A highly under- and/or misrepresented topic
By : Ireneboa
13-Feb-11, 21:50
Thanks for your blog post on a highly underrepresented respectively misrepresented and complex topic.
Interestingly enough the whole pidgin/creole topic is usually quite neglected outside rather specific groups of linguists or language lovers. The vast majority still refer to any verbal or written communication not exactly following the rules of the standard language as 'bastardized', 'corrupted' or 'wrong'. Especially in connection with the so-called Black English laymen are quick to judge – even though we one could speak of a greatly decreolized English-based creole. At university, I wrote my final paper on the English-based creole of Trinidad as depicted in various works of literature including 'Miguel Street' by Naipaul, and I really took joy in figuring out the origins of certain structures or expressions. In the end I not only had to work closely with several grammars and dictionaries covering British Standard and dialectal variants, but also with references to numerous other European and non-European languages. Eventually, I decided to interview people from different countries in West Africa, from India, from Portugal and other countries that contributed to the voluntary or involuntary influx of migrants into the West Indies in order to acquire a better understanding of the structure and expressiveness of their respective spoken mother tongue. All this sounds quite un-exciting or even boring but I ended up amazed at the innovative forces that converted the instantaneous pidgins springing up wherever required into highly expressive creoles. What is also interesting is that there seems to be a common denominator for creole languages, pretty much regardless of which linguistic cultures and sociological structures/hierarchies are being involved: The most common and obvious characteristics shared by most creoles are the omission of the copula and the duplication of adjectives/adverbs in order to express the comparative. And indeed neither copula nor 'correct' comparatives are required in order to grasp the meaning of what is being expressed; in a nutshell, creole languages do definitely have rules, but they are basically all about functional communication and not about formality or uncalled-for complexity. It is almost as if there were a secret, yet universal code to the development of a creole...
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