible negation, or utopian idealization of the possibilities of the creole, I pay particular attention to the discursive life of the term and its “translations,” both linguistic and conceptual.

Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics, 2018

This chapter discusses specific methodological concerns when working with creoles. We provide a survey of data collection techniques employed in the analysis of social variation and language use in Romance creole settings. A presentation of Romance creoles and previous sociolinguistic and dialectological research on them is followed by a discussion of central concepts in the study of creoles: diglossia, creole continuum, prestige asymmetry, and language endangerment. Best practices in the collection and analysis of creole data focus on ethical aspects and contextualization of research with creole communities, and access to data through participant observation, interviews, and surveys. The chapter ends with a case study of Chabacano perceptual dialectology that combines several sociolinguistic methods in the collection of data on variation and speaker perceptions in a multilingual setting.

Th is paper discusses the possibility of quantifying complexity in languages in general, and in creoles in particular. It argues that creoles are indeed diff erent from non-creoles, primarily in being less complex. While this has been argued before, this is the fi rst attempt to prove it through the use of an extensive typological database. It is noteworthy that the diff ering complexity is not related to the relative lack of morphology in creoles, since they are also simpler than analytical languages. Finally, the parallels between pidgins and creoles (and in particular the fact that languages sociologically intermediate between the two categories are also structurally intermediate) support the increasingly questioned belief that pidgins are born out of pidgins.

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2011

In creolist circles, there has been a a long-standing debate whether creoles differ structurally from non-creole languages and thus would form a special class of languages with specific typological properties. This debate about the typological status of creole languages has severely suffered from a lack of systematic empirical study. This paper presents for the first time a number of large-scale empirical investigations of the status of creole languages as a typological class on the basis of different and well-balanced samples of creole and non-creole languages. Using statistical modeling (multiple regression) and recently developed computational tools of quantitative typology (phylogenetic trees and networks), this paper provides robust evidence that creoles indeed form a structurally distinguishable subgroup within the world’s languages. The findings thus seriously challenge approaches that hold that creole languages are structurally indistinguishable from non-creole languages.

Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère

This article responds to Ingo Plag's recent (2008) columns in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages in which creoles are discussed as 'conventionalized interlanguages of an early stage' with consideration of infl ectional morphology and syntax. Here it is argued that Plag's traditional conception of transfer coupled with his uncritical acceptance of Processability Theory as a theory of interlanguage development make it diffi cult to offer a rigorous assessment of the basic claim. This article offers several critiques of Plag's argumentation and claims that Full Transfer/Full Access model offers accounts that are at least as satisfactory as those offered by Processability Theory. Nevertheless, while embracing Plag's Interlanguage Hypothesis, this article calls for quantitatively and qualitatively more ambitious studies of both interlanguage development and creole formation, based on typologically driven constellations of L1s/ substrates and the Target Languages/lexifi ers.

2005

_Ken Hale: A Life in Language_, Michael Kenstowicz, ed., Cambridge MA: MIT Press,, 2001

Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2012

This paper presents morphosyntactic and sentential information on Mauritian Creole (MC), a French-lexifier creole which has been underrepresented in many studies of Creole morphosyntactic typology. Typological features from Holm & Patrick (2007), Bickerton (1981, 1984), Taylor (1971, 1977), Markey (1982), and Dryer (1992), most of which have previously been assembled as being diagnostic of a language’s creole status, are presented here with examples from contemporary MC. MC sentences from sets of comparative creolistic sentences in Hancock (1975, 1987) are presented in Appendix A. The material demonstrates abundantly that MC exhibits the vast majority of features which have been deemed typical of creole languages over the past four decades.

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...