Sociolinguistics

Pidgins and CreolesWith thanks to faculty.washington.edu and

Talking Story about Pidgin

Language Contact

• What do I mean by language contact?

Language contact is a situation in which groups of speakers of different languages come into contact with one another. Examples:• Geography• Conquest• Trade

Language Contact - Results

What happens when cultures with different languages come into contact?

A. Widespread bilingualism (usually with codeswitching)

B. Selection of a lingua franca: Any language used to enable communication between groups of people with differing native languages. (natural or constructed languages)

Two possible strategies:(1) Employ an already existing language(2) Form new language…

Language Contact Terminology

• Stratum or strate: means layer in Latin and is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact.

• Superstrate or Supestratum is the language that has higher power or prestige.

• Substrate or Substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another.

• Adstrates or adstratum refers to languages in contact that have equal prestige and power

• Lexifier Language: The language which appears to provide most of the lexicon to a pidgin. "The prestige language which supplies the bulk of the vocabulary is the one which is usually thought as being pidginized“

http://linguistics.osu.edu/research/publications/jpcl/terms_gl

From Pidgin to Creole: A Story of Suriname

Pidgin Recap

One type of lingua franca. A language which arises to fulfill restricted and ongoing needs for communication among people who have no common language.

Often arises when there is a long-term need tocommunicate(i.e., in trade/business)

Not the primary language of their speakers (i.e., learned as 2nd lang)

Structural features of a pidgin

• x no strict word order• ✔ single set of pronouns• x no complex sentences• x no determiners• x no grammatical gender• x no inflectional morphology• ✔ plurals: noun + 3rd person pronoun

Creole

A language that comes about by prolonged use andnativization, usually arising when parents transmit a pidgin to their children, and the pidgin becomes the child's native language. This language undergoes rapid expansion because it must meet all the communicative needs of the native speaker.

Often arises from a pidgin that is adopted as first/native language

Exploring the creole language of Hawai‘i

Social Relations on Plantations: The Origins of Pidgin

Language as a lens

In groups choose an ethnicity to research. You need to think about why pidgin language began to develop on the plantations.

Think about the social relations among different ethnicities as a way to understand why pidgin developed.

• Hawaiian• Chinese• Portuguese • Japanese• Caucasians from the United States• Filipinos

Guiding Questions

• What were the main time periods that your group came?• What other kinds of people (ethnicities) would your group have interacted

with?• Why would you have interacted with these groups? What kinds of social

networks would this have led to?• Where would your group have interacted with people from other

ethnicities/language backgrounds? Think about adults, teenagers, and children.

• Why wouldn’t your group have learned other group’s languages?• Think about how speakers would try to communicate by simplifying their

language. What languages would they have tried to simplify? What languages might they have used as a common resource?

• Why didn’t Hawaiian become the shared common language?• Why did or didn’t your group maintain your language over time? Is it still

spoken today in Hawai‘i? How do past social relations on plantations explain why or why not your group speaks their language in 21st century Hawai‘i?

Pidgin Across the Generations: Your Linguistic Family Tree

Teresa Lau language tree

Guiding Questions

• 1) What are the past social, political, and historical factors that led your family members to learn, maintain or lose their languages?

• 2) What are the current social, political, and historical factors that will influence whether the you decide to learn, maintain, or lose the language/s?

Discussing Pidgin Discrimination