Distinguish between pidgins and creoles and explain how their distinctive grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary have emerged in different parts of the world due to the processes of colonialization.

Distinguish between pidgins and creoles and explain how their distinctive grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary have emerged in different parts of the world due to the processes of colonialization. Support your answer with close reference to at least two case studies.

At the end of the sixteenth century, European expansion and colonization was a primary catalyst for many of the pidgins and creoles known today. By these we understand that European powers came up strong during this period and for economic and political reasons there began the Europe-wide phenomenon. With colonization, came many reactions e.g. nationalist reactions and linguistic consequences such as dialect levelling and focusing and also the beginnings of the pidgin language. One such area that was colonised by Britain was West Africa. The birthing of the pidgin language was marked by the beginning of the slave trade in Sierra Leone. Slaves from different places were caught and put together in different places. Coming from different backgrounds there was no shared lingua franca among them. The slaves were ingenious enough to create a make-shift language to facilitate interaction and communication after a few months of being together. When this makeshift language is adopted by the community as a first language, with the appearing of a second and third generation--slave-children, it becomes creole. It is essentially an elaborate form of pidgin.

A distinction between pidgin and creole should be further developed. Pidgins are reduced languages, characterized by having a limited vocabulary and a simple grammar which serve to satisfy basic communication needs. It has no native speakers and is restricted in areas of usage. Pidgin language develops into creole language through a process called creolization. In this process, there is an expansion of vocabulary and grammar and an extension in usage, especially for the purposes of communication and expression. Creolization also allows users to better express themselves and on a whole different level. Users progress beyond using pidgin language to serve functional purposes to using creole which allows them to express a broad array of human emotions and experiences and usually adopt creole as their mother tongues.

Patrick says that “Most languages develop through normal language transmission where each generation of speakers inherits their language from previous generations intact, with only a few minor changes.” (Patrick 2003, pp 1). Here we can see that neither pidgins nor creoles are formed via normal language transmissions. Rather the development of pidgins and creoles is linked to the contact of two or more different languages. By studying them, we can come to understand language change and contact, and also help us see how new languages may then evolve. Academic investigations into this area also surface many questions regarding linguistic adequacies in pidgin and creole, highlighting the significance of this linguistic phenomenon. This phenomenon was not unique to Africa but applied to many parts of the world that to date, and just English-based pidgins and creole languages can be found up to 44 places in the world today. (Leith 2002, p.209) We will proceed to examine two case studies and see how the distinctive grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of pidgins and creoles have emerged in different parts of the world because of colonization. Our first case study will be on Reading B, Chapter 6 on Bislama Pronouns from the course book. I’ll be using it to tract how some grammar structures particular to Bislama has connections to colonization.

Combs explains:

“Vanuatu has about 110 languages for its 150,000 inhabitants, the world's highest concentration of languages. Historically, most villages had very limited contact with each other, and many developed their own languages. Contact with the West, which brought trade, Christianization, and colonization, forced the villages to communicate with other, and throughout much of Melanesia (from Papua New Guinea through The Solomon Islands to Vanuatu) a more-or-less common pidgin developed. Vanuatu's variant of this pidgin is called Bislama.” (Combs 1995, pp.1)

Bislama is the national language of the South Pacific country of Vanuatu, and is a combination of ...

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Combs explains:

Bislama is the national language of the South Pacific country of Vanuatu, and is a combination of English, French and Melanesian words. One of the commonest features of pidgin languages is that they are ‘simplified’ or ‘reduced’ in comparison with their lexifers (Siegel 2002, pp.1). The lexifier is the language that most of the vocabulary for the pidgin was taken from. The lexifer language of Bislama is English. In the case of the pidgin language Bislama, we see this process of simplification, in the system of using pronouns.

Pronouns are words used in substitute of names and nouns. In Bislama, gender is not distinguished. The word ‘hem’ in Bislama can mean ‘he’s’, ‘she’s’ or ‘it’s’. Thus the sentence

Hem i stap insaed long graon a?

can have three different meanings, depending on occasion of usage. E.g.:

It’s in the ground eh?

He’s in the ground eh?

She’s in the ground eh?

Clauses in Bislama are also not rigidly defined. The word olgeta is used for ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their, as in the following sentences (Siegel 2002, pp.5):

(1) Olgeta oli save ple ragbi They can play rugby

(2) Mi bin singaotem olgeta I called them

(3) Haos blong olgeta I bon finis Their house has burned down

Using descriptive grammar to help us understand, in sentence (1) the word olgeta is the subject (S). In sentence (2) the same word is the object (O) and finally in sentence (3), it is again the subject (S). At the same time, the pronoun system of Bislama does have characteristics that are foreign to the English language. It has a system of four different second-person pronoun. One example of this is the word ‘you’: yu (singular ‘you’), yutufala (dual ‘you two’, yutrifala (trial ‘you three’) and yufala (plural ‘you all’). Here we see that although simplification makes a language simpler than another in some aspects, it makes it more complex in others.

The case study also shows the functional use of a pidgin language. Bislama almost borders on being a creole in the aspect of functional usage, except it is not being communicated as the mother tongue of the people of Vanuatu. It is used in many areas of life such as the mass media, in the government and also in Bible translations. Another type of expansion of Bislama is grammatical expansion. Substrate influence is when substrate languages – the mother tongue of the pidgin’s speakers, act also as a source for grammatical expansion. The pronoun systems of most of the substrate languages belonging to the Oceanian subgroup of the ‘Austronesian’ family, make the same distinctions in inclusiveness and number as in Bislama. (Siegel 2002, pp.10) This is one way how colonization have influenced the some part of the grammar system of a pidgin language. I will proceed to examine case study two which is on Audiocassette 1, Band 6 on Guyanese Creole and the associated notes in Study Guide 1 to see how pronunciation and vocabulary in this creole language is particularly linked to colonization.

The first inhabitants of Guyana were Amerindians and the first European settlers in the area were Dutch. The English were later invited by the Dutch to come and build plantations. As time passed, both these groups of settlers brought African slaves to this part of the world to build up sea defenses needed to protect farming areas. Next, following the abolition of slavery, Indian labourers were imported for work on sugar and rice plantations. The abovementioned groups of people contributed in one way or another, to the development of Guyanese Creole. It is not surprising to find words of African origin in the creole. A substantial amount of vocabulary native to areas of India has been found also in Indo-Guyanese, which is a form of Guyanese associated with the rural areas of Guyana (Commentary, Audiocassette 1, Band 6 on Guyanese Creole). An example of a person from that area would be Irene, as featured in our case study. Irene belongs to the ‘estate’ class of people, one of two broad classes of speakers in the village near Georgetown. There are many distinctions about the pronunciation in Guyanese Creole that apply to both Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese (the other broad class of speakers) Creole. We will refer to the associated notes in Study Guide 1.

The written symbol ‘th’ can be pronounced in two different ways, voiceless and voiced. In the extract of Irene’s speech, the voiced sound e.g. in the word ‘this’, seems to be regularly pronounced as ‘d’. Words like ‘da’ or ‘that’ (line 356), ‘de’ or ‘there’ (line 380) and ‘di’ or ‘the’ (line 379) are but a few examples of how there seems to be a replacement of consonantal sounds in words that begin with ‘th’.

Many words ending in ‘ay’ have pronounciations that not only seem to replace the original vowel in the ‘ay’ but also accentuate the length of the supposed vowel sound. Some examples of this is ‘everiidee’ or ‘everyday (line 358), ‘plee’ or play (line 358). At the same time, the word ‘lai’ or ‘lay (line 370) doesn’t seem to suffer from the same effect.

There are also a couple of other strange effects that are isolated cases in the extract. The word ‘faal’ or ‘fall’ seems to be pronounced in a way where the original vowel sound is pronounced very much like a diphthong, but shorter as compared to a word e.g. ‘cow’. Diphthongs are known as double vowels. This means that when the vowel is pronounced, the tongue starts at one place in the mouth and moves as the vowel is being pronounced. In this example the spelling of the word ‘faal’ shows very clearly the difference in pronunciation. Another isolated case where I am unable to draw a clear rule is the word ‘boot’ or ‘boat’ (line 361) and the word ‘heer’ or ‘hear’ (line 366). There is a strange distinction in the handling of similar words in English, in which we see a middle component of the word consisting of a diphthong, two different vowels. In Indo-Guyanese Creole the second of the two vowels is replaced with the first. Hence we hear a slight difference in the pronunciation.

There is also a vague hint of English associated with modern day Black people. Words like ‘notn’ or ‘nothin’ (line 382) and ‘hapn’ or ‘happ’n’ (line 392) quickly remind me of how vogue it seems to some and natural to others, to speak this way in today’s world. However, the most interesting thing I have noticed about this speech extract is something that sounds almost like Singlish to me. In line 392 I quote “… ‘dis ting hapn tu mii tuu, chrii taim,” By virtue of being able to vaguely decipher the quotation and putting some sounds to it, it is easily mistaken for another sample of Singlish. (Note ‘chrii’ is pronounced as ‘tree’)

The vocabulary of the Guyanese Creole has the distinction of being quite English, despite the fact that there are traces of words of other origins e.g. Indic. It is often the case of creoles, where the vocabulary appears to be mainly made up of English and yet the grammatical structures are derived from somewhere else, probably from the substrate which is their native language. English is therefore the lexifer language for Guyanese Creole. I suspect too that de-creolization has and is taking place. Romaine (1992) says that it is a further development in which a creole gradually converges with it’s lexifer language and moves towards standard English (in the case of Guyanese Creole). Reading this two extracts of Irene’s and Mother’s speech and examining the vocabulary, the origins of the language is almost obscured. A few exceptions whereby words are foreign to the English-educated would be e.g. ‘skiwb’ or ‘firecracker’ (line 1329) and ‘jumbie’ (in the heading of the extract of Irene’s speech).

We have seen examples of distinctions in pidgin and creole grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. From my analysis of the case studies, I also note some relation between status and social identity with the development of his linguistic phenomenon. The area of implementation in standardization creates a pressure for people to learn a functional language quickly. The obvious social and status difference in the foreigners who introduced the influence of their language could also be a factor in the spread of pidgin and creole, creating an artificial need to fit in. On the flipside in today’s world, we sometimes associate language with obvious relations to creole e.g. Black English with inferiority and the lack of proper education and this brings us to another paradigm in itself.

(Word count: 2038)

References:

ALLSOPP, R. and ALLSOPP, J (eds) (1996) , Oxford University Press

COMBS, S. (1995) Bislama, Vanuatu's National Language,

Commentary, Audiocassette 1, Band 6 on Guyanese Creole

LEITH, D. (2002) ‘English – Colonial to Postcolonial’ in THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, (ed.) English history, diversity and change, New York, Routledge.

PATRICK P. L. (2003) Notes for LG102, Intro Sociolinguistics,

SIEGEL, J (2002) ‘Bislama Pronouns’ in THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, (ed.) English history, diversity and change, New York, Routledge.