Creolization of Language and Culture

Robert Chaudenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134758418
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Creolization of Language and Culture is the first English edition of Robert Chaudenson's landmark text Des îles, des hommes, des langues, which has also been fully revised.
. With reference to the main varieties of creole French, Chaudenson argues against the traditional account of creole genesis for a more sophisticated paradigm which takes full account of the peculiar linguistic and social factors at play in colonial societies.
This is an accessible book which makes an important contribution to the study of pidgin and creole language varieties, as well as to the development of contemporary European languages outside Europe. Key features include:
Analysis of current debates on the development of creoles
Discussion of many aspects of human culture including music, medicine, cooking, magic and folklore
Translation of all French sources from which Chaudenson quotes extensively

1 Creole people and languages

The current etymology of the word creole was proposed a long time ago. Recent lexicographic attempts to determine its origin more accurately have not been successful. Nonetheless, it is useful to start this study of creoles by citing two alleged sources. They are obviously false, but, in their respective ways, they illustrate perfectly how often extreme ideological fantasies can divert serious thinking, even in debates that are reputedly scientific.

I will present them chronologically, starting with Jules Faine, an eminent Haitian and learned Mulatto, fiercely opposed to the African origins hypothesis of French creoles upheld at the time (the 1930s) by a fellow Haitian, Suzanne Sylvain. Faine (1974:11) perceives in the ‘universal unity’ of such language varieties an essential argument for refuting the mistaken claim, also endorsed by Melville Herskovits, that Creole is a product of the West African linguistic mold. Although, as we shall see, Faine’s basic position is in principle commonsensical, he gets carried away regarding the term creole. He formulates a strange hypothesis which discards a priori the established etymology of his time, which he knew.¹ According to Faine:

The general opinion is that the word creole comes from Spanish criollo … French créole was apparently borrowed from Spanish in the seventeenth century. In Spanish, the word criollo meant ‘a person of European descent born outside Europe.’ It seems strange that Creole, a language variety that developed from dialectal French, was thus misidentified with a foreign name. Still stranger is the repetition of the same process, during the same period, in other places where Spanish was yet unknown. This is why the creole French varieties of the Mascarenes [i.e., Réunion, Mauritius, and Rodriguez] are identified as creole patois … It is significant that the word creole was able to transmigrate from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean … Under such conditions, it is fitting to seek the origin of the term creole elsewhere than in Spanish, that is in the Patois ascent line – in other words, in the maritime language, which was shared by all these creole varieties. Thus, in the Norman patois, the verb creire means ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on whether or not it combines with negation (Moisy 1886). These forms are not unknown in the Haitian language. For instance, Vous viendrez ce soir? ‘Will you come this evening?’ – Oui, ous a-vini à souè ha? ‘Yes, we will come this evening’ M’crei ça oui! ‘(I think) yes’ – Non, je ne viendrai pas m’pas crei ‘No, I won’t come (I don’t think).’ In French itself one says naturally je crois bien ‘I think so,’ je vous crois ‘I believe you’ for oui ‘yes.’ Creire is the corruption of Latin credere ‘believe.’ Credere produced credo ‘I believe,’ and credo became creo ‘I believe’ by syncopation of d. The Romance pronoun lo, the equivalent of French le, was affixed to the base creo, which finally produced creolo, hence créole. Thus creolo must mean ‘I believe it.’ Usage of créolo for oui ‘yes’ would follow the old Romance tradition that designated its dialects by the word they used for ‘yes.’ Thus langue d’oïl for the northern group, langue d’oc for the southern group, langue de cia for Italian, langue de si for Provençal, Catalan, etc. Likewise, the creole language would be that amalgamation of patois that we have identified as maritime language … We can conclude from all the above observations that it is not the term criollo that produced our term créole but rather the latter that produced criollo.

(Faine 1974:148–19)

Even though the Spanish etymology is not inherently dangerous and does not imply ‘African influence,’ it appears that Faine seeks this extravagant hypothesis in order to assign the word an exclusively French etymology. It is in fact not impossible for words of Portuguese or Spanish origin to have migrated from the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean. The logic of such contributions can easily be demonstrated (Chaudenson 1974a:591–632).

The second etymology, even quainter and more unexpected, was proposed in the Rideau de cannes (May–July 1963) by an anonymous author who is, most certainly, R. Nativel, follower of another Réunionnais scholar Jules Hermann (1846–1924). Hermann was a prominent local personality in his time: notary, Mayor of Saint Pierre, President of the General Council, first President of the Réunion Academy (founded in 1913), and member of the Malagasy Academy and of the French Astronomical Society. Interested in everything and author of many works on the most diverse topics, he fits, because of some of his theories, into the category of ‘mad scientist’ (homologue of the ‘fous littéraires’ who fascinated Queneau). His major work, Les révélations du Grand Océan ‘Revelations of the Great Ocean’, published posthumously (probably around 1927), clearly illustrates the dominant characteristic of his production: extensive and infinitely diverse knowledge produced by an overflowing imagination that was itself governed by a mind obsessed with systems. What is important to us is that, starting with reflections on the ‘Franco-Malagasy’ creole of Bourbon, Hermann negotiated a hazardous and complex path through anthropology, ornithology, geology, history, cosmogony, and linguistics, to demonstrate the prior existence of a ‘southern continent where Réunion, South America, Africa, and the eastern parts of Madagascar and Hindoostan formed one country.’ Based on this, he considered Malagasy to be the ‘primitive language of humanity’ (p. 157), which led him to elaborate a large chapter on ‘global etymologies.’ With some amazement, we learn from this that, for instance, Pologne ‘Poland’ ‘comes from Malagasy polo ina: ‘that which has been divided into ten [parts]’ – an admirable foreshadowing of the later breakups of this poor state! The word Manche ‘Channel’ is derived from mantsa: ‘sly, astute, cunning,’ which allegedly demonstrates that the prehistoric Normans already deserved their later reputation. His explanation of Suisse ‘Switzerland’ with soïtra: ‘penetrating something with a crochet-hook or a pointed stick’ would prove unequivocally that prehistoric people already used alpenstocks. Hermann concludes: ‘I stop. I am myself confounded by such a revelation.’ How could his readers not be equally confounded?

Surprisingly, these theories of Hermann’s gave rise to a school, at least in the Indian Ocean. He exerted influence as much on literature – for instance in the works of R.E. Hardt or M. de Chazal – as on studies of local creoles – for instance, on M. Julien’s study of Réunionnais toponyms (one of Hermann’s specialties), on B. Gamaleya in the beginning, and on Nativel. This brings us back to our initial subject matter, on which the foregoing sheds some light. The anonymous author of the article in the Rideau de cannes submits indeed the following etymology for the word créole:

The word gris is quite French, the word grey is English. If we consider grec or grek ‘Greek,’ we also find the word gris. Others more knowledgeable than us in linguistics have proposed and established that when the Hellenics or Hellas of the Peninsula made conquests, they set aside from those that they had defeated thousands of women whom they crossed with their men in order to have beautiful hybrids who made Greek plastic glory. These bastards were gris or greks … Pounding in the same crucible gris/grey/grek and Malagasy giri, we get the word gre, which, adjoined to Malagasy ol (from olona ‘person’), indisputably produces creole or grey person. It is by brute force that Larousse seeks to make a creole a person of pure white race born in the colonies. Nonsense!

(Rideau de cannes, May-July 1963)

Despite some reservations,² the etymological approach is clearly similar to Hermann’s. As may have been suspected from the biographical information already given, Hermann belonged to the Réunion’s white bourgeoisie (such classifications are not very clearly determined on social or ethnic grounds). Nativel’s goal is precisely the opposite of Faine’s, however: he was absurdly and blindly eager to deny the established European origin of the word creole in favor of a Malagasy etymology – which, since the word was first attested in the American-Caribbean region (ACR), is daring, to say the least. And yet his attempts are identical to the Haitian scholar’s endeavors to assign it a ‘purely’ French origin. Both these approaches to etymology exemplify the ideological confrontations that arise in studies of creole languages and cultures.

In reality, the facts about the word creole are now well known, even though experts can still discuss some details of its etymology. Is the original etymon the Spanish criollo, or the Portuguese crioulo (whose older form, according to Guy Hazaël-Massieux, is creoulo)? Isn’t the former a borrowing of the latter into Spanish? One is tempted to think so. However, although the original etymology is probably Portuguese, the first attestation of the term criollo in French is a citation from Spanish, in R. Regnault’s 1598 translation of José de Acosta’s book under the title of Histoire naturelle et morale des Indes. Arveiller (1963) established conclusively the history of the term in French. He showed that it was only toward the end of the seventeenth century that criollo lost its Hispanic character through Gallicization; criole and criolle were commonly attested around 1670. It is undoubtedly at that time, or perhaps a little earlier, that French colonists in the Caribbean orally borrowed criollo or crioullo, among other Spanish and/or Portuguese terms (the etymology of the term on the Islands may be different from that of the scholarly borrowing in French). It was modified to créole, which in French eventually superseded the scholarly word criolle, although the latter can be found in printed texts of the eighteenth century both in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. La Roque still uses it in his Voyage de l’Arabie heureuse (1716): ‘The air of this Island [Bourbon] is wonderful for health; yet crioles, the locally born, do not ordinarily live to old age.’ In any case, since then créole has been attested in French written documents (Histoire générale des voyages, vol. 9, p. 155, 1703) and on the Islands. This is the form that is most widely attested. On Bourbon (today’s Réunion) it is the only one that appears in archival documents.

The sometimes quaint glosses or comments provided by the authors who use the term underscore its rare and exotic character. French lexicography has recorded its existence and highlighted its phonetic evolution. While Richelet’s (1680) and Furetière’s (1690) Dictionnaires enter criole, the Dictionnaire de Trévoux lists only the form créole, which has been without alternatives since then.

However, an often attested semantic opposition arose, which would lead to an interesting and significant diversification of the meaning of the term. French lexicographers have assigned to créole the meaning of ‘European born on the Islands’ – thus broadening the original meaning, which was sometimes retained, particularly in the beginning (according to Furetière, criole ‘is the name that the Spaniards give to their children who were born in the Indies’). In the colonies themselves, though, créole was used to designate Whites and Blacks, as long as they were locally born.

According to Histoire générale des voyages (vol. 9, p. 155, 1703), on Bourbon, ‘by the word créoles, one mustn’t expect reference to deformed persons, men or women; some of them are very pretty and well built. Their flesh color is somewhat brown [my emphasis] but soft. ’

In Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique (vol. 4, p. 146, 1722), Father Labat wrote of the Antilles: ‘The Créoles themselves [black slaves in this context], that is, those who were born in the country, regard them as their fathers. ’

After 1725 the usage on Bourbon of Mascarin, to refer to slaves born on the Islands, was replaced by créole.

These examples show that the word was used on the Islands to designate individuals who were apparently of mixed (white and black) descent (1703) or Blacks (1703, 1722, 1725). In both the Caribbean and the Mascarenes, during the first half of the eighteenth century the modifier créole applied to Whites, Mulattos, and Blacks. Although the French lexicographic tradition has until very recently restricted the application of this designation to Whites, the term has evolved extensively, depending on the place and time, in different creoles and in the different regional French va...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Editor’s foreword
• Preface
• 1: Creole people and languages
• 2: Concepts and settings The case of French creoles
• 3: Theories of linguistic creolization
• 4: Toward a theory of creolization The sociohistorical and sociolinguistic approach
• 5: Linguistic creolization
• 6: Creolization of cultural systems
• 7: Creole music
• 8: Creole cuisine
• 9: Creole folk medicine and magic
• 10: Creole oral literature
• 11: General conclusions
• References