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Creoles
Page created in collaboration with Michel Launey & Alain Kihm, 2009.
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.
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Pour en savoir plus :
- Questions autour de la genèse des langues créoles, par Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux
- Le créole haïtien : une lente montée en puissance, par Fritz Berg Jeannot
- D’Afrique de l’Ouest aux Antilles, des créoles portugais dynamiques, par Nicolas Quint
- Le papiamentu, un créole qui se porte bien, par Bart Jacobs
