Creoles

Creole languages are uncommon by the conditions of their formation, which places them outside the usual genetic classification of languages. While the majority of languages originate from a constant transmission from one generation to another, each transmission implying more or less significant changes, creole languages appear to originate both from a rupture (an entire population being forced to give up their native language) and an encounter (with a new language, consequently deeply transformed). Unlike all other languages, in other words, existing creole languages have emerged following historical events, which can be dated by more or less fifty years.

Different kinds of encounters might explain the emergence of these languages. The encounter triggering the emergence of plantation creole, in the Antilles islands, was extremely violent: hundreds of thousands of people being deported as slaves across the Atlantic in the worst imaginable conditions. These men and women from Africa who originally spoke a variety of languages ended up in the need of a common language within the new society they were part of. Because none of these African languages was ever hegemonic over the others, the only possible point of reference was the language of the slaveholder. Contact with this language had obviously nothing to do with the dispassionate learning of a new idiom, however, occurring as it was in the violent context of servile labor: vocabulary came through, grammar didn’t.

In other cases – creoles emerging in Africa, creoles of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, which don’t necessarily originate in slavery – the encounter wasn’t as violent, but it did create enough of a rupture to allow the emergence of a creole language, a rupture that is always at least social and cultural, sometimes also geographical.

Consequently, creole languages bear two main features:

- their vocabulary essentially stems from a language of colonization, which explains references to English, Arabic, Spanish, French, Dutch or Portuguese-based creoles (or English lexical base creoles, etc.).

- on the other hand, creole grammars stem from structural alterations under influence of several elements: the grammar of the original languages, continuous situations of linguistic contact and self-teaching of second languages, universal properties of Human speech…

The grammar of creole languages is thus of major interest to linguistics and cognitive sciences.

Koines

A koine language is the “inner-dialectal” variation of a language. A language with numerous dialectal variations sometimes develops a common form through consensus, a form understandable by all speakers of the different dialects. The term koine comes from the first example known in History: Greek koïnè (“common language”), which in late ancient Greece enabled the various Greek political entities to maintain commercial and diplomatic relations despite all their different dialects. Greek koine was spoken all over the Mediterranean Basin, and may very well be the very origin of Modern Greek. Even when a koine language is an artificial construction – which was probably not the case of Greek koine – some parents might still hand it down to their children because of its social resonance, instead of handing down their own dialectal variation.

There are many contemporary examples of koine languages: Modern Standard Arabic, for example, as opposed to Arabic dialects, or Batua (”Unified Basque“), the official language of the Basque region in France.

Pidgins

A pidgin language is an idiom developed among speakers of very different or remote languages (as opposed to a koine language) in the aim to ease exchange between them. Most of the time the vocabulary of a pidgin language is essentially drawn from on the languages already present (Chinese Pidgin English, for example, spoken over all of the 19th century between Chinese and European merchants in the Chinese harbors that allowed foreign presence (Guangzhou, especially). Words of Chinese origin were the minority, as were the French and English borrowings in Chinook Jargon, developed along the 19th century (and possibly still used in the beginning of the 20th century) between American Indians and European settlers in western America and Canada (Oregon, Washington, British Columbia). But some pidgins are actual blends, such as Russenorsk and its evenly proportioned Russian/Norwegian vocabulary, used between Norwegian fishermen and Russian merchants who’d come to buy cod-fish in the northern harbors of Norway. (Russenorsk disappeared along with the cod-fish trade shortly after the 1917 revolution). Sometimes pidgin vocabulary comes from different languages that are close enough to be difficult to distinguish from one another, which is the case of Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir, and their blends of lexical Italian, Spanish and Occitan borrowings.

Pidgins are nobody’s mother language. Their limited use implies (a) limited vocabulary; (b) a near total absence of morphological devices generating the flexing of words according to time, number, etc. and thus the emergence of new ones; (c) a simple syntax. Pidgins sometimes disappear when they lose their uses (like in the case of Russenorsk, if a language ends up growing over the others and the local population becomes plurilingual).

When they last long enough (over generations), their lexical, morphosyntactic, and discursive resources can become so rich that the language itself becomes hardly distinguishable from an « ordinary language » although it still remains a second language. That was the case of Tok Pisin (formerly Pidgin English) in Papua New Guinea, until about thirty years ago. It could also still be the case of Kriyol (Portuguese) in Guinea-Bissau.

At this point, however, some speakers simply adopt pidgin as their « own » language and start handing it down to their children as their mother tongue. The pidgin language then becomes a creole language. This is what happened to Bislama, in Vanuatu, which became the mother tongue for children of the cities; Tok Pisin, mentioned above, is also undergoing the same process nowadays.

Page created in collaboration with Michel Launey & Alain Kihm, 2009.