Out of Many Voices, One Language
Pidgin and Creole languages typically emerge in multilingual settings and result from the multiple, complex social factors and linguistic processes (substratal transfer (Siegel, 2008), restructuring (Neumann-Holzschuh & Schneider, 2000) and feature recombinations (DeGraff, 1999; Mufwene, 2001; Aboh, 2015), among others) that participate in language emergence, development and change. The original creolophones' diverse linguistic backgrounds accounts for the unavoidable variability in the input to Pidgins and Creoles and make it necessary to consider variation as one of their inherent attributes (Meyerhoff, 2021).
In this presentation, I focus on a set of Creoles in particular, and examine the nature and origins of their grammatical properties, comparing them to their diverse source languages on both the African and European sides. More specifically, I investigate the precise connections between the selected Creoles' source languages and the properties that these Creoles instantiate, to what extent their grammatical properties overlap or converge with those of their source languages and to what extent they diverge and innovate.
This presentation will showcase how the original creolophones' multiple voices (Kihm, 1990; Baptista, 2009a, 2020; Faraclas et al. 2014) interact in the linguistic ecology in which Creoles emerge and how some of the linguistic features observable in the Creoles under study can be best explained when analyzing them through the diverse lenses of speakers of both the African and European languages (Faraclas et al., 2014).
In the first part of the presentation, I provide comparative diachronic and synchronic analyses of two domains -anteriority and pronominal systems- in the selected Creoles and examine the variation in the expression of anteriority and pronouns across the Creoles under study and their source languages. I will show which variants can reasonably be traced back to specific sources and which ones are genuinely innovative.
The second part of the talk introduces the theoretical model and combination of methods used to examine the sites of convergence and divergence between the selected Creoles and their source languages. I demonstrate the complex social factors and linguistic processes that account for the observable variation across the selected Creoles in the two domains under study (anteriority and pronouns). Furthermore, by using multiple measures of complexity (not just morphological complexity), I show the complex processes underlying the emergence of Pidgin and Creole languages (Aboh and Smith, 2009; Baptista, 2009b).
Based on the complex picture of Creole emergence drawn by this presentation, in the third part, I make a call for drastic changes in the way that Creoles are discussed and introduced to students of Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology and other fields (Bancu et al., in preparation). I discuss preconceived notions about Creoles that are inherited from the colonial times in which they emerged, perpetuated by current neo-colonial distorted narratives (DeGraff, 2003) and make a set of recommendations for their study, based on Bancu et al. (in prep.).
