Varieties of creole

Unlike creolization, which 'repairs' the reduction, decreolization is a process, which attacks the simplification and admixture to occur during pidginization. Contact between the source language (in this case English) and the Creole language (in this case Jamaican Creole) leads to the gradual introduction into the Creole of irregularities and redundancies from the source language, and the gradual disappearance of elements derived from languages other than the source - such as, in this case, words derived from African languages.

The problems caused by the English-Creole continuum in Jamaica, often referred to as a post-creole continuum, are quite considerable. First, there is a very widespread view in Jamaica (as elsewhere in the Caribbean) that the majority of Jamaicans speak a very inferior type of English (since Jamaican Creole is obviously so different from English). Secondly, it means that children are taught to read and write in Standard English; after all, 'English' is considered to be their language. Because of the great differences between English and many types of creole, however, many of these children never succeed in learning to read or write English with any degree of proficiency, and the failure rate of Jamaican children taking British English examinations is very high, compared to their performance in other subjects.

From a purely linguistic point of view, a sensible solution to this state of affairs would be a Norwegian type of approach. In spite of the fact that Standard Danish was similar to Norwegian dialects, to the extent that they were formerly felt to be heteronomous with respect to Danish, Norway developed its own standard language after political independence had been achieved. This new standard language was still similar to Danish, but was sufficiently different from it to make it resemble actual Norwegian speech much more closely. A few nineteenth-century Norwegians would have been upset by the statements to the effect that they did not speak Danish. To compare with it, many West Indians now feel insulted by suggestions that they do not speak English. This is because (a) varieties near the (social) top of the Jamaican dialect continuum are much more like English than Creole; (b) it is a characteristic of social attitudes to the language: Standard English is accepted by nearly everybody in Jamaica as 'good' and deviations from it as 'bad'. From a more theoretical linguistic point of view, one of the most interesting features of creole languages generally - at least in the case of those related historically to European languages - is the number of similarities they share with one another, regardless of geographical location. Consider the following verb forms:

Jamaican Creole: /wa de go hapm nou/ What’s going to happen now?

Sranan: /mi de kom/ I’m coming.

Gullah: /de da njam fora/ They were eating fodder.

Krio: /a de go wok/ I’m going to work.

How can we explain the similarities (both of structure and of form) between these languages, particularly in view of the great distances separating them and of the fact that they appear to be historically derived from different sources?

One explanation that has been put forward underlines the similarity of those situations, which led to the growth of pidgins (and hence of Creoles). These languages were generally the joint creation of sailors, traders and indigenous people in trading or other similar contexts. It is also true that pidgins grow up in circumstances where the transmission of information is very difficult and where it may be very useful to make language as simple and efficient an instrument of communication as possible. That is, there may be universal or widespread principles of simplification - including the loss of redundant features and the omission of irregularities -which will favour some structures more than others.

A second explanation goes under the name of the 'relexification theory'. Briefly, this theory claims that the first widespread European-based pidgin was Portuguese Pidgin, which probably grew up some time during the fifteenth century along the West African coast. The Portuguese then spread to their other trading posts and colonies in Africa and Asia, and traders from other countries began to learn it as well. However, when French and English traders entered the trade - particularly the slave trade - in large numbers, relexification of this Portuguese pidgin took place. The grammar of the language remained the same, but the words were changed. Words derived from Portuguese were gradually replaced by words from English, French, or some other dominant European language. The evidence in favour of this theory is as follows:

I. Some Portuguese words still remain in many non-Portuguese pidgins and Creoles e.g. savvy, from Portuguese sabe knows', and piccaninny, from Portuguese pequenino, little'.

2. A large number of words found in creole languages can be traced back to West African languages. For example /njam/ 'eat', which is found in Jamaican Creole, Gullah Sranan, and others, probably derives from /njami/, which means 'to eat' in Fulani, a language spoken today in Guinea, Gambia, Senegal and Mali.

3. There are a number of grammatical similarities, in addition to those we have already noted in the case of verbs, between English, French, Portuguese and other creoles. The 'same grammar but different words' hypothesis provides a ready explanation for this.

4. The actual nature of the grammatical similarities - although they may be partly due to universal principles of simplification - suggests links with West African languages. Many of these languages, like the Creoles, indicate aspect and tense by means of pre-posed particles.

Afrikaans, the other major language of the white community in South Africa alongside English, used to be considered a dialect of Dutch. During the course of this century, however, it has achieved autonomy and now has its own literature, dictionaries, grammar books, and so on. Compared to Dutch, Afrikaans shows significant amounts of changes in grammar, and a significant amount of admixture from Malay, Portuguese and other languages. It still remains mutually intelligible with Dutch, however. The crucial feature of Afrikaans is that, although it is now spoken by some South Africans who are the descendants of people who spoke it as a non-native language - hence the influence from Portuguese, Malay, and so on - and who undoubtedly therefore spoke a pidginized form of Dutch. In the transition from Dutch to Afrikaans, the native-speakers tradition was maintained throughout. The language was passed down from one generation of the native speakers to another; it was used for all social functions and was therefore never subjected to reduction. Such a language, which demonstrates a certain amount of simplification and admixture, relative to some source language, but which has never been a pidgin or a creole in the sense that it has always had speakers who spoke a variety, which was not subject to reduction, we can call a creoloid.

There are other fascinating cases around the world, however, where languages of this type appear to have two main sources. We can call these languages dual-source pidgins, creoles, post-creoles and creoloids. Russenorsk was a pidgin spoken in the far north of Norway until 1917, when trade between Norway and Russia halted as a result of the Russian revolution. It was a reduced and simplified language, which consisted of elements taken from Russian and Norwegian in about equal measure. It obviously arose as a result of contact between Russian and Norwegian speakers, but it acquired focused norms of usage, and was also learnt and used as a lingua franca by the speakers of other languages such as Sami, Finnish, Dutch, German and English. It is probably significant that Russenorsk arose not in a colonial situation but in a European trading setting in which both contributing languages were spoken by people of approximately equivalent wealth and technology.

It is difficult to imagine situations in which such dual-source pidgins could become the sole language of a community, and hence give rise to Creoles. At least one such situation has occurred, however. Pitcairnese, the language of the remote Pacific Ocean island Pitcairn, is a dual-source creole, which is the sole native language of a small community there. The Pitcairnese are for the most part descendants of the British sailors who arose a famous mutiny on the Bounty and Tahitian men and women who went with them to hide on Pitcairn from the British Royal Navy. Their language is a mixed and simplified form of English and Tahitian (a Polynesian language).

Pitcairnese also has speakers on Norfolk Island, in the Western Pacific, who are descended from people who resettled there from Pitcairn. On Norfolk Island, the language is in close contact with Australian English, and is consequently decreolizing (in the direction of English, not Tahitian). We can therefore describe it as a dual-source post-creole.

There are also languages that one can refer to as dual-source creoloids. One such language is Michif (Metsif, Metis - there are various spellings), which has its origin in Canada but most of whose 'mixed-blood' speakers are now in North Dakota, USA. The two languages involved in its formation were French and the Native American language Cree. Unlike Pitcairnese, Michif does not have very much simplification. We can guess that this is because of the greater involvement of young children in its formation than was the case for Pitcairnese. Children are, of course, much better language learners than post-adolescents and adults, and simplification mostly results from the imperfect learning of a source language by learners over the age of fourteen or so. Cree, in fact, is remarkable in that its noun phrases are French, complete with gender and adjectival agreement, while its verb phrases are Cree, including the complex verbal morphology of that language.

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