The Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, ed. by
Nancy Bonvillain, 345-368. London: Routledge.
23
The Emergence of Creoles and
Language Change
Salikoko S. Mufwene
1 Introduction
From an evolutionary perspective, creoles have typically been discussed in relation to pidgins,
from which they have allegedly evolved. This position has been disputed by, especially,
Chaudenson (2001, 2003), Mufwene (2001, 2005, 2008), and DeGraff (2009), for reasons I
discuss below. Much earlier, Alleyne (1971) had disputed the “baby talk” hypothesis, according to which pidgins had evolved from simplified, baby-like utterances produced by the nonEuropeans with whom the Europeans came in contact. Alleyne argues that fossils of variants still
evident in Haitian Creole, Saramaccan, and Sranan (e.g., broko ‘break’, dede ‘died, dead’) speak
otherwise. I show below that the history of the European trade and exploitation colonization of
the relevant territories also disputes the “baby talk” hypothesis and its alternative, the “foreigner
talk” hypothesis, according to which the Europeans spoke to non–Europeans in trade colonies
in reduced utterances, imitating those produced by their interlocutors.
Since the late nineteenth century, the study of creoles has been marked by a social bias
according to which non-Europeans were incapable of learning European languages adequately
(Mufwene, 2001, 2005, 2008; DeGraff, 2003, 2005). Creoles have also been stipulated as separate
languages from their lexifiers and not genetically related to them (Thomason, & Kaufman 1988;
Thomason, 2001), although most speakers of these new vernaculars say they speak the same
European language (Mühlhäusler, 1985; Mufwene, 1988). The stipulation is disputed in part by
the fact that the Romance languages, which, like creoles, would not be mutually intelligible with
Vulgar Latin, are also by-products of language shift. I will avoid the bias by sometimes referring to
creoles as vernaculars or as language varieties, thus leaving room for them to be treated as new, colonial nonstandard dialects of the relevant European languages, produced by populations that are
predominantly of non–European descent. Evolutionarily, they are on a par with, for instance, the
French vernaculars of Louisiana and Québec, except that these have been produced by predominantly French colonists. Lack of mutual intelligibility with, especially, their metropolitan lexifiers,
which has often been invoked to justify the disfranchising of creoles from the relevant European
genetic linguistic families, also applies, as variably, to some of these other colonial vernaculars.
The term lexifier is used in this chapter as a label of convenience for the language from which
a creole has typically inherited the overwhelming part of its vocabulary. This practice is based
on the assumption that a creole has inherited its grammar from sources other than its lexifier
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(Holm, 1988; Thomason, & Kaufman, 1988; Thomason, 2001). Although, however, the basilect of a creole has a very different grammar from the standard variety of its lexifier (called
acrolect), many of its grammatical features can be traced, at least partly, to some of the nonstandard varieties of its lexifier, to which its “creators” were exposed. This is in fact one of the
strongest contributions of Sylvain (1936), ironically invoked by some creolists as a forerunner of
the relexification hypothesis (see below). Also, although the term creole has been extrapolated to
various contact vernaculars, including those with a non–European lexifier (cf. Kouwenberg, &
Singler, 2009), this chapter is restricted to those lexified by a European language. The reasons
for this position are articulated below.
2 Historical Perspectives: What Are Creoles and Pidgins?
Strictly speaking, creoles and pidgins are new language varieties that developed out of contacts
between colonial nonstandard varieties of a European language and several non–European languages around the Atlantic and in the Indian and Pacific Oceans during the 17th–19th centuries.
Pidgins typically emerged in trade colonies, which developed around trade forts (as on the coast
of West Africa) and on whaling ships (as in the South Pacific). They have reduced structures and
restricted communicative functions: typically trade and whaling activities. Initially they served as
non–native lingua francas to users who maintained their native vernaculars for their intra–ethnic
interactions. Some pidgins have expanded into regular vernaculars, especially in urban settings,
and are called expanded pidgins. Examples include Bislama and Tok Pisin (in Melanesia) and
Nigerian and Cameroon Pidgin Englishes. Structurally, these are as complex as creoles (Féral,
1989; Jourdan, 1991, 2009), though their evolutionary trajectories are different (see below).
Creoles emerged typically in settlement colonies whose primary industry consisted of sugar
cane or rice cultivation, for which non-indigenous, non–European slaves were employed, constituting the overwhelming majority of the plantation populations. Examples include Haitian,
Mauritian, and Seychellois (lexified by French); Jamaican, Guyanese, and Hawaiian Creole,
as well as Gullah in the United States (all lexified by English); and Saramaccan and Sranan in
Surinam (lexified by English, with the former heavily influenced by Portuguese and the latter
by Dutch). Creoles have also been singled out in Australia, although they are endogenous, as
they were produced by Aboriginal, rather than exogenous, populations (Chaudenson 1979).
Vernaculars such as Cape Verdian Crioulo (lexified by Portuguese) and Papiamentu in the
Netherlands Antilles (apparently Portuguese–based but influenced by Spanish) suggest that the
plantation industry is not as significant a factor as population growth (including rate of population replacement) and population structure (related to early segregation) in the identification of
a colonial vernacular as a creole. These considerations help explain why Brazil, which engaged
in sugar cane cultivation a century earlier than the Caribbean colonies but had a non-segregated
population structure, did not produce a creole (Mufwene, 2005, 2008). Certainly, it is also
disputable whether creoles can be singled out as a typological class, let alone a genetic one (see
below).
Although Melanesian expanded pidgins are associated with sugar cane plantations, they
need not be considered as creoles. According to Keesing (1988), they originated in trade
and whaling settings and were adopted as lingua francas on the plantations (but cf. Baker,
1993), before they evolved into urban vernaculars and expanded their functions and structures.
However, since the complexity of their grammars makes them comparable to creoles, they
raise the question of whether only one evolutionary trajectory need produce the extreme kind
of structural divergence from the lexifier that has been associated with these vernaculars. It
remains debatable whether, in the first place, creoles can be defined by their structural features.
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Even McWhorter (1998) had to posit a small subset of “creole prototypes” (refuted by DeGraff,
2001), to dodge the question of why creoles are like each other only on the family resemblance
model (Mufwene, 2001, 2005, 2008). This state of affairs is inconsistent with typological classifications, which are predicated on classical categories: all members must share the feature or
combination thereof that justifies grouping them together.
According to Chaudenson (1979, 2001, 2003), creoles have evolved by basilectalization
away from the closer approximations of their lexifiers spoken by the earliest slaves. This account
is grounded in the particular way in which plantation settlement colonies developed, originally
settled in small homesteads whose populations were integrated and eventually becoming larger,
racially segregated plantations, as economic capital increased.
Linguists have also typically considered as creoles the varieties that are structurally the most
divergent from the acrolects, called basilects. According to Chaudenson, these evolved later in
history, through imperfect approximations of already imperfect approximations.1 The notion
of acrolect should not be confused with that of lexifier, because the lexifiers were typically
nonstandard and most likely koinés (i.e., compromises between different dialects) of the relevant
European languages.
It appears that, evolutionarily, creoles relate to expanded pidgins in a way that a half–empty
bottle relates to a half–full bottle: different histories but similar outcomes. Interesting evidence
for this may be found in Solomon Islands Pidgin. Jourdan (2009) reports recent “system–internal
innovation[s],” consisting of English prepositions used predicatively and transitivized according
to Pidgin’s grammar, with the suffix –im, which make the vernacular more divergent from its
lexifier and more similar to the indigenous substrate languages.
The position since the 19th century that creoles evolved from erstwhile pidgins by the
acquisition of native speakers appears to have been prompted by the assumption that complex
structures evolve from simpler ones. However, a diachronic examination of the morphosyntaxes of Indo-European languages such as English or French reveals a trend from more complex to simpler morphosyntax. Colonial history also disputes this traditional position. Creoles
emerged in settings where contacts with Europeans and native speakers of the lexifiers could
not have been as sporadic as in the trade settings that produced pidgins, certainly not during
the homestead phase, when the non–European component of the settlement population was
the minority and the populations were racially integrated, though not necessarily equal socially
(Chaudenson, 2001; Mufwene, 1997, 2001, 2008). Geographically, our epistemological prototypes of creoles and pidgins developed in separate places, in plantation settlement colonies of
the New World and the Indian Ocean for creoles and in Canton, the Pacific, and Oceania for
pidgins (Mufwene, 2005, 2008). Moreover, the term pidgin was first used in print in 1807, in
Canton (Baker, & Mühlhäusler 1990), much later than the term creole, which had been coined
in Latin America for locally born people of non–indigenous stock in the late 16th century. It
was used in reference to a “corrupted” variety of Portuguese spoken in Senegal only in the late
17th century (La Courbe’s Premier voyage, 1688:192, cited by Arveiller, 1963). Its later extension to other colonial nonstandard varieties spoken primarily by descendants of non-Europeans
may have been initiated by locally- born White colonists, who were proud to be identified as
Creoles (given some rights they could claim to administer the colonies), claimed to have maintained the European language intact, but dissociated themselves from the non-White Creoles
(Stewart, 2007).
The etymology of the term pidgin points to business English in Canton, though the emergence of the term is probably also due to partial congruence between business and Cantonese
bei chin ‘give money’ or ‘pay’ (Comrie et al., 1996: 146). Noteworthy is the fact that Canton was
an important trade colony where no plantation industry developed and no variety has been
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identified as creole. Besides, the history below also suggests that the emergence of pidgins lexified by European languages may be a peculiarity of British colonial ventures in the 19th century.
Pidgins lexified by other European languages are scant and are not attested before the 20th
century.
Also bearing heavily on the position that creoles evolved from antecedent pidgins is the role
played by interpreters in the early contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans (Bolton,
2000, 2002; Fayer, 2003; Mufwene, 2005, 2014). This is best documented in relation to China,
where the interpreters (often identified as linguists) were also required power brokers in trade
(Van Dyke, 2005). Further evidence comes from the colonization of Hawaii (Beechert, 1985),
where interpreters, from the monarchy, played an important role in the spread of English in the
Pacific. Additional evidence comes from the colonization of Africa, facilitated by interpreters
all the way to the early 20th century (Fortbath, 1977; Reader, 1997; Austen, 1999; Austen, &
Derrick, 1999; Lawrance, et al., 2006; Kennedy, 2013). There is similar evidence about the
colonization of the Americas, where interpreters were used in trade with Native Americans
(Karttunen, 1994; Curtin, 1984; Gray, & Fiering, 2000; Metcalf, 2005).
It appears that in the particular territories where pidgins lexified by European languages
emerged, knowledge of the European language remained the privilege of a few who benefited
from the trade, then operating as in today’s globalized economic networks, between indigenous
rulers and the foreigners, interfaced by experts who can carry on the transactions. The slave
trade, which has figured centrally in the relevant literature, did not proceed in bazaar-style open
markets (Mufwene 2014). The British East India Company traded exclusively with a guild of
Chinese merchants (Co-Hong) in tea, porcelain, and silk.
There are thus plenty of reasons to question the traditional, a–historical view that derives
creoles from pidgins (pace, e.g., Siegel, 2008; Bakker, 2009). Although the Pacific illustrates
the pidgin-to-expanded-pidgin evolutionary trajectory, this is not the one followed by creoles
around the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean, or even in Hawaii. Expanded pidgins are byproducts of the replacement of trade colonization by exploitation colonization, whereas creoles
emerged in territories that remained settlement colonies until independence. Barring disputable
stipulations of some South and East Asian vernaculars as creoles, there is a neat ecological complementary distribution between creoles and expanded pidgins: settlement plantation colonies
for creoles vs. former trade colonies for pidgins.
Also, although Bickerton (1981, 1984) presents Hawaii as typical of settings where creoles
developed, it was rather exceptional compared to Atlantic and Indian Ocean settlement colonies (Mufwene, 2008). In Hawaii, Creole emerged in the city but Pidgin on the plantations
(Roberts, 1998, 2004), whereas in the other territories creoles developed on the plantations.
Caribbean cities produced closer approximations of the lexifier. Creoles spread to them after the
abolition of slavery, when former slaves who did not want to continue working on the plantations migrated to the city.
History also suggests that even pidgins must have evolved gradually rather than abruptly. In the
case of Africa, as trade intensified in the 18th century and there were fewer and fewer interpreters
who had learned the European language in Europe, more and more linguistically less competent
individuals assumed their function. Then the reduced structures associated with pidgins emerged,
in a way similar to the basilectalization that produced creoles. Expanded pidgins of course arose
by recomplexification, in response to the more diversified communicative needs of those who
would use pidgins as vernaculars in the emergent multi-ethnic cities. Under indigenous substrate
influence, this complexification furthered the structural divergence from the lexifier.
The often–invoked jargon or pre–pidgin stage in the emergence of creoles and pidgins has
not been documented. The hypothesis is not consistent with the role of interpreters during the
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trade colonization of Africa and Asia up to the 19th century. According to Drechsel (2014), the
same interpreters used a Maritime Polynesian Pidgin (MPP) in communicating with the Natives
on the Pacific islands, from New Zealand to Hawaii. MPP had apparently been used as a lingua
franca by Polynesians before they traded with the Europeans.
One should not ignore the fact that no French or Dutch pidgins emerged on the African
coast comparable to Nigerian and Cameroon English pidgins. “Le français tirailleur,” associated
with African recruits in the French army since the 19th century, appears to be a stereotypical creation of the French colonizers themselves. The recruits hardly spoke it, though it has
been kept in the French citizens’ negative representation of Africans’ inability to learn standard
French competently (Vigouroux, 2013). Tai Boy in Vietnam emerged only in the 20th century,
just like “l’abidjannais” in Southern Côte d’Ivoire, and was short-lived. No pidgin based on
a colonial language other than English appears to have emerged in the Pacific. Unserdeutch,
spoken in Papua New Guinea, and also known as Rabaul Creole German, is considered a creole. Pidgins appear to be by–products of British trade colonization, though the reason for this
historical peculiarity is not yet clear. It also appears that they did not emerge before the late 18th
century (based on some disputable attestations) or, more likely, the early 19th century. That is
after Caribbean and Indian Ocean creoles had already emerged (Mufwene, 2014).
Supporting the above hypothesis is also the observation by Huber (1999) and Ostler (2005)
that Portuguese, for which there is no evidence of pidginization in history (pace Whinnom,
1971), had functioned as a convenient lingua franca of trade and diplomacy along the African
and Indian Ocean coasts, all the way to the Far East, until the 18th century, after the Dutch,
the French, and the English confiscated some of the Portuguese colonies. The European slave
trade with Africa appears to have been conducted in Portuguese, spoken by the grumetes (young
sailors) and the children of the Portuguese “factors” or lançados, who acted both as intermediaries and as interpreters (Berlin 1998). Nigerian and Cameroon Pidgins may thus have arisen for
reasons that had little to do with the slave trade.
Hall’s (1962, 1966) and Mühlhäusler’s (1997) “life-cycle” hypothesis, according to which
creoles are somewhere on an evolutionary trajectory proceeding from the lexifier to a jargon,
then to a pidgin, possibly to a creole, and sometimes even to a –postcreole, by decreolization
(see also Schuchardt 1914; Bloomfield 1933, on the latter), appears to be inconsistent with
history (Mufwene 1994). The term jargon was used randomly by colonizers for any language
variety they did not understand, not necessarily pidgins. The term and its meaning actually
have a longer usage than the European colonization, dating from the 13th century (Mufwene
1997). Neither Hall nor Mühlhäusler provide operational criteria for distinguishing their
putative jargons from interlanguages, except that the latter are less stable. Even Plag’s (2008,
2009) claim that creoles evolved from interlanguages does not redeem this traditional position, because all L2 learners go through interlanguages, which are individual but not communal varieties (DeGraff 1999, 2009; Mufwene 2008, 2010a). Also noteworthy is the fact
that Black Creoles of the homestead phase appear to have spoken the relevant colonial koinés
instead. In addition, several Hispanic American countries identify Creole populations who
speak no creole vernaculars.
3 Critical Issues
3.1 How Many Creoles Are There?
Under whatever definition, it is not clear which contact–based vernaculars count as creoles
and which do not, especially outside the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Hawaiian English
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Creole is problematic because it evolved in the city, rather than on the plantations, where a
pidgin emerged. It was also produced by contract laborers rather than slaves. Besides, there was
no extensive multilingualism among the laborers, who consisted of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos,
Koreans, and “Portuguese,” and lived in separate ethnic “houses.” They continued to speak
their ethnic vernaculars, in which they received instructions for work, and they resorted occasionally to Pidgin Hawaiian and later on to English, which they pidginized, for inter–ethnic
communication. To date, their descendants have kept their ethnic identities, although most of
them speak Hawaiian English (Creole) as their vernacular.
Kreol of Queensland is identified as such because it was produced by non–Europeans, primarily from Australia, who worked on sugar cane plantations. It is structurally close to Melanesian
pidgins, which Baker (1993) claims evolved from it or its antecedent in New South Wales.
Important structural differences between these Pacific varieties and those of the Atlantic and
Indian Ocean make it futile to attempt to define creoles structurally (pace McWhorter, 1998;
Bakker et al. 2011).
More difficult to accept as creoles are varieties such as Afrikaans, classified as such by
Valkhoff (1966) but not by Hesseling (1897). The latter found it less divergent from Dutch than
Negerhollands (now dead), which had been produced by African slaves who had worked on
sugar cane plantations. Hans den Besten (Wouden, 2012), however, saw “creole features” in
Afrikaans, capitalizing on the fact that the Dutch settlers had been in contact with non-European people, with whom they sometimes mixed, and Cape Dutch was restructured under their
influence. Afrikaners do not think their language, now stipulated as separate from European
Dutch, is a creole, no more than Louisiana White Creoles think they speak Créole, although
their vernacular is very similar to Louisiana French Creole (see, e.g., Klingler, 2003), associated
exclusively with Black Creoles and sugar cane cultivation.
There are also varieties spoken by descendants of non-Europeans in small, former endogenous Portuguese settlement colonies, from South Asia (e.g., Korlai in India) to Southeast and
East Asia (e.g., Papia Kristang in Malaysia and Mecanese in Macau), which are called creoles.
Their speakers are descendants of indigenous populations that had lived with the Portuguese,
sometimes formed unions with them, converted to Christianity, and adopted their colonizer’s
language. The vernaculars are not associated with the plantation industry, nor do their features
match those of our epistemological prototypes of creoles in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.
They just share with the latter the fact of being nonstandard vernaculars of European origins
spoken by a non-European population. This brings up the issue of whether the race of the
speakers is not really an important tacit reason why some “contact-based” vernaculars are called
creoles (Mufwene, 2001, 2005, 2008; DeGraff, 2003, 2005).
On the other hand, some creolists have extrapolated the terms creole and pidgin to various varieties around the world that are not lexified by European languages but have been
restructured in similar ways, “under contact conditions.” Thus, new African languages such as
Kikongo-Kituba, Lingala, and Sango in the Central African Republic, Kinubi in South Sudan
and Kenya, Fanakalo in South Africa, and Hiri Motu in Papua New Guinea have been branded
as creoles if they have native speakers, otherwise as pidgins. I have avoided that extrapolation
in this chapter, though I believe it is easier to operationalize the concept pidgin (by invoking
reduced communicative functions and structures) than creole.
Some linguists, such as Bailey and Maroldt (1977) and Schlieben-Lange (1977), have gone
even farther back in time and claimed that Middle English, for the former, and the Romance
languages, for the latter, are creoles, since they are outcomes of language contact. The issue is
whether there are any modern languages that do not owe at least part of their structures to language contact (Hjelmslev, 1938). How can the boundary be drawn between the kind of contact
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that produces a creole and the kind that does not? Are there any cases of language speciation that
have nothing to do with language contact?
On the other hand, why did Bailey and Maroldt not go even farther back and claim that Old
English was a creole? The Germanic populations that colonized England in the fifth century had
spoken no English. The latter is indigenous to England. Old English appears to have emerged
only in the seventh century, two centuries after the Germanic invasion. It may be argued that
it was a Germanic koiné, out of the contact of the languages of the Jutes, Saxons, Angles, and
perhaps Frisians. However, the names England ‘land of the Angles’ and English ‘language of the
Angles’ suggest that one group prevailed, at least culturally, and their language won a Pyrrhic
victory, just as in the case of creoles. An important difference is that it was not the socioeconomically subjugated people who shifted languages in the process. What seems more significant
here is that language change and speciation were actuated by contacts with populations speaking
different languages or dialects.
Overall, it is difficult to answer the question how many creoles are spoken today, nor how
many can be documented in history, because creolists do not have a common yardstick for
determining which ones count as creoles and which do not. The inventories provided by
Hancock (1977), Holm (1989), and Smith (1995) provide drastically different numbers!
3.2 Are Creoles Separate Languages From Their Lexifiers?
Another contentious issue about creoles is the traditional stipulation by linguists that creoles are
separate languages from their lexifiers and related varieties spoken by descendants of Europeans
in the same or other former colonies. Thus, the nonstandard French varieties spoken in Quebec
and Louisiana, as well as on the Caribbean islands of St Barts and St Thomas, are considered
dialects of French rather than creoles. Likewise Latin American nonstandard varieties of Spanish
and Portuguese are not considered creoles (with the exception of Palenquero, spoken by a
population of primarily African descent!), despite structural similarities that they exhibit with
creoles of the same lexifiers, such as São Tomense, Principense (both spoken in the Bight of
Biafra), and Cape Verdiano Crioulo for Portuguese.
Interestingly, African American Vernacular English is not considered a creole, perhaps
because it shares its origins with American (White) Southern English or because their structures remain so closely similar. In any case, Holm (2004) claims that it is a semi-creole, though
there are no structural features by which creoleness can be measured (Mufwene, 1986a, 2000).
Gullah, spoken by a majority-Black population has been stipulated to be a creole (though its
speakers think Creole is spoken only in Louisiana). Amish English is not, however, despite the
fact that it has also diverged significantly from other White American Englishes. It is spoken
by descendants of German-speaking Swiss! Ignoring Hjelmslev’s (1938) and Posner’s (1985)
position that creoles are new dialects of European languages, creolists have adopted uncritically this socially based naming tradition in former European settlement colonies, identifying
as creoles modifications of European languages produced and appropriated as vernaculars by
non-European majorities.
It is striking that, in the first place, grammatical divergence must weigh so heavily in these
stipulations. Genetic connections have typically been based on lexical, phonetic, and morphosyntactic correspondences. Proportionally, creoles share more lexical materials with their lexifiers
(over 90% of their vocabularies) than English does with modern German or Dutch. And their
grammatical features probably do not diverge more from those of their nonstandard lexifiers than
those of English do from those of other Germanic languages. Besides, there is yet no yardstick
for measuring global structural divergence from the lexifier or between any other languages.
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Also, as noted above, contact has played as important a role in the speciation of Vulgar Latin into
the Romance languages as in that of French and Portuguese into their respective creoles.Thomason
and Kaufman’s (1988) stipulation that the comparative method cannot be applied in the case of
creoles is a foregone conclusion with no empirical basis (Mufwene, 2003, 2005, 2008). Ironically, it
is invalidated indirectly by equally disputable attempts, based on the comparative method such as
by Bakker et al. (2011), that connect creoles genetically in their own separate families.
Granted that the non-creole varieties are not as structurally divergent from their common
lexifiers as the creole vernaculars, there is another explanation that weakens the traditional
distinction. In the case of White American English varieties, for example, the majority of
European immigrants, who were of non-English descent, shifted to English after the American
Revolution, i.e., after its critical formative phase. This timing puts them in a situation comparable to that of more recent immigrants, with their children acquiring the extant variety
natively and the immigrants themselves taking most of their xenolectal features with them to
their graves. This is why continental European immigrants have exerted little influence on the
grammar of American English, although their descendants are today the majority of the White
American population (Mufwene, 2009a).
4 Current Contributions and Research
4.1 Creole “Genesis”
The central question here is: how did creoles emerge? The following hypotheses are the major
ones competing today, although efforts have been made by some to integrate their insights: the
substrate, the superstrate, and the universalist hypotheses.
Substratist positions are historically related to the “baby talk” hypothesis, which can be traced
back to late 19th-century French creolists: Bertrand-Bocandé (1849), Baissac (1880),Adam (1883),
and Vinson (1882). According to them, the languages previously spoken by the Africans enslaved
on New World and Indian Ocean plantations exerted a strong influence on structures of the
European languages they appropriated as their vernaculars. They also assumed African languages
to be “primitive,” “instinctive,” in “natural” state, and simpler than the “cultivated” European languages. Creoles’ systems allegedly reflected the mental inferiority of their producers.2 The connection with “baby talk” is that, in order to be understood, the Europeans supposedly had to
speak to the Africans like to babies (Bloomfield 1933). More or less the same idea is to be found
in the “foreigner talk” hypothesis (as explained above). Unsurprisingly, Maurice Delafosse (1904)
claimed that “le petit nègre” was invented by the Africans, though history suggests otherwise.
The revival of the substrate hypothesis (without its racist component) has been attributed to
Sylvain (1936). Although she recognizes significant influence from nonstandard French dialects,
she concludes her book, surprisingly, with the statement that Haitian Creole is Ewe spoken
with a French vocabulary. Over two decades later, Turner (1949), disputing American dialectologists’ claim that there was virtually no trace of African languages in “Black English,” highlighted some morphosyntactic similarities between “the Gullah dialect” and some West African
(especially Kwa) languages. He then concluded that “Gullah is indebted to African sources”
(p. 254), which stimulated more research on African substrate influence on African-American
English (e.g., Dillard, 1972) and on Caribbean English creoles (e.g., Alleyne, 1980).
There are three main schools of the substrate hypothesis today. The first, led by Alleyne
(1980, 1996) and Holm (1988) is closer to Turner’s approach and is marked by what is also its
main weakness: invocation of influences from diverse African languages without explaining
what kinds of selection principles account for this seemingly random invocation of sources.
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This criticism is not ipso facto an invalidation of substrate influence. It is both a call for a more principled account, one that can articulate the particular ecological factors that appear to have favored
various individual influences (thus legitimating what was dubbed the “Cafeteria Principle”), and a
reminder that the nature of such influences must be reassessed (Mufwene, 2001, 2008).
The second school, identified by its practitioners as the relexification hypothesis (RH), is fully
articulated by Lefebvre (1998), who argues that Haitian Creole (HC) consists largely of French
lexical entries spoken with the grammar of languages of the Fongbe group. Extended to other
creoles, the position has been repeated in some of the contributions to Lefebvre et al. (2006),
though some others (see especially Aboh, 2006 and Siegel 2006) dispute it, and almost all contributing to Lefebvre (2011) are more cautious. Objections to RH include the following: 1)
Lefebvre’s “comparative” approach has not taken into account several features that HC (also)
shares with nonstandard French; 2) she downplays features that HC also shares with several
other African languages that were represented in Haiti during the critical stages of its development, so it is not obvious why there is the exclusive focus on the Fongbe languages; 3) studies
of naturalistic second language acquisition provide little evidence in support of RH, even if the
emergence of creoles could at all be associated exclusively with adult L2-learners (Chaudenson,
2001, 2003); and 4) Lefebvre does not account convincingly for those cases where HC has
selected structural options that are not consistent with those of Fongbe. Moreover, relexificationists assume, disputably, that languages of the Fongbe group are structurally identical in
all respects and that no influence-related competition among them was involved. The most
elaborate critique of RH is DeGraff (2002), which is complemented by various refined analyses
of hybridized structures in Haitian by Aboh (2006, 2009, in press). For contrary evidence from
other creole-like languages, see especially Siegel (2006).
The least disputed version of the substrate hypothesis is Keesing’s (1988), which shows that
substrate languages may impose their structural features on the new, contact–induced varieties if they are typologically homogeneous, with most of them sharing the relevant features.3
Thus, Melanesian pidgins are like (most of) their substrates in having DUAL/PLURAL and
INCLUSIVE/EXCLUSIVE distinctions and a transitive marker on the verb. For other common features see especially Sankoff and Brown (1976), Keesing (1988), Sankoff (1993), and
Jourdan (2009). Singler (1988) invokes a “homogeneity of the substrate” (see also Mufwene,
1986b) to account generally for substrate influence.
The Melanesian pidgins have not, however, inherited all the peculiarities of the substrate
languages. For instance, they do not have their VSO major constituent order, nor do they
have much of a numeral classifying system in the combination of pela with quantifiers. For an
extensive discussion of substrate influence in Atlantic and Indian Ocean creoles, see Muysken
and Smith (1986) and Mufwene (1993). For similar discussions about creoles and the like in the
Pacific, see Lefebvre et al. (2006) and Lefebvre (2011).
Competing with the above genetic views has been the dialectologist, or superstrate, hypothesis, according to which the primary, if not the exclusive, sources of creoles’ structural features
are nonstandard varieties of their lexifiers. This position was first defended by Faine (1937),
according to whom HC was essentially Norman French. It was espoused later by Hall (1958),
who argues that
the ‘basic’ relationship of Creole is with seventeenth–century French, with heavy carry–
overs or survivals of African linguistic structure (on a more superficial structural level) from
the previous language(s) of the earliest speakers of Negro Pidgin French; its ‘lexical’ relationship is with nineteenth– and twentieth–century French.
Hall (1958:372)
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Chaudenson (2001, 2003) is more accommodating to substrate influence as a factor accounting
for the more extensive structural divergence of creoles from their lexifiers compared to their
non-creole colonial kin. Chaudenson’s allowance for substrate influence is elaborated especially
by Corne (1999), who articulates the most explicitly how feature selection can be driven by
congruence, even if only partial, between the languages in contact. Although, unlike Pacific
pidgins, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean French creoles did not typically emerge in settings
that satisfied Singler’s “homogeneity of the substrate” condition, partial structural congruence
between the substrates and nonstandard French favored the selection of the particular features
French creoles possess, for instance in the domain of time reference. Aboh (2006, in press)
has carried this approach farther with detailed analyses showing how structural traits can be
hybridized in ways similar to biological gene recombination, in various aspects of the grammar.
According to him, even transfers from the substrate languages were modified by the contact.
One must then determine whether such substrate influence, which does not boil down to mere
introduction of features from substrate languages (identified as “apports” by Allsopp, 1977), was
facilitated by the numerical proportion of speakers of the relevant languages and/or by the time
of the insertion of these in the feature pool. See Singler (1996, 2009) for such considerations
regarding HC.
The universalist hypotheses, which stood as strong contenders to substrate hypotheses in the
1980s and 1990s, have forerunners in the 19th century. For instance, Adolfo Coelho (1880–
1886) partly anticipated Bickerton’s (1981, 1984, 1989) language bioprogram hypothesis, according
to which creoles “owe their origin to the operation of psychological or physiological laws that
are everywhere the same, and not to the influence of the former languages of the people among
whom these dialects are found.” Bickerton pushed things further in claiming that children,
not adults, constructed creoles by fixing the parameters of these new language varieties in their
default settings, as specified in Universal Grammar (UG). To account for cross–creole structural
differences, Bickerton (1984:176–177) invokes a “Pidginization Index” (PI) that includes the
following factors: the proportion of the native to non-native speakers during the initial stages
of colonization, the duration of the early stage, the rate of increase of the slave population after
that initial stage, the kind of social contacts between the native speakers of the lexifier and the
learners, and whether or not the contact between the two groups continued after the formation
of the new language variety. These factors, which are included in Mufwene’s (2001) ecological
approach, were simply not anchored in the actual history of the colonization of the different
creole-speaking territories.
Some nagging questions with Bickerton’s position include the following: Do structures
really support the claim that they were produced primarily by children (DeGraff, 1999; Roberts,
1998)? Is his intuitively sound PI consistent with his hypothesis that creoles emerged abruptly,
over one generation, from an antecedent macaronic pidgin? Is the “abrupt creolization” hypothesis consistent with the socioeconomic histories of the relevant territories? How can we explain
similarities between abrupt creoles and expanded pidgins when the structural expansion and
stabilization of the latter is not necessarily associated with restructuring by children (Meyerhoff,
2009)? Is there convincing evidence for assuming that adult speech is less controlled by UG than
child language is? If so, how can an adult learn and speak any other language at all?
Not all universalists have invoked children as critical agents in the emergence of creoles. For
instance, Sankoff (1979) and Mühlhäusler (1981) make allowance for UG to operate in adults,
too. Few creolists nowadays subscribe exclusively to one genetic account, as evidenced by
the contributions to Mufwene (1993) and Lefebvre (2011). The “complementary hypothesis”
(Baker, & Corne 1986; Corne 1999; DeGraff 2009; Hancock 1986; Mufwene 1986b, 2001)
seems to be an adequate alternative, provided we can articulate the ecological conditions under
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which the competing influences (between the substrate and lexifier languages, and within each
group) may converge or prevail upon each other. Aboh (in press) articulates in fine detail how
competition and selection operate during the restructuring of the lexifier under the influence
of some specific substrate languages. Schuchardt (1909, 1914) anticipated this language-mixing
account in his discussions of the genesis of the Mediterranean Lingua Franca and of Saramaccan.
It is also noteworthy that the traditional claim that creoles emerged abruptly, within one
generation, from a pidgin ancestor, has increasingly been disputed by, e.g., Chaudenson (1979,
2001, 2003), Arends (1989, 1995), Singler (1996, 2009), and Mufwene (1996–2008, 2010a).
Baker (1995) argues that even pidgins developed their characteristic features gradually. Overall,
the oldest documentary evidence shows more similarities between the new vernaculars and
their lexifiers than do the later texts. The gradualist scenario is consistent with the gradual way
in which plantation colonies evolved, having started from homestead settings settled by small
integrated groups in which the slaves were in the minority and interacted regularly with the
European colonists; shortage of capital made it difficult to import more slaves. The colonial
populations then grew, albeit slowly, more by birth than by (forced) immigration (Mufwene,
2001, 2005, 2008).
Still, the future of research on the emergence of creoles has some issues to address. Knowledge
of the nonstandard lexifiers from which they evolved remains limited, though more research is
now underway and much of the scholarship on the dialectology of the relevant European languages is becoming useful. There are few comprehensive and integrated descriptions of creoles’
structures, especially from a diachronic perspective, which makes it difficult to determine globally
how the competing influences interacted among themselves and how the features selected from
diverse sources became integrated into new systems. Other issues remain up in the air, for instance,
regarding the markedness model that is the most adequate to account for the selection of features
into creoles’ systems. Can there really be an ecology–independent, universal scale of markedness
that can account for the selection of particular features into the structures of particular creoles? If
so, how can one explain why even creoles that, for all practical purposes, evolved from the same
lexifier do not have identical structures, e.g., Gullah, and Guyanese and Jamaican Creoles?
4.2 Genetic Creolistics and Language Change
Creoles have typically been treated as historical anomalies, being contact-based and with mixed
systems. Only exceptionally has it been claimed that they can help us better understand how
languages change and can speciate into new ones. They remind us that language or dialect contact is a common actuator of change. To wit, the birth of English is a by-product of language
contact primarily between the different Germanic languages that were brought to England from
continental Europe, although students of Celtic Englishes argue that the Celts too contributed
to the emergence of Old English on their land. In addition, various changes in the history of
English in England have involved the Danelaw, the Norse rule, and the Norman Conquest.
Changes in British English within the last half-millennium can also be associated with population movements within England. The emergence of varieties such as Irish and Scots Englishes
also has everything to do with language contact.
Likewise, the speciation of Vulgar Latin into so many Romance languages stemmed both
from variation among the Celtic languages spoken by the populations that shifted to Latin and
from differences between the other languages with which the numerous emergent neo-Latin
varieties came in contact, e.g., Frankish in Gaul and Arabic and Moorish in Iberia. Thus, the
emergence of creoles, outside Europe, is a repetition of history in kind, especially with naturalistic language learning being the dominant mode of language appropriation.
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Creoles have also been prompting us to reconsider the way changes have been discussed in
historical linguistics: A→B in the environment of C. Discussions of the emergence of creoles
have made us more aware of variation in the feature pool, which provides the apparently more
accurate statement of how competition was resolved: B was selected over A in the environment
of C. This brings up the actuation question: what led the B variant to prevail over the A variant?
Indeed, the consequences of such a shift in the conceptualization of change may take us all the
way back to Grimm’s Law, as explained below.
No justification has been provided for assuming that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was one
single language and as monolithic as a biological organism. Rather, we can assume that like
modern languages, if it were really a single language, it must have varied internally. If it were a
cluster of related languages, like some language clusters today (e.g., Kikongo in central Africa
and Quechua in South America), some aspects of its system are likely to have varied. Thus,
instead of the typical formulation bh > b > p > φ for part of Grimm’s Law, one can argue that
these consonants were variants of each other in PIE, with some dialects or languages preferring
one or the other. As the Indo-Europeans dispersed to Europe and South Asia, the original competition was resolved in different ways, leaving some room for the pre-IE populations that they
encountered to have contributed to differing selections from among the variants.
Alternatively, the pre–IE languages may have introduced some of the variants, which subsequently were selected over the PIE obstruents. This competition-and-selection alternative appears
to be evolutionarily more plausible than the traditional account, especially because it brings us closer
to addressing the question of why this specific change occurred. From the point of view of language
speciation, one may argue that the dispersal led the separated groups to strengthen their respective
preferences, probably under the influence of the populations with which they came to coexist.
5 Future Directions
The debate on “creole genesis” informs genetic/historical linguistics on the relevance of the
varying external-ecology not only to the actuation question and to language change and speciation but also to language vitality (Mufwene, 2005, 2008). A concomitant of the emergence of
creoles around the Atlantic and in the Indian Oceans was the loss of heritage languages among
the (descendants of) the enslaved Africans. The cause of this is language shift, which was concurrent with the appropriation of the European language.
Language shift, which results in language loss, was also a concomitant of the emergence of
the Romance languages, as of Irish and Scots Englishes, though in these cases, involving endogenous language contact, the shift was more gradual. Language shift happens when opportunities
for using one’s heritage vernacular decrease to zero and/or when speakers cannot remember the
heritage language when an opportunity does arise. The speed at which a population experiences
the shift varies from one contact setting to another, apparently faster in exogenous colonies
with a high level of societal multilingualism and population-mixing than in others. The contract laborers of Hawaii maintained their heritage languages longer than the Atlantic and Indian
Ocean slaves precisely because of this difference in population structure, although in both cases
the laborers had been transported to an exogenous setting.
On the other hand, although European colonists and immigrants also migrated to exogenous
colonies, they lost their heritage languages slower than the African slaves, simply because they
remained for a long time, into the 19th century in the Americas, in segregated mini-national
colonies. They shifted to the dominant languages only after they integrated the economically and politically dominant population, for instance, the Anglos in English colonies or the
Portuguese in Brazil.
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The language-shift factor also explains why the influence of continental European languages
on American English is way below what it could have been if continental Europeans had
been integrated since the 17th century and had constituted the White American majority since
then (Mufwene, 2009a). Additionally, it highlights the role of children as agents of selection
(DeGraff, 1999) in a contact setting. Being better learners and wanting to be integrated in the
linguistically and culturally dominant population, the children of immigrants weeded out a large
proportion of the features their parents could have contributed to the host country’s vernacular.
Genetic creolistics makes historical linguists and historical dialectologists more aware of
population movements and language contact as ecological factors that generate new feature
pools, by introducing new elements, reweighting the variants, or modifying their distribution.
One can also invoke periodization and population structure (viz. integration vs. segregation,
notwithstanding disparities in demographic size) to explain why different subgroups have not
exerted the same (extents of) influences on the languages they have appropriated. This accounts
for differences between the influences of the substrate languages spoken by the African slaves
and those of the languages spoken by Americans of continental European descent on American
Englishes.
We must also revisit the distinction between externally and internally motivated language
change. Since languages have no separate existence from their speakers/signers, they must be
distinguished from the mental and anatomical infrastructures that enable them. Thus the mind
and the anatomy count as the most immediate ecologies, which, combined with the personalities of speakers/signers, shape our idiolects and the ways in which we contribute to restructuring our communal languages. This relation of languages to speakers/signers suggests that there
are probably few fundamental structural changes that are not externally motivated, contrary
to the tradition that has acknowledged as such only contact-induced changes. The reasons for
this conclusion include the following: 1) learning, which is naturally imperfect, may introduce
new variants of forms or rules; 2) pressures to communicate new ideas or nuance one’s statements may introduce new variants by modifying current meanings or structures; 3) dynamics
of mutual accommodations between idiolects may in some cases offset the balance of power
among the variants and thereby produce changes in the system; and 4) knowledge of another
language can influence the speaker’s/signer’s performance, especially if that other language is
ecologically favored, say, by how more frequently it is used, by the number or prestige of its
speakers, or by the fondness that speakers of the changing language have for it.
The only changes that are internally motivated are those that are consequences of other
changes that have already affected the system. For instance, while it is not clear that the construction be going to was coopted as an alternative for expressing the future tense/mood because
of some language-internal reason, its contraction to be gonna in some dialects or even gon in
African American English was internally motivated. The latter change appears to be an analogical evolution similar to the morphophonological reduction of, for instance, will, will not,
and shall not to, respectively, pronoun’ll, won’t, and shan’t. An extreme conclusion is that,
since languages have no agency independent of their speakers/signers, all changes are externally
motivated.
The list of insights that genetic creolistics can contribute to historical linguistics and historical
dialectology remains open. The primary reason for this ignorance is the assumption of “creole
exceptionalism” (DeGraff, 2003, 2005), which has deterred linguists from identifying ways in
which the scholarship on creoles can inspire research on language change. Rejecting “creole
exceptionalism” would entail at least questioning the ideological stipulation that creoles cannot
be grouped genetically with their lexifiers, even if they are considered as separate languages.
Acknowledging the role of substrate influence as a possible actuator of change in non-creole
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languages can also benefit from controversies about it in the emergence of creoles, just like the
latter may help refine discourse on transfers or interference in language acquisition (Schumann
1978, Andersen 1983, Lefebvre et al. 2006, Lefebvre 2011, Mufwene 2010a). No less interesting is the light that genetic creolistics can shed on speculations regarding the evolution of
language (Bickerton, 1990, 1995, 2010; Botha, 2006; Mufwene, 2008, 2009b, 2010b; Hurford,
2012). Perhaps the time has finally come when creoles can influence more conspicuously the
way linguists and other scholars study language.
Related Topics
18 New and Emergent Languages (Riley); 19 Language and Political Economy (McElhinny);
20 Language, Immigration, and the Nation–State (Pujolar); 21 Language and Nationalism
(Haque); 22 Language in the Age of Globalization (Jacquemet).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Nancy Bonvillain for facing my delays in completing this essay with a lot of
patience and for her very helpful feedback to my first draft. I am solely responsible for the
remaining shortcomings.
Notes
1 Since there are no features that are particularly creole and the relevant vernaculars have been disenfranchised typically because of the particular social history of their emergence, one may ask why the whole
basilect-to- acrolect continuum is not characterized as creole. After all, some structural features of the
colonial acrolects have also diverged from their metropolitan counterparts, reflecting language contact
or conservatism. However, the elite associated with the colonial acrolects would feel insulted, while the
distinction between creole and non-creole colonial varieties would become more elusive.
2 This assumption would also be repeated by Delafosse (1904), who encouraged the French army officers
to speak to African recruits in broken French, the ancestor of the mythical “français tirailleur.”
3 These expanded pidgins are brought back into the discussion here not because they should be considered as creoles but for other reasons discussed elsewhere.
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