Reference
The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies
Edited by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler.
Wiley – Blackwell , 2008
The Cultural in Pidgin Genesis
Christine Jourdan
The author considers as Pidgin all the languages common to Caribbean and Pacific
plantation.
She defends that the origins of Pidgin should not ignore cultural aspects, because
“stories of
pidgin genesis are invariably stories of people, (…), stories of cultural
contacts (…) and therefore of cultural change ( …) , and they are also stories of the power
relationships that are at the core of the social worlds that have fostered most
of the pidgin and creole languages we know. These are stories of people on the
move (…). These are also stories of repeated negotiations and accommodations of
meaning, as much as of the imposition of meaning, cultural and linguistic” p.359/360.
To
understand Pidgin in a cultural environment, she begins by laying out the
cultural conditions of these societies:
- work
force was forcibly removed from home countries;
- there is
no equal proportion of men and women, elder and young;
- some of
home culture was kept alive by groups of workers;
- social
activities were work-related activities;
- social
constraint and physical/psychological violence must be taken into
consideration.
Taking the
plantation as a locus for research, it is safe to say that communication
revolved around work. Therefore, the origin of pidgin is deeply connected to
work related activities.
Work
provided context for communication, either with white masters or their employees,
either amongst slaves themselves. Work, according to the author, is what
provides the common ground heterogeneous individuals would need to form a
community, because they might have come from different cultural backgrounds,
however, they were subject to the same practices through work. Hence, it provides necessary conditions for the
creation of a pidgin.
She defends
that Pidgin was more prominent in work related activities, whereas vernacular would
be more influential in other cultural activities, essential to the connection
with memory and past, arguing for the co-existence of pidgin and vernaculars in
these societies.
Meaning
would be a result of a consensus, understood as negotiation. However,
negotiation would be step 2 to a first process, which relies first in how one
read and makes sense of the reality, deeply connected to one’s culture.
Therefore, some of what was experienced might have not been possible to
translate, so to speak. This is how the author explains pidgins not being
totally similar to their substrate languages, because some of the language
would not be considerate relevant or even understandable for the groups that
were involved, defending that pidgins are not vernaculars added with French or
English words.
What she
means is that there are too many cultural aspects to take into consideration
before accepting the idea of semantic and lexical categories being simply
transposed from vernaculars to pidgin. Also because new cultural events were
being experienced, so new lexical had to be invented.
With the
same premise, she also argues against the second language acquisition aspect of
pidgins, which would be to deny that workers were in fact developing a new
language.
The example
she gives illustrates that a process of selection and retention took place in
Solomon Islands, when certain kinship terms are used according to English form
and nuclear family organization – dadi, mami, brata, sista- but grani, for
example, would mean both grandparent and grandchildren, and the other terms do
not refer specifically to one person but to a group of people ( mami would be
all women in the generation of one’s mother)as opposed to English, more similar
to Melanesian kinship.
The race
matter
When removed from their homes, slaves said they had seen slavery
before, but never in terms of race. Then, in this specific context, race
becomes a power issue that needs to be taken into consideration.
The author
calls attention to the fact that all languages developed in these terms were
labeled as Pidgins.
She also considers the emergence of Pidgin as a form of resistance to an hegemonic setting. it provided
communication among slaves, breaking their isolation;it established ground to the formation
of a cultural identity.
According to her, there has been too much
attention given to conflicting power relationships and not enough on collaborative ones.
And language development is the relationship which cannot develop without collaboration.
Promoting efficiency in communication would be the goal, which allows for
language mixing, and would guide selection of linguistic features.
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