The beginning of Pidgin and Creole Studies.

Reference:

CONTACT LANGUAGES 

edited by John Holm and Susanne Michaelis

Routledge, 2009

Two articles are used as reference material to speak about the beginning of Pidgin and Creole Studies. They discuss important contributions from theorists and general mindset of the work in the time. 

Their contributions are divided under the heading which contains their reference. 

On the Beginnings of Pidgin and Creole Studies

Schuchardt and Hesseling

Guus Meijer and Pieter Muysken

The authors try to investigate the origin of studies on Pidgin and Creole by speaking of two of the main researches in the field, Schuchardt and Hesseling

About the beginning of the studies in general, authors put it that

“The investigations of pidgins and creoles, now a major area of linguistic studies, began at the end of the nineteenth century as an offshoot of Romance Linguistics.” p.188

“Most of the nineteenth- century views on creoles were shaped by the same racism that characterized slavery” p.189

As an example of this mindset, they mention Bertrand-Bocandé, 

“It is clear that people used to expressing themselves with a rather simple language cannot elevate to the genius of a European Language"

The emergence of a creole language would be explained in terms of intelectual complexity. European languages were complex, and black languages were not. This fact reveals both people’s level of intelligence and intellectual complexity. With contact, it seems logical that the complex language had to be simplified to be used by blacks. 

The idea of creoles as a corrupted form of language derives from these earlier views and studies, which clearly had a biased view of the language. Moreover, it seems these studies were focused on lexical items and did not take into consideration syntactic structure, according to Meijer and Muysken.

Systematic investigation of Creole begins in the 1880’s, as the interest in Africa had changed. Trying to regain economic prestige and be freed of English control, Portuguese liberal intellectuals shifted their attention to their colonies, and creole was part of this movement. Although the work produced does not seem reliable, for theoretical flaws, it was pioneer.

Another reason for the systematic study of Creole was a nineteenth century attempt from scholars to explain how Latin had developed into many different languages, thus the idea was to understand how one language could develop into different ones, which seemed to be the case of Creole. This was agreed by Lucien Adam, a French theorist.

A Portuguese theorist, Coelho, disagrees with this hypothesis. He defended that creole would be a initial state of acquisition of a foreign language, and the substratum language would have nothing to do with it. Creole emerged in an emergency contact situation, in which people had to respond using one specific language. This is similar to the idea of Lingua Franca. The process is based on universal psychological laws, not on substratum language. In support of his theory, he presents examples of common characteristics in creoles of different places. 

Hugo Schuchardt, a german linguist,  is an important name in this field, as one of the first theorists to have dedicated himself into understanding Pidgin and Creole, especially because to him, they represented the interactions between different grammars, rather than the previous investigation on substratum. 

In his theory, 

“Creoles have developed from pidgins into full- fledged, complete languages because the slaves, belonging to many different nations, had no other language in common” p.197

“One of the peculiar traits of creoles is the existence of numerous degrees of similarity of the creole to its model, although this does not imply that creole is ‘individual broken talk’. 

Thus system and variation co-exist in Creole, according to the authors. 

The discussion about Schuchardt's contributions to the field continue in another article, written by another important name to these studies, Hesseling. 

How Did Creoles Originate?

D. C. Hessling

One of the fundamental characteristics of Creole languages is observed to be the replacement of all verb forms for the indicative. 

Schuchardt would defend that the indicative use in creole languages would be a consequence of the native speaker trying to simplify his own language when speaking to a non-native speaker.

“For the master, as well as the slave, it was a matter of making oneself understood; the former removed all peculiarities from his European language, and the latter held back all his peculiarities; one met at a medium.” Cited in pg 378

Hesseling questions exactly the fact that speakers, that is, non specialized in linguistics, would know exactly what to simplify and to omit in these situations. 

He proposes that the model, then, is a matter of power, not language.

One could not learn a language without the help of a native speaker, who would act as a mediator.

To him, the use of indicatives in creole languages would not be a simplification, as the baby talk theory had suggested, but a matter of repetition of a common verb form in a language.  

“The pervasive incidence of deviations from this rule shows, I believe, not the conscious deliberation of the uneducated, but rather the intuitive adoption of the most frequently heard form” 

What is observable here is that the studies of these languages were conducted, in the beginning, taking into consideration the linguistic aspects more than the speakers themselves. This will be the topic of the next post!