Die Creol taal

250 years of Negerhollands texts

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3 Negerhollands and Creole studies

Unlike other languages, creole languages are by definition languages of which we know when and (in some cases) how they emerged as separate linguistic systems: that is, when peoples speaking mutually unintelligible languages come into contact, the possible creole emerging from this contact could not have existed before. This gives us a unique opportunity to study aspects of the process of language birth and its results, particularly in the case of the relatively recent creole languages, such as those that developed on plantations in the Caribbean under European occupation. The study of language birth can provide us with important insights into how linguistic systems in general are constituted and what is needed to make them function adequately as systems of human communication.

In addition, the circumstances of language birth can tell us something about the drastic linguistic change and innovation which may take place in situations of language contact. Thus, many characteristics of the European languages which provided the vocabulary for creole languages are not at the same time reflected in the structure of these languages. So when creole languages came into being, only certain components of other languages were transferred, whereas particular other linguistic components of creoles do not originate from either one of the languages in contact. For this reason, creole languages cannot be seen as (defective) varieties of contributing other languages. This has been the reason for the emergence of a separate subdiscipline: creole studies.

As language structure, function and ecology became central concerns of linguistics, creole studies moved from the not-quite-respectable fringes of historical linguistics at the beginning of this century towards the center of linguistic research.

The creole languages do not constitute a family in the sense of historical linguistics, although some of them are clearly related. A common way to classify them is in terms of the language that has contributed most of the vocabulary. Thus, we have creoles based on African languages, and on the major colonial languages such as French, English, and Portuguese. Most of these languages are spoken in the Caribbean, West Africa, the Indian Ocean, South East Asia, and the Southern Pacific. There are several hundred pidgin and creole languages known.

The term pidgin refers to a contact language that is not spoken natively in any speech community. Contrasting creoles with pidgins, we can define creoles as contact-induced languages which are spoken as the mother tongue of a speakers' community. Pidgins are by definition acquired as a second language. The theory that creole languages are the result of the acquisition of pidgins as a first language is widely accepted but hardly proven.

While they are not related in historical terms, creole languages have often been thought of as belonging to one typological class. In the following section a number of ‘typical creole features’ will be mentioned. However, in recent years attention has shifted to the grammars of individual languages and to the study of areas in which the creole languages differ from each other structurally.

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While five major European languages have been involved in creole genesis, the Ibero-Romance (Portuguese and Spanish) and the Dutch-based creoles have been underrepresented in research. Most of the insights gained so far derive from English-and French-lexicon creoles. This bias has several serious consequences.

First, the fate of a number of potentially very interesting grammatical features of Ibero-Romance and Dutch (e.g. word order, optional subject pronouns, verb clusters and verbal particles) under creolization has remained unstudied so far.

Second, the groups of both Ibero-Romance and Dutch creoles are much less homogeneous, structurally, than the English and French creoles. Therefore, the fact that so many English and French creoles resemble each other may be due to accidental reasons of historical relatedness rather than to properties of the process of creole genesis as such.

In addition, the field of creole studies has remained surprisingly a-historical, given its strong conceptual links with historical linguistics, and the consensus among creolists that the actual socio-historical circumstances of creole genesis must have been crucial for their formation. While it is clear that the earliest available documentary sources for creoles should be examined if we want to gain an insight into the field, these have remained relatively inaccessible and unstudied.

In recent publications (e.g. Carden and Stewart, 1988; Arends, 1989) the question was brought up of whether creole genesis is a gradual or a single-generation phenomenon. The study of early texts makes it possible to be much more confident regarding statements about which grammatical structures early creoles did or did not have, and to what extent the stabilization of the creole languages was an extended process. The substantial collection of 18th-and 19th-century Negerhollands manuscripts and edited texts (Stein, 1982a,b, 1985, 1986a,b,c, 1989, 1991), the folk tales recorded at the beginning of this century (de Josselin de Jong 1926), and recent recordings of which this book gives an overview makes it possible to look at the language in its historical context and to study its development.