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Imagine that you are packed into the dark, cramped hold of a Portuguese sea vessel, surrounded by sick and dying strangers few of whom speak your language. Miraculously surviving the trip, you arrive at a port and are transferred in shackles to a plantation where you must find a way to communicate with the slave driver on whom your life and well-being depend and you must communicate with your peers in order to retain your sanity. You hear other slaves who seem to have a better idea of how things work plotting among themselves in a language you don't know but seem to have heard when you were first taken captive, when you were still home. You try to figure out what they are saying to, God save you, join the plot, but in walks the slave master. The special group of slaves just keep talking, though, directing themselves to the slave master. But it's not quite the same. You don't understand exactly, but you know. You must. What would you do? Where would you start? How would you join the plot? These are the sorts of conditions under which many creole languages emerged. But what exactly is a creole? Just another language? If you are from the US you may be thinking New Orleans and Cajun cooking. If you are from Latin America you may be thinking of colonial times and the descendents of Europeans, Africans and indigenous people. If you are from Haiti, though, you are likely thinking of the language you speak at home with your family. Creole is a loaded word that takes its color from the diverse ethno-, socio-, anthropo-, historio-logical impressions the concept embodies. For the present post, I want to focus on creole as a type of language that is formed under turbulent sociohistorical circumstances. In the case of the Atlantic creoles the backdrop is the slave trade of the 16th and 17th centuries. New languages emerged in West Africa slave ports and in the plantations of the Americas, each with a complex mix of European (first Portuguese and then Spanish, Dutch and French) and African (such as Wolof, Malinke, Fante, Twi and Ewe) linguistic influences. Subsequently, more creoles, such as Saramacaan from Suriname, emerged as freed and escaped slaves established autonomous isolated communities in the colonial hinterlands. The dominating or colonial power's language is used to classify creoles in most cases. Common creoles include:  Portuguese creoles: Kriolu (Cape Verde), Kriol (Guinea-Bissau) Spanish creoles: Papiamentu (Netherlands Antilles), Palenquero (Colombia) French creoles: Kreyòl or Haitian Creole (Haiti), Antillean Creole (Lesser Antilles) English creoles: Sranan & Saramaccan (Suriname), Jamaican Patois (Jamaica), Krio (Sierra Leone)But what characteristics define these languages as creoles? Many would say, it is the simplicity of the grammar and the great degree of internal variation. John A. Holm, in An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles proposes that "A creole has a jargon or a pidgin in its ancestry; it is spoken natively by an entire speech community, often one whose ancestors were displaced geographically so that their ties with their original language and sociocultural identity were partly broken. Such social conditions were often the result of slavery." To clarify, pidgin is used to describe the initial mixing of languages prior to the adoption of the emergent language as a native language of a second generation of speakers, at which point the pidgin will have increased in complexity reaching a greater level of stability as a shared language. Others might argue that the emergence of creoles is no different than the emergence of Romance languages like Spanish, French and Portuguese from their Latin ancestor. From this perspective the categorization of a language as a creole in the first place can be viewed as a sociohistorical prejudice. For the moment, let us assume that creoles do have distinct characteristics that allow us to explore them as a linguistic entity. Origin of the species Linguists debate the origins of creoles. Some say that creoles emerge via quasi-Darwinian natural selection, whatever the raw materials may be, picking and choosing the elements that make practical communication most effective. Others see languages superimposed on others – European words inserted into an African language structure, European flora superimposed on the African landscape. However, another quite intriguing possibility exists. A wide range of creoles with seemingly unrelated origins tend to have very similar linguistic structures. Can it be that there is some intrinsic language circuitry in humans that leads us, when facing a lack of coherent linguistic input, to create new languages infused with universal linguistic characteristics? This position is effectively argued by Derek Bickerton in his language bioprogram hypothesis, which asserts that in the early stages of language development, children who are presented with only the unstructured pidgin language of their parents (remember a pidgin, as a second language, is a precursor to a creole, which is the native language of its speakers) will use innate language instincts, regardless of the linguistic natural resources at hand, to create a native tongue (creole) with highly structured grammar. Identity and decreolization The earliest systematic writing of a creole takes us back to the 1730s in what are now the US Virgin Islands, where Moravian missionaries, mostly native German speakers, make first reference to the now extinct Dutch-based creole, Negerhollands, as a unique language. George Lang argues in Entwisted Tongues that because the Moravian Brethren were German speakers they were better able to objectively disentangle the creole from the lexifier, the language providing its lexical base (Dutch). Cultural identity in creole-speaking cultures has been shaped by the complex dance of past and present, high language and low language, domination and submission. A common theme is that of overcoming the self-denigrating belief that the creole language is inferior to the European lexifier. From a historical perspective the perception of creoles by the speakers themselves has come full circle, arguably more than once. Initially, one can imagine that the nascent Atlantic creole spoken as the lingua franca of diverse colonial peoples would have been belittled, taken as the inferior attempt by African's to produce the "high" European linguistic forms, with little appreciation for the innovation brought to what was an inconceivably horrific and bewildering experience. Eventually, though, the creole became the language of the new colonial culture, one that now included descendents of Europeans and of mixed race natives of the colony. It became a source of identity as the colony sought to distinguish itself from the European parent culture. After independence, however, one sees class dynamics shaping the perception of creoles, the educated elite having mastered the European tongue and perpetuating the process of decreolization by moving the mesolect of their native creole toward the European lexifier. Now, having achieved independence from colonial powers and with language serving as a tool of those who seek to promote autonomous development of cultural identity, creole speakers are faced with the dilemma of establishing national literary traditions and, at an even more basal level, standardized orthographies that allow education to be conducted in creole languages, without reverting to the European lexifier as a shared academic language. Despite the challenges in creole cultural and linguistic identity the wealth humanity derives from créolité is palpable even if not consciously recognized. An inspiring perspective regarding how we value language is found in the following statement by J.G.A. Koenders, the Surinamese writer and activist: "Efi fu yu brede ofu prisir yu leri wan fremde tongo, leri en bun, ma a no fu date de yu mu ferakti yu eygi tongo èn trowe en." [in Sranan] "If to survive or even for your own pleasure you learn a foreign language, learn it well, but do not for that reason despise your own and throw it away." [English translation, courtesy of George Lang, Entwisted Tongues] | |||
