Prominent languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch were the languages of the Colonizers. They traveled and set up ports in coastal towns where shipping and trading routes were accessible. As colonies expanded and became more established, these areas usually developed a sense of local cultural and linguistic identity which might be reinforced by contact with local languages and new kinds of social hierarchies.
The most complex linguistic situation was found in those colonies like India and West Africa, where bilingual communities were created. Here a small number of Europeans imposed political and economic control over precolonial populations. When a language is imposed on a community as part of a colonial process, speakers tend to incorporate many linguistic features from their first language when speaking the new, imposed one leading to the adoption of a phonological system or set of grammatical patterns. ( ref : English – history, diversity and change chapt 5 p 184-185)
This is seen in the successful expedition by the English to establish a colony in North America. Later colonists from other European states such as the French and the Dutch followed trying to exert their influence.
With colonization huge plantations growing rice and cotton developed. Labour for the plantations was supplied by slaves who were transported from Africa. These slaves were separated from the people of their community and mixed with people of various other communities, therefore they were unable to communicate with each other. The strategy behind this was so they could not come up with a plot to escape back to their homeland. The slaves in order to communicate with their peers on the plantations, and with their bosses, they needed to form a language in which they could communicate therefore creating pidgin. Here the main West African languages had a strong influence on the new forms of English which were spoken by the slaves. ( ref : English – history, diversity and change chapt 5 p 194)
The long term effect of the slave trade on the development of the English language is great. It gave rise not only to black English in the United States which has been an important influence on the speech of young English speakers worldwide, but also led to the formation of English pidgins and creoles. ( ref : English – history, diversity and change chapt 5 p194-196)
In contrast, a creole language is a pidgin that has developed and become the mother tongue for a community of people. It is marked by an expanded vocabulary and grammar structure that allow for communication as that of non-creole languages.
Once a pidgin with its limited vocabulary and grammar is adapted and expanded and passed on the next generation to be used as a first language, it became a creole.
The term creole has been traced to the Portuguese world crioulo: criado”raised” (as in a child). Originally the term referred to an African slave born in the New World and the meaning expanded to include Europeans born in the New World.
An English creole is a language which is formed when an English pidgin becomes a first language and thus extended in the ways required by a native speaker to communicate in a wide variety of contexts. It is called an English creole because its vocabulary has been based on that of English. The first stage of creole development is typically pidginization. Creolization occurs as this develops into a full language, acquired by children as their first language. There are many English –based creoles. In west Africa, they include Aku in Gambia, Krio in Sierra Leone, and Kamtok in Cameroon.
Typical grammatical features in European –based creoles include the use of preverbal negation and subject-verb-object word order; for example (from Sranan in Surinam), A mo koti a brede He didn’t cut the bread. Many use the same item for both existential statements and possession: for example, get in Guyanese Creole Dem get wan uman we get gyalpikni There is a woman who has a daughter. They lack a formal passive: for example, in Jaaican Creole Di pikni sik The child is sick. Most creoles do not show any syntactic difference between questions and statements: for example, Guyanese Creole I bai die g dem can mean ‘He brought the eggs or ‘Did he buy the eggs?’ ( ref : English – history, diversity and change chapt 5 p 220)
Creolization does seem to have occurred in Jamaica. This island was captured from the Spanish in 1655, rapidly turned over to sugar production and settled by English-speakers from Barbados and other Caribbean islands and by convicts from Britain. By 1673 these seem to have been matched in number by African slaves, but by 1746 the latter outnumbered the former by over ten to one, and the owners of the plantations lived in fear of a slave revolt. Eventhough the slaves were kept separate linguistically, it did not prevent them from rebelling, despite the severest punishments. These slaves could most probably had communicated through creoles they had developed with new meanings unavailable to the slave owners. Words such as adru ( a medicinal herb ) from Twi, himba (edible with yam) from Ibo, and dingki (funeral ceremony) from kongo have all been found in Jamaican creole.
The influence of the various major colonies could be seen in the Jamaican Creole which has words from Portuguese ( pikni, ‘a small child’), Spanish (bobo, ‘ a fool’ ), French (leginz, ‘a bunch of vegetables for a stew’), Hindi (roti, “a kind of bread “), Chinese (ho senny ho, ‘how’s business?’) and even Arawak, the language of the precolonial population who had been exterminated by the time English was spoken in Jamaica (hicatee, ‘ a land turtle’, adopted via Spanish). The English element includes dialect words now scarcely heard in England ( for example, haggler, ‘a market woman’)
An eighteenth- century account of Jamaican speech also notes the presence of nautical terms such as berth (office), store (warehouse), jacket (waistcoat), windward (east) and leeward (west), suggesting that the ‘maritime’ speech of English seamen (drawn from a mix of dialects of British English ) may have influenced the formation of an English-based pidgin (Bailey 1992, p 126)
In conclusion, as seen by the two examples given ; colonization did play a part in the emergence of pidgins and creoles. Jamaica and North America are two case studies where a displaced population was replaced by people who spoke different languages, brought in initially as slaves and where communication between these people and English speakers resulted in the development of a pidgin language that subsequently creolized. ( ref : English – history, diversity and change chapt 5 p 210)
References
David Graddol, Dick Leith and Joan Swann (1996) English, history, diversity and change, The Open University
Website : http:// babel.uoregon.edu/explore/socioling/gidgin.html
