SIL Electronic Book Reviews 2003-001
URL: http://www.sil.org/silebr/silebr2003-001
An introduction to pidgins and creoles
Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 282. hardback $69.95, paperback $24.95.
Reviewed by David J. Holbrook
SIL International
There have been various studies of Pidgin and Creole languages, some as early as the Nineteenth Century. However, Pidgin and Creole studies as an academic discipline was not established until the 1950s and early 1960s. Part of the reason for the late establishment of Pidgin and Creoles as a legitimate field of study is the disparaging attitude that not only nonlinguists, but also linguists have had toward the status of Pidgin and Creoles as languages. Unfortunately, this attitude still continues among some linguists, and I have heard it from some of my SIL colleagues.
This book provides a good description of the development of this field of study, the key players, and their theories that have helped shape the direction that Pidgin and Creole studies have taken. It also points out a number of areas of linguistic study to which Pidgin and Creole studies have made significant contributions. These include:
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Studies of the Creole continuum that have led to the development of implicational scaling in linguistics;
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Labov’s work on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) laid the foundation for modern sociolinguistics and the social motivation behind some language change;
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For historical linguists, pidginization and creolization are extreme cases of language change resulting from language contact. This challenges the validity of some of the assumptions regarding the genetic relatedness of languages, in particular the family tree model and glottochronology;
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Pidgin and Creole studies have contributed to the study of second language acquisition and theories of first language acquisition; and
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Studies of the role that language universals play in pidginization and creolization have focused attention on the nature of universals and thus contributed to grammatical theory.
Previously, Holm has authored a two-volume set, Pidgins and Creoles (Vol. 1, 1988; Vol. 2, 1989), a broad survey of Pidgin and Creole languages. This more recent publication contains some of the same information from the sociohistorical, lexicosemantics, and phonology sections, with the latter two being generally scaled down and more concise. There is a chapter on social factors, which did not occur in his previous survey. The bulk of the new information appears in the chapter on syntax. His previous publications contained a description of Creoles from various lexical bases and with a wide geographic distribution. This publication touches on Creoles from various geographic regions, but the majority of the focus is on the Atlantic Creoles, those Creoles spoken in the Caribbean region and coastal West Africa. These Creoles form a group because, as Holm puts it, “the Atlantic Creoles arose among speakers of partially similar African languages learning partially similar European languages under partially similar social conditions” (239). These Creoles share many features in common and provide a strong database for illustrating some of the points related to current topics in Creole studies.
Holm takes a moderate substratist position in this book. A moderate substratist position is basically one where it is believed that, in addition to the influence of substrate language(s) explaining features of Creole language grammar, etc., second-language acquisition tendencies, Creole-internal innovations, borrowings from adstrate languages (those languages that are neither superstrate nor substrate), and convergence of all or some of these account for the features that distinguish Creoles from their lexical source languages.
There are many features that distinguish the Atlantic Creole languages from their lexical source languages. The main features included in the chapter on syntax are aspects of the verbal system, the noun phrase, function words, and word order.
The bulk of the chapter covers the verbal system—some thirty-eight pages. One of the features that is typical of Creole languages is the use of free or unbound morphemes for the tense, mode, and aspect characteristics of the verbal system as well as other grammatical markers. This is a difference from the superstrate language verbal system. Another difference is the change in the word order for tense. I’ll illustrate using my data from Vincentian Creole, an English-lexifier Creole spoken in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Where the English uses verb tense markers attached to the end of verbs (except for the future tense), Vincentian Creole uses free morphemes that occur prior to the verb.
| English | Vincentian Creole |
| Present tense | Present tense or Simple past depending on context |
| I see you (pl.) | mi si ɑju |
| Past tense | Anterior tense (past tense in a simple past context |
| You (singular) pushed it | ju bɪn pʊʃ i |
| Future tense (i.e. Irrealis Mode) | Future tense (i.e. Irrealis Mode) |
| I will see him | mi ɡo si i |
| Progressive Aspect | Progressive Aspect |
| She is walking | i ɑ wɑk |
The noun phrase is given about fifteen pages and is broken down into sections on determiners, number, gender, possession, and pronouns. The other function words and word order sections are given about ten pages when combined. The above examples illustrate three of the features related to pronouns; pronouns carry no case marking in the Atlantic Creoles, there are distinct forms for second person singular and plural, and there is no gender distinction in the third person pronouns. The noun phrase section provides some good comparison of data across a number of Creoles. I have not seen as thorough a comparison of these different features in one place before. The vast majority of previous research has focused on the verbal system and, although this chapter does give a good amount of space to other features, it is still heavily weighted toward the verbal system.
Overall, this publication provides some new and insightful information with regard to the current issues in Creole studies. The title, however, does not necessarily convey all that it entails. There is very little space in the book given to Pidgin languages. This includes about two pages in the introductory chapter and in a few other places some brief mentions of the relevance of Pidgins in the development of Creoles through the next two chapters, but almost nothing in the final three chapters prior to the conclusion. As a textbook for Pidgin and Creole studies it will likely require students who have more than an elementary knowledge of linguistics. It would be very useful for Creole linguists and those who study language contact phenomena and I consider it an important contribution to the study of Creole languages.
References
Holm, John. 1988. Pidgins and creoles, vol. 1: theory and structure. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Holm, John. 1989. Pidgins and creoles, vol. 2: reference survey. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.