Language and Colonisation: Pidgins and Creoles

There’s some argument that English is a Creole language. You’ll remember that Middle English was formed when Norman French invaders conquered (southern) England in 1066, and took over government, radically simplifying the Anglo-Saxon language and layering it over with a ‘higher class’ stratum of French and Latinate lexis. Well, this is similar to what happened to create new languages/language varieties from around the renaissance period and onward, when European empires took over regions of the world and brought together speakers of varied (usually African) tongues to undertake forced work — slavery — to support Western commerce.

In the first exam text we looked at, alongside an extract from Caxton, we had a story told in a version of Jamaican dialect. We explored the history and language of Jamaica, and found some interesting key features:

• A mixed group of peoples were brought together, segregated with deliberately heterogeneous (mixed-up) languages, and set to work under order given in English
• These people then had to adopt English as the lingua franca in order to do what was required (under threat of brutality) and communicate together
• This creates a pidgin form of English — simplified in vocabulary and grammar, unstable, improvised from person to person
• Tense markers fall away in the morphology (inflectional suffixes disappear), pronunciation simplifies with phonemes shifting to easier-to-articulate locations (eg th-forms become stopped to /t/ and /d/), unstressed syllables and ending consonants may be deleted, clusters reduced — as with children’s speech.
• On that subject: when the first generation of children grows up in this language environment, they grow up speaking a form of language which does have a fixed (if simple) grammar: this is called a creole. (It’s remarkable that this happens, and seems strong evidence for Chomsky’s innateness theory that people have a built-in ‘template’ for language evolved into their brains.)
• That creole, which may be called by its speakers ‘Patois’ or even ‘pidgin’ (as in Tok Pisin) by its speakers, bears traces of its colonial history: enshrining the pronunciation of the British, for example, (/h/ dropping in Jamaica), or even lexis (Tok Pisin’s verbs bagarapim = to damage (‘bugger up’)) and suffixes, eg –pela (‘fella’, a typical noun which would be premodified by an adjective — pela has become an adjective marker). So a more complex grammar may re-appear.
• There may be borrowings (such as a version of ‘piccaninny’ for ‘child) from African languages, or other colonial languages like Spanish or Dutch, or words surviving from the indigenous peoples of the territories (who may have been enslaved, dispersed or killed when the new peoples enter to work over the land).

As we can see, this is a dark history. The languages capture some of it, and they often become a badge of pride today for the speakers, growing new complexity and invention. (A favourite Tok Pisin word is gras bilong fes, = beard.) Jamaican Patois was spoken proudly by victorious competitors in the recent Olympics, for example.

However, as we saw, there are variations within creoles: an acrolect, a version of the language that is spoken by the more educated and powerful which cleaves closely to the standardised forms of English that frequently survive as official language, language of education and government; a basilect, a quite distant and heavily -modified version of the language, ‘pure creole’, often spoken at home by people who may also use a more acrolectal version elsewhere; and a range of possible mesolects in between those.

Finally, there is a ‘post-creole continuum’, whereby a creole may gradually fade out — as speakers accommodate to each other (recall Giles’ communication accommodation theory), often converging upward to make creoles fade away and leaving a more standardised acrolect behind. It is also possible to diverge, however, and for the language to split and sustain its own identity.

There are many possible creoles, though they share similar traits. Any could come up in the exam (but only English-based). Look at their forms on their own merits; read the context given to you; look for features which might be shared with creoles you’re familiar with, and consider how their colonial histories may have led to certain forms being as they are.

English isn’t quite a creole, since its history and outcomes are rather different, but that principle of stratification of language due to contact with other cultures, and the profound  influence of trade and colonisation of countries on the language which they speak, is striking to consider as a central rather than peripheral feature of language change. Creoles just have it writ especially large.