French Creoles

A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar

Anand Syea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315388564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langue française

French Creoles: A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar is the first complete reference to present the morphology, grammar and syntax of a representative selection of French Creoles in one volume.

The book is organised to promote a thorough understanding of the grammar of French Creoles and presents its complexities in a concise and readable form. An extensive index, cross-referencing and a generous use of headings provides readers with immediate access to the information they require.

The varieties included within the volume provide a representative collection of French Creoles from the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including: Mauritian Creole, Seychelles Creole, Reunion Creole (where relevant), Haitian Creole, Martinique Creole, Guadeloupe Creole, Guyanese French Creole, Karipuna, St. Lucia Creole, Louisiana Creole and Tayo.

By providing a comprehensive description of a range of French Creoles in a clear and non-technical manner, this grammar is the ideal reference for all linguists and researchers with an interest in Creole studies and in French, descriptive and historical linguistics.

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.0 Introduction

French creoles are spoken in different parts of the world, particularly on small islands in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean. Those which are spoken on some of the Atlantic islands include Haitian, St. Lucian, Martini-can, Guadeloupean, and Dominican Creole (collectively known as the Caribbean French Creoles). Those which are spoken on some of the islands in the Indian Ocean are Seychelles Creole, Mauritian Creole, Rodrigues Creole (collectively referred to here as the IOC), and Réunion Creole. In the Pacific, Tayo is spoken on the island of New Caledonia. French creoles are not however restricted to small islands but can also be found on coastal mainlands, e.g. Guyanese Creole and Karipuna Creole are spoken in the northeast part of South America, while Louisiana Creole is spoken in the state of Louisiana in the United States.

Creole languages came into being in these different parts of the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when speakers of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English came into contact with speakers of African languages, particularly those spoken on the west and east coast of Africa. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are well known for European expansionism, in particular the colonisation of countries, large and small, around the world, including those in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. This was also the period of the slave trade. Many Africans, speaking a multitude of mutually unintelligible languages, were taken to these remote places, where they became instrumental in their subsequent economic, social, and linguistic developments. Contacts between colonisers and slaves as well as contacts between slaves speaking mutually unintelligible languages during this period led to the emergence of restructured forms of the European languages. These subsequently developed into independent languages (creoles), each with its own grammatical system but with most of its lexical items inevitably drawn from the European languages. Looking at creoles across the world, particularly those which emerged and developed on plantations, whether in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean, it is evident that they have become successful languages. This success is attributable to the fact that both the colonisers and the slaves themselves needed a common language to communicate with each other.

Attitudes towards creole languages have been mostly negative. Bloomfield (1933: 472) refers to them as ‘lower’ languages resulting from non-Europeans’ attempts at learning a restructured (simplified) version of the ‘upper’ (i.e. European) language. Other derogatory terms abound, e.g. ‘baby-talk’, ‘bastardised’, ‘inferior dialect’, ‘degenerate offshoots’ of European languages, and so on. Even today creoles are seen by some as ‘simple’ languages, which is surprising in the light of mounting evidence that they have developed quite complex grammatical rules (see DeGraff 2011). Attitudes towards creole languages in most countries where they are spoken continue to be negative. The general view that they are inadequate for the purposes of education and administration persists even amongst their native speakers. However, there is a growing recognition in a few countries that creoles can function just as well as the established languages from which they derive in the field of education and government administration.

1.1 Theories of creole development

Different theories have been proposed to explain how the creoles which are spoken by millions of people today emerged and developed. These languages, regardless of their European lexifiers, share many structural or grammatical commonalities, and it is these, among other things, that the different theories outlined below have sought to explain.

1.1.1 Monogenesis theory

One of the earliest theories to explain these commonalities was the mono-genesis theory (Whinnom 1965). It claimed that the creoles spoken around the world originated from a common Portuguese-based pidgin which was spoken in the Mediterranean and along the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century. It was further claimed that this structurally basic pidgin was dispersed around the world as its speakers came into contact with speakers of other languages, who then relexified it (i.e. translated it word for word into their native languages) whilst keeping its structure more or less unchanged. What therefore resulted from these contacts were structurally similar pidgins and creoles but with words drawn from different lexifiers (e.g. French, Spanish, English, and Dutch). Others who shared this view were Thompson (1961), Stewart (1962), Taylor (1963), Goodman (1964), and Voorhoeve (1973). On this approach, the original model was adopted and adapted by new speakers, and different pidgins and creoles emerged from it. However, not everyone believed that the shared features came from a common Portuguese-based source. Hancock (1969) and Goodman (1987) for instance expressed doubts as to whether positing such a source was necessary for explaining the similarities which exist between creoles.

1.1.2 Substratist theory

Another theory which seeks to explain how pidgin and creole languages came about is the substratist theory. A key claim of this theory is that the slaves who were instrumental in the establishment and development of pidgin and creole languages used their knowledge of their native languages in the process of acquiring the European languages with which they came into contact. In other words, they transferred grammatical, lexical, and phonological features of their native languages in the process of creating new pidgins and creoles (see Sylvain 1936, Bentolila 1971, Baker and Corne 1982, Lefebvre 1986, 1998, 2014, Lefebvre and Lumsden 1994). Evidence which lends support to this theory often comes from phonological, lexical, and structural phenomena which exist in the pidgins and creoles but are not found in their European lexifier languages. One such example, often held up as evidence of African substrate influence, particularly of West African languages, is the phenomenon of serial verb constructions, which exists in the Atlantic creoles but not in any of the European languages from which they derived. Substratists are therefore essentially concerned with tracing linguistic features or structures which exist in pidgins and creoles to their substrate languages. The strongest form of this approach (e.g. Sylvain 1936) claims that creoles are African languages with European words.

1.1.3 Superstratist theory

A third approach which also seeks to explain how pidgins and creoles emerged is the superstratist theory. In the strongest version of this theory (e.g. Faine 1937), it is claimed that creoles are no more than dialects of their European lexifiers. French creoles, for instance, are said to be dialects of some varieties of French, e.g. Haitian Creole as a dialect of Norman French (Faine 1937). There are others who subscribe to a weaker form of this approach in that they do not claim that the creoles are dialects of their lexifiers but they nevertheless descend directly from them without any break in transmission. Among these are Valdman (1978) and Chaudenson (1979, 1992, 1995). Chaudenson’s view is that the development of creole languages, particularly French creoles, went through two key phases: first the société d’habitation (homestead phase) and second the société de plantation (plantation phase). The former is characterised as the establishment of small holdings in which Europeans and slaves (in more or less equal numbers) settled, lived, and worked together within close proximity over a period of years. This provided the non-Europeans (slaves) with direct access to the European languages.

The second stage, société de plantation (plantation phase), is characterised by a difference in number between Europeans and slaves, the latter being increasingly numerous as more and more were brought to these small islands to help develop an agricultural economy (mainly sugar plantation). The non-Europeans who had settled on these islands during the first phase played a crucial part in helping to manage the new arrivals, who Chaudenson (1995: 65) refers to as bossales. Some of them would have been entrusted with a few supervisory and overseeing tasks which only the Europeans had performed during the first phase (i.e. the homestead phase). They in fact became the middlemen who liaised, on the one hand, with the Europeans and, on the other, with the then-recent arrivals. It is assumed on this approach that the newly arrived hands did not have direct access to the language spoken by the Europeans but to an ‘approximation’ of that language or a restructured version of it as it was spoken by the middlemen. It is also suggested that subsequent arrivals on these islands had even fewer opportunities to hear the Europeans speak their language and instead heard and acquired an even more restructured version of that language or, further down the line, an ‘approximation’ of an ‘approximation’. A central aspect of this theory is that there was no break in the transmission of the lexifier language and therefore no pidgin stage. A second aspect, also vital, is that the native languages of the non-Europeans (i.e. the substrate languages) had no significant contribution to make to the development of creoles, although it does allow for convergence of structures which belonged to different (sometimes typologically different) languages (see Chaudenson 1995: 79). However, it has been suggested that there are some creoles which have emerged from pidgins (e.g. Hawaiian Creole from Hawaiian Pidgin English, see Siegel 2008) and that there is also evidence of substrate influence on the genesis and development of creoles. Lefebvre (1998), for instance, argues that many of the structures in Haitian Creole have their roots in the African language Fongbe, a Gbe language.

1.1.4 Universalist theory

A fourth theory, which has been influential in the field of Creole linguistics and general linguistics in the last few decades, is the universalist theory. Its main proponent is Bickerton (1981, 1984), and its basic claim is that creoles were created not by adults, as assumed in all the previous theories, but by the children of the slaves who worked on sugar plantations. These children were exposed to a pidgin which was rudimentary, unstructured, and unstable. Out of this rather chaotic and inadequate input, they then created a creole by relying on an innate linguistic mechanism (i.e. a language bioprogram). The process of creolisation, according to Bickerton, is complete within a generation. The similarities which creoles share are seen as a consequence of this intervention by this innate/universal apparatus. There have been several objections to Bickerton’s universalist approach. Arends (1993) has argued, on the basis of historical evidence relating to the development of Sranan, that the process of creolisation is a gradual one, spanning several generations, rather than an abrupt and unigenerational one, as suggested by Bickerton. It is also suggested that adults played a role in the development of this creole, and creolisation must therefore be seen as the result of processes of second language acquisition rather than first language acquisition. Roberts (1998, 2000, 2005) similarly argues, on the basis of historical evidence pertaining to the development of Hawaiian Creole, that the children who developed this creole were in fact not exposed to an unstable and unstructured pidgin, as claimed by Bickerton (1981, 1984), but to an already expanded pidgin (with fairly complex structures) spoken by their parents, who were second generation immigrants in Hawaii and also had some knowledge of their ancestral languages. Bickerton had previously claimed in support of his approach that the children who created creole languages did not have access to their ancestral languages but only to a structurally minimal pidgin spoken by adults. The question of whether creoles were created by children out of some structurally minimal and unstable input or from expanded pidgins and the question of whether adults had a role to play in the process of creolisation are both far from resolved.

1.1.5 Feature pool hypothesis – an ecological approach

This approach to the formation and development of creole languages is outlined in the work of Mufwene (2001, 2008) and is built around two key ideas drawn from evolutionary biology, namely competition and selection. The central idea here is that, in contact situations, different languages and different varieties of a language are in competition, and only a few are selected to be part of the communal language. This idea of languages competing with each other in contact situations can also be found in the ‘complementary’ approach of Hancock (1986, 1993) and Baker (1993). Mufwene, however, extends it to linguistic features and structures. His proposal is that where creoles developed, different substrate languages and different non-standard varieties of the lexifier contributed features (phonological, morphological, syntactic, and so on) to a feature pool (the feature pool hypothesis). These features competed with each other, and a few were then selected on the basis of ecology-sensitive markedness (Mufwene 2001: 34) to be part of a ‘communal’ language. The winners from this pool were decided on the basis of such ecological factors as frequency, regularity, semantic transparency, perceptual salience, and so on. Different ecological or ethnographical factors are thus said to have favoured some variants over others.

The feature pool hypothesis takes language as an essentially social rather than structural phenomenon, and it therefore accounts for variations which are at the surface, particularly those relating to morpho-syntax (e.g. changes in the categorial and functional status of certain words derived from nonstandard varieties of a lexifier (e.g. preposition functioning as complementiser) and phonology (e.g. changes in pronunciation (accents)), and so on). However, it is less clear on the selection of the more abstract structural variants (e.g. whether movement in a grammatical system obeys locality condition or not). Another problematic example is the absence of passive structure in a creole whose lexifier has passive constructions (e.g. the French creoles and French). A formal causal explanation for its absence in a French creole can be arrived at by linking it to the absence of verbal passive morphology. An ecological approach, in contrast, must appeal to processing complexity or semantic transparency to explain why this feature/structure is not selected. The obvious problem with such ecological factors lies in their general quantitative vagueness. It is also worth pointing out that structural variants are generally fewer in number than other types of variants when different varieties of a language are competing with each other, whether these varieties exist in one country or different countries (e.g. British English, American English, Australian English, and so on). This would also have been the case in the early stages of creole development (e.g. the homestead stage). For example, any structural differences (e.g. word order) between different varieties of French would have been minimal. The ecological approach, it would appear, has little to say as far as the structural development of creole languages is concerned.

1.2 Contemporary debates

Even though there is as yet no definitive answer to the question of why creoles, regardless of how far apart they are geographically, share a number of structural similarities, it is fair to say that the different theories mentioned here have made significant contributions to our understanding of issues relating to the genesis and subsequent development of creoles. Interestingly, these issues continue to be aired and debated. In recent years for instance the nature of creole languages has once again come under the spotlight. The debate is between those who claim that creoles are exceptional languages (see for instance McWhorter 1998, 2001) and those who claim that creoles are just like other non-creole languages, and there is nothing exceptional about them (see for instance DeGraff 2001, 2003). The exceptional nature of creole languages is partly based on another claim, viz., that creole languages have the simplest grammars (see McWhorter 2001) and therefore are unlike their lexifiers, which have over time developed more complex and more developed grammatical systems. It is also claimed that creoles involve a break in transmission from the lexifier (i.e. discontinuity), and they therefore begin de novo (see Bickerton 1981, 1984, McWhorter 2001). These claims are disputed by others, e.g. Arends (2001), DeGraff (2001, 2003), and Mufwene (2001), who point out that the creole linguistic systems are just as complex as those of non-creole languages and that the similarities between creoles and their lexifiers at different linguistic levels suggest continuity of transmission from lexifier to creole. The role of substrate languages also continues to be discussed, and there appears to be general agreement...