Creole and Creolisation

• A creole is often defined as a pidgin that has

become the first language of a new generation
of speakers.
• A pidgin which has acquired native speakers is
called CREOLE, and the process whereby a
pidgin turns into a Creole is called
'creolisation'.
 From Pidgin to Creole
• How pidgins acquire native speakers: by being
spoken by couples who have children and rear
them together. Examples:
• This happened on a large scale among the
African slaves taken to the New World, and is
happening on a somewhat smaller scale in
urban communities in places like Papua New
Guinea.
• Imagine a couple in New Guinea who speak Tok
Pisin to each other for lack of any other common
language, but who each have some other language
as their native language.
• They have a baby, who starts to speak Tok Pisin. (As
we saw in the north-west Amazon, it is possible for
a child's first language to be a language which is not
the mother's native language.)
• The essential difference between the baby and the
parents is that the baby is learning Tok Pisin as its
first language, whereas when they learned it they
already knew another language.
 Why is the study of Creole important in
sociolinguistics?
• From a social point of view, Creoles are of
more interest than pidgins. Most Creole
languages are spoken by the descendants of
African slaves and are of great interest, both
to their speakers and to others, as one of the
main sources of information on their origins,
and as a symbol of their identity.
• A similar interest is shown by people who speak
varieties whose origins are in a Creole, but which have
since been 'decreolised. It is possible that the English of
black people in the United States is such a variety, and
because of this Creoles and decreolised languages are of
particular interest to many American linguists.
• Another reason for the interest in Creoles is that there
are minority groups, such as West Indian immigrants in
Britain, whose members speak some form of Creole. If
their Creole is one based on the majority language of
the country into which they have immigrated
• for example, an English-based Creole in the
case of immigrants to Britain - then serious
educational problems may arise if neither
teachers nor taught can be sure if this Creole
is a different language from the majority one
or a dialect of it. If the former, it may be
appropriate to use second-language teaching
methods to teach the majority language, but
this is by no means an appropriate method if it
is a dialect.
• Consequently research is needed in order to
establish the extent of the difference between
the Creole and the majority language. Similar
problems arise in countries where the
majority language is itself a Creole, if the
language expected by the education system is
the standard version of the language on which
the Creole is based, as in many Caribbean
countries.
 DECREOLISATION
• It means moving towards the dominant variety at the expense of
most distinctive characteristics of the Creole.
• When a Creole is spoken in a country where other people speak
the Creole's lexical source-language (for example, English). Since
the latter has so much more prestige than the Creole, Creole
speakers tend to shift towards it, producing a range of
intermediate varieties. Sociolinguists call the Creole the BASILECT
and the prestige language the ACROLECT, with the intermediate
varieties lumped together as MESOLECTS. This range of varieties
spanning the gap between basilect and acrolect is called a 'POST-
CREOLE CONTINUUM'.
• Why decreolisation?: social, political and economic factors
 Pidgin…. Creole ( Basilect…Mesolect….Acrolect)… Standard Language

• The basilect is likely to be as different from the

acrolect as Tok Pisin is from English, so it is
easy to see that thousands of items must vary
and that, linguistically speaking, most of them
are quite independent of one another:
• the way in which future time is expressed has
nothing to do with the form of the pronoun /
or me, and so on through the grammar and
vocabulary.
• In Jamaica, one speaker may say a fi mi buk
dat, using the basic creole variety, another
may put it as iz mi buk, using a variety with
fewer creole features, and yet another may
choose it’s my book, using a variety with only
some pronunciation features of the creole, or
a ‘creole accent’.
• It is also very common for speakers to be able
to use a range of varieties in different
situations.
• post-creole continuums are particularly
interesting for a sociolinguist as they provide
clear evidence for social classification of single
linguistic items, i.e. detailed social information
about individual items.
 Features of Creole
• A Creole is a pidgin that has native speakers.
Example: Tok Pisin has just recently gone
through this process of 'acquiring native
speakers’.
• Used for a number of purposes
• Extended vocabulary
• Complex grammar (syntax, morphology)
• Can become a standard language of a community
• Speech becomes faster
• Expansion of phonology
 Differences
• Pidgins have no native • Creoles have native
speakers. speakers.
• Pidgins have a limited • Creoles have a
range of uses. considerably expanded
• Pidgins typically evolve range of uses.
out of contact • Creoles evolve out of
situations. pidgins.
Thanks