Yakpo, Kofi & Norval Smith. 2020. The Atlantic. In Umberto Ansaldo & Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.),
The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 179–198. London: Routledge.
doi.org/10.4324/9781003107224-11. Author manuscript version.
The Atlantic
Kofi Yakpo & Norval Smith
Introduction
A common theme in the description and theorization of the Atlantic Ocean and its African,
American, and European littoral is ‘movement, transformation, relocation’ (Gilroy 1993).
The interaction and merging of populations, languages, cultural traditions, and economic
modes in the Atlantic basin from the 16th century onwards can be seen as a harbinger of the
shape of things to come. The colonial Caribbean in particular became the epitome of
the later trajectory of the world in which Europe forged its version of
modernity (Mintz 1996), with its constitutive elements of industrial capitalism, asymmetrical
globalization, forced labour, castism-racism, large-scale labour migration, and the destruction
of older social institutions and kinship systems, the ‘melting of solids’ (Bauman 2013).
But the Atlantic world also saw the rise of an equally modern counter-project, the
syncretic and subversive culture of ‘métisage’ (Glissant 1997) constructed by enslaved and
colonized African- , Indigenous- , and Asian- descended peoples, of the Americas who
rejected the hierarchical binaries of European colonialism that sought to dehumanize them.
The resulting ‘créolité’ (Bernabé et al. 1989) is powerfully embodied in the Afro-European,
Afro-Indigenous (e.g. Taylor 1956), Euro-Indigenous, and Afro-Asian (e.g. Yakpo 2017a)
cultural and linguistic contacts along the Atlantic rim. A whole range of linguistic varieties
emerged from these contacts. Among these, the Afro-European Creole languages of the
Atlantic basin stand out because they combine the various linguistic lineages spoken by their
progenitors in particularly interesting ways, and continue to be spoken in ecologies
characterized by extensive contact.
Here, we focus on the Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles (AECs) in order to flesh
out some salient features of language contact in the Atlantic. Today, AECs are spoken by
around a hundred and twenty million people in a string of closely related, often mutually
intelligible but typologically diff erentiated varieties in Africa and the Americas (Yakpo
2016). Contrary to the colonial official languages of the Atlantic, the exponential growth in
AEC speaker numbers across time and space has been entirely self-authored, and against
formidable ideological odds inherited from colonialism and enslavement: The masses of
working peoples who speak AECs as their primary languages still face educational, political, and economic exclusion (Devonish 2010). At the same time the economic and sociocultural transformations of the last few decades have dramatically extended the reach of the
contact languages of the Atlantic.
179
Kofi Yakpo and Norval Smith
Afropop sung in Nigerian Pidgin, Reggae and Dancehall in Jamaican, and African American
English Rap lyrics have become the musical and linguistic signatures of a Trans-Atlantic
culture. The trajectory of the AECs therefore epitomizes the significant linguistic and social
transformations of the Atlantic world, and the globe at large, in the past few centuries.
1.
The Atlantic as a contact and convergence area
Thelittoral zone of the three continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean has served as an arenaof
people and language contact for millennia. In precolonial times, the North Atlantic with its
character of an inland sea and coastal lowlands served as a theatre for contact and convergence between peoples and related and unrelated languages (Ureland 2011). Canoe-powered
naval trade, warfare, and fishing connected the entire western seaboard of Africa (Smith
1970), and extensive marine networks linked the continental Americas and the Caribbean
(Hofman et al. 2010). Existing patterns of contact had therefore already shaped the linguistic practices and individual experiences of people on the three Atlantic continents when the
Western European nations set out to colonize the Americas and the Atlantic islands of Africa in
the 15th century.
The colonial period laid the foundations for the Atlantic as an intercontinental
convergence zone across hitherto regionally confi ned linguistic macro-families. Arawak
languages indigenous to the Americas, Atlantic-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Mande languages of
West Africa, European regional dialects of Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Breton,
and Irish were brought together in ever-changing constellations in early colonial-era
settlements.
From the late 17th century, and particularly the 18th century onwards, the European colonial plantation economies grew to industrial proportions, fuelled by the enslavement of Africans. In this period, the Atlantic increasingly became a contact ecology dominated by Kwa
and Benue-Congo substrate languages, Romance and Germanic superstrates, and AfroEuropean Creole languages. An additional layer of typological complexity was added in
the 19th and early 20th centuries. Large numbers of indentured labourers came with their
languages from India (e.g. Boer 1998), southern China (e.g. Rojas- Berscia & Shi 2017),
Java (e.g. Villerius 2018), and West Africa (e.g. Warner-Lewis 1996).
The postcolonial era since roughly the 1960s – with the notable exception of Haiti which
rid itself of colonialism and slavery in 1804, and the continental American colonies – is again
characterized by migration and mobility, albeit without direct coercion. The experience of a
considerable portion of the populations of the Americas, Africa, and Europe is one of (often
circular) migration and language contact between languages of the Northern and the Southern
hemispheres of the Atlantic (e.g. Hinrichs 2011; Kootstra & Şahin 2018). These more recent
migratory movements have extended the reach of Afro-European contact varieties from their
homesteads in the once colonized Southern Atlantic to the Northern Atlantic. True to their
historical role as languages of identity and resistance, Afro-European contact varieties have
garnered prestige in grassroots culture, thus feeding into urban popular culture, and interethnic youth speech styles in the cities of the former colonizing nations (for the Netherlands, see
Dorleijn et al. 2015).
2. Current contributions and research
Research on language contact in the Atlantic has been deeply invested in theorizing the
ontological status of Creoles. Sensationalist claims that Creoles have the ‘simplest
grammars
180
of the world’ (McWhorter 2001), and more diligent arguments that Creoles constitute a
‘typological class’ (e.g. Bakker et al. 2017) have occupied a disproportionate amount of
discursive space in Pidgin and Creole studies.
A consequence of the singular focus on creolization is that Afro-European Creole
languages have been excised from their genetic heritage and areal context. The study of Atlantic (and other) Creoles however off ers countless possibilities for cross-fertilization with the traditional fields of comparative and historical linguistics, and with genetic and areal-typological
linguistics, more so in combination with an increasingly sophisticated linguistic data science. In
Section 3.1, we address genetic aspects in the reconstruction of an AEC proto-language. In
Section 3.2, we turn to areal typology.
2.1 Genealogical perspectives: ‘Ingredient X’
The structure of the AECs may be seen to reflect the genealogical heritage of the lexifier (for a
recent, data- driven study, see Blasi et al 2017), of the substrates (e.g. the pioneering study of
Boretzky 1983), or a combination of both (van Sluijs et al. 2016). A fourth perspective is to
postulate a ‘non- genetic’ origin of Creoles (e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988). Here, we turn
away from the embattled question of determining external genetic continuities and look at the
equally interesting internal genealogy of the AECs. A relationship between the AfroCaribbean English-lexifier Creoles has been suggested for quite some time (Hancock 1969;
Alleyne 1980; McWhorter 1995; Huber 1999). In the following we give a brief over-view of
the position of Smith (1987, 2015), which combines socio-historical and linguistic data to
argue for the emergence of an AEC proto-language in the Caribbean in the early 17th
century.
Smith (1997, 2015) introduced the term ‘Ingredient X’ on the model of a term employed in
British TV soap powder advertisements. This was a supposedly secret ingredient that would
help produce a more sparkling wash. The intended implication was that a group of words
from coastal West African languages dispersed along many hundreds of miles of coast, had, in
unexplained fashion , entered the vocabularies of many English-lexifier Creole languages in the
Atlantic area.
In Table 9.1 , we repeat the list in a form based on Smith (2015: 70–72, sources provided
there) (also see Baker & Huber 2001; Avram 2004; Parkvall 2016). The number of AECs has
however been increased to cover more varieties. We give one African form only, choosing,
where possible, the likeliest source language, whose name is given immediately preceding the
relevant form. The very fact that this set of lexical items was drawn from a disparate group of
at least eleven African languages makes it very unlikely that any common source has to be
looked for in Africa itself (pace Hancock 1986). This also suggests that these items belonged to
a single original linguistic system employed in the very early 17th century during the Eng-lish
colonization of the Caribbean. The presence of ‘Ingredient X’ in the African AECs also
supports the idea that a Maroon variety of Jamaican was transplanted to Sierra Leone in the late
18th century and substantially fed into the emerging Krio language (Smith 2017). A
comparison of the phonology, grammar and lexicon of the African AECs among each other, in
turn, suggests that the diff usion of the Krio language from along the West coast of Africa in the
19th century ushered in the formation of Pichi, Nigerian Pidgin, and Cameroon Pidgin (Huber
1999: 128–129).
Some ‘Ingredient X’ items also occur in the French-lexifier Creoles of the Caribbean Creoles
(Parkvall 2016). This need not, however, in itself indicate more far-reaching genealogical
181
Table 9.1 Ingredient X words in the Afro-European Creoles
African languages
(1) spider
(2) eat
(3) stab
(4) White man
(5) only
(6) magic
(7) a staple food
(8) drum
(9) you (plural)
(10) ghost
(11) leprosy
(12) gossip
(13) headpad
(14) evil ghost
(15) ackee
(16) rattle
(17) deaf/dumb
(18) beancake
(19) okra
(20) monster
(21) game
(22) mud
(23) peanut 1
(24) peanut 2
(25) yam
(26) dumpling
anansi
nyam
juk
bakra
soso
obia
fufu
gombe
unu/una/ona
jumbi
kokobe
kongosa
kata
dopi
aki
sak
mumu
akra
okra
bubu
wari
potopoto
gobo(gobo)
pinda
nyams
dokun
Twi
Wolof
Fulani
Efik
Igbo
Efik
Twi
Kikongo
Igbo
Kimbundu
Twi
Twi
Kikongo
Gan
Kru
Efik
Twi
Igbo
Igbo
Kikongo
Twi
Twi
Kimbundu
Kikongo
Mende
Twi
Ewe
Yoruba
Ewe
Yoruba
Ewe
Yoruba
E. Ịjọ
Mende
Fon
Ewe
Kikongo
Yoruba
Sr
J
Kr
Sa
SK
Guy
Bah
Mi
Gren
Bar
Ant
Gul
Is
Bel
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Total
14
14
14
13
13
13
12
10
11
11
11
8
8
10
8
8
8
8
10
7
7
6
6
8
6
7
Kofi Yakpo and Norval Smith
182
English
(27) vulva
(28) lungs
(29) strike
Reflexes in language
bombo
fukofuko
fom
Kikongo
Yoruba
E. Ịjọ
x
x
x
29
x
x
29
x
x
25
x
x
x
25
x
21
21
20
19
16
x
15
x
x
x
14
14
12
15
7
4
4
Abbreviations
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
=
Sranan (Suriname)
Jamaican Creole
Krio (Sierra Leone)
Saamaka (Saramaccan)
St Kitts (Kittitian)
Guyanese Creole (Creolese)
Bahamian Creole
Miskito Coast Creole (Nicaragua)
Grenadan Creole
Barbadian Creole (Bajan)
Antiguan Creole
Gullah (South Carolina, Georgia)
Islander Creole (Providencia-San Andres) (Colombia
The Atlantic
183
Sr
J
Kr
Sa
SK
Guy
Bah
Mi
Gren
Bar
Ant
Gul
Is
links between the diff erent Afro-European Creole groupings. For one thing, Africans were
deported to the Americas from the same regions in Africa. Second, the distribution of ‘Ingredient X’ words is not the same. Dopi ‘evil ghost’ is restricted to the AECs, while makak
‘monkey’ is only found in French-lexifier Creoles. Jumbi ‘ghost’, on the other hand, is nearuniversal. Names for foods and plants tend be present in both groups.
Third, there was contact and borrowing between the Creole groupings due to population
movements between American colonies held by different European nations. So for example, we
have the near- universal bakra ‘White person’ in the AECs. The French-lexifier Creoles, in
contrast, mostly have beke , probably of Eastern Ịjọ origin. However, Bajan, the Englishlexifier Creole of Barbados, also has bɛki, a form related to beke, while bakra is only recorded
in Bajan in the 18th century. Barbados is geographically cut off from the other English Creolespeaking islands by a string of (former) French Creole- speaking islands including Dominica,
Martinique, and St Lucia. A possible conclusion is, therefore, that Bajan bɛki has been borrowed from (one of the) French-lexifier Creoles.
The existence of grammatical items (e.g. the subjunctive complementizer mek , see Section 3.2) in addition to lexical ones provides further evidence for an AEC proto- language.
Given present-day speaker numbers of more than one hundred million, this is quite a
remarkable trajectory for a language once spoken by a few thousand Africans who had arrived
on the shores of the Caribbean in chains.
2.2 Areal perspectives on Afro-European contact languages
Another line of research has looked at the Afro- European Creoles of the Atlantic basin in an
areal perspective. Thick descriptions emanating from this perspective (e.g. Essegbey 2015;
Aboh 2015; Yakpo 2019a; Hackert 2019) have made the identification of a Creole ontological
type ever more elusive. A coherent body of areal work is, for example, the work on the
‘Transatlantic Sprachbund’ (Muysken & Smith 2015), showing the links between the speak-ers,
grammars, and lexica of the Gbe languages spoken in present-day Togo and Benin, and the
Creole languages spoken in Suriname. Yakpo and Muysken (2017) trace the outlines of a
linguistic area within Suriname itself. An interesting finding is that Suriname’s dominant Creole
language Sranan functions as a conduit for influences on the Indic, Austronesian, Sinitic,
Arawakan, and Cariban languages for both European (via Dutch) and African (via the
substrates) areal features, for example in the transfer of overt clause linkage with ‘and’ to
Hakka vs. the strengthening of serial strategies in Javanese, and the borrowing of a ‘say’ complementizer by Lokono.
An Atlantic linguistic area can therefore be conceived of in much broader geographical
terms. Muysken (2008: 11–24) discusses the Atlantic as an intercontinental linguistic area, as in
the spread of African structural features and lexical items to the European languages and
Creoles of the Americas, and European lexical and structural infl uence on the Creoles and
Indigenous languages of the Americas. Taking this further, the Atlantic can be pictured as the
meeting ground of two large linguistic areas that we may conveniently call the ‘Afrosphere’
and the ‘Eurosphere’, made up of the languages of the West African littoral and its hinterland,
and of the European colonizing nations respectively.
The areal character of Eurosphere and Afrosphere languages beyond their genetic connections have been studied for West Africa (see Güldemann 2018 for a recent overview) and
Western Europe (see Haspelmath 2001 for an overview). Some of the many features of the
Afrosphere described in the literature and relevant here are serial verb constructions; a tendency towards isolating morphology; ‘hypertransitivity’ (Essegbey 1999); few prepositions
184
and (mostly postpositional) locative nouns; no (pro- )nominal gender; no pro- drop; a specificity distinction; aspect and mood prominence; tone systems; and lexical, idiomatic, and pragmatic Africanisms (e.g. ‘kiss teeth’, a signifier of negative affect, see Figueroa 2005).
Relevant features of the Eurosphere, in turn, are overt clause linkage, some fusional
morphology, many prepositions, a definiteness distinction, stress systems, and lexical
Europeanisms.
Evidence for the presence of both African substrate and European superstrate features suggests that these two spheres converge in the Afro-European Creole languages of Atlantic
Basin. The Creoles therefore form an ‘areal buffer zone’ (cf. Stilo 2005) between the
Eurosphere and the Afrosphere. Some of the convergences and co-occurrences of Eurosphere
and Afrosphere features in the Creoles are:
Full- blown tone systems (e.g. Ndyuka, Huttar & Huttar 1994: 562–579), next to
‘residual’ (Berry 1972) tone systems (e.g. Sranan, Smith & Adamson 2006), stress systems
(e.g. Jamaican, Gooden 2003), and mixed systems combining tone and stress
(Papiamentu, Rivera- Castillo 1998) or etymologically layered tone systems (Saamaka, Good
2004); for an overview, see Devonish 2002); Tendency towards analyticity characteristic of
both Kwa and English/Romance; ‘Mismatches’ in constituent order, e.g. strict SVO and the
expression of core spatial relations through prepositions and postpositions in the same
Creole (e.g. in Sranan, see Yakpo 2017b); African-style TMA systems (e.g. Winford & Migge
2007) and mixed NP systems combining European (e.g. adjective- word order in the AECs)
and African formal features (e.g. post- posed determiners, plural expressed only once in the
NP).
In the American Atlantic, the presence of Afrosphere features gradually tapers off in line with
various factors that conditioned the differing demographic distribution and socio- economic
stratification between Black and White populations in the New World (Mintz 1971; Faraclas
et al. 2007; Yakpo 2020 for a discussion of both factors). Structurally somewhat less
independent Black ethnolectal varieties than the Creoles like African American English (e.g.
Green 2002) and Afro-Spanish varieties (e.g. Afro-Yungueño, see Perez & Zipp 2019), as well
as rural/working class varieties like Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (e.g. Petter 2004) for
example, have comparatively fewer Afrosphere features than the Creoles on the one hand, but
still more than White ethnolectal and standard varieties, on the other.
Probably the most important driver of the spread of Eurosphere features in the last century
or so is the expansion of formal education in the former European colonies of the Atlantic rim,
as well as increased national, regional, and international mobility, migration, and media
access. Uninterrupted contact for five centuries with European superstrates in the Americas
has infused more Eurosphere features into Afro-European Creoles and Indigenous languages
of the Americas than into Creoles (and other African languages) spoken on the African
continent. In the following section, we show how the resulting Trans-Atlantic areal cline of
Eurosphere vs. Afrosphere features can be captured with the help of a particular linguistic
feature.
2.3 The stratal-areal contact model: subjunctive mood in the AECs
Processes of areal convergence have played a central role in shaping the diff erentiation of
AEC grammars. The stratal- areal contact model (Yakpo 2017c, 2017d) suggests, among other
things, that contact with African adstrates has reinforced and expanded existing Afrosphere
185
Kofi Yakpo and Norval Smith
features in the African AECs, while the absence of contact with African adstrates has led to a
weakening of Afrosphere and a strengthening of Eurosphere features in the American AECs.
We briefly explore this by looking at the formal-functional differentiation of subjunctive mood
across AECs in Africa and the Americas (examples from Kofi Yakpo’s field data unless a
source is provided).
Subjunctive mood is instantiated in the modal complementizer mek(i) ‘SBJV’ homophone
of, and diachronically related to the lexical verb ‘make’ (for an overview, see Smith 2015:
83–85). The use of subjunctive mood in complement clauses is associated with the presence
of the deontic nuance of ‘manipulation’ (Givón 1995: 125ff.). Subjunctive mood appears in the
directive main clause types of imperative (1), cohortative (2), and jussive (3):
(1)
wét
smɔ́l!
mék
yù
2SG
wait small
SBJV
‘Wait a bit!’ (Cameroon Pidgin)
(2)
mek
wi
go!
SBJV
1PL go
‘Let’s go!’ (Jamaican)
(3)
a
so
meki a
tan!
FOC like.that SBJV
3SG.SBJ remain
‘Let him/her/it be (like that).’ (Ndyuka; Suriname)
Second, the subjunctive complementizer mek(i) also introduces subordinate clauses
dependent on main verbs whose meaning contains an element of causation, manipulation,
proposal, desire and other affective nuances compatible with deontic modality (see (4)-(5)).
This is the central domain of the subjunctive, where the modal complementizer occurs with a
great number of deontic main verbs in some AECs (e.g. in Pichi, see Yakpo 2019b: 389–392;
and in Nigerian Pidgin, see Faraclas 1996: 26–32):
(4)
mi
bali
en
taki
meki a
an
kon.
1SG
shout 3SG.OBJ QUOT SBJV
3SG.SBJ NEG come
‘I shouted at him/her that he should not come.’ (Ndyuka; Suriname)
(5)
ii
gud
meek ii
faal dong.
3SG.SBJ
be.good SBJV
3SG.SBJ fall
down
‘It’s good (serves him/her right) that/if s/he falls.’ (Tobagonian)
Among the deontic ‘manipulative’ contexts, we also find WANT-complements (6), and the
subordinate clause of effect in analytic causative constructions. Like (4) and (5), these
constructions are ‘balanced’, consisting of two finite clauses and hence a subject undergoer
(like in African languages, see later), rather than ‘deranked’ (Cristofaro 2003) ones involving
an object undergoer and argument sharing (like European languages, see the translations of
examples). However, only some of the African AECs allow the co-occurrence of the
causative verb and the homophonous subjunctive marker as in (7) (again like in African
languages, see (15)):
(6)
du
wan
sani
gi
mi.
mi
wani
meki
a
3SG.SBJ
do
one
thing
PREP
1SG
1SG
want
SBJV
‘I want him/her to do something for me.’ (Sranan; Suriname)
186
The Atlantic
(7)
à
mék
mék
è
drɔ́ngò.
1SG.SBJ
make
SBJV
3SG.SBJ
be/get.drunk
‘I got him/her drunk.’ Lit. ‘I made that s/he get drunk.’ (Pichi; Equatorial Guinea)
Third, subjunctive mood occurs in purpose clauses, which contain the deontic nuance of an
anticipated outcome:
(8)
blak
di
ruod
mek
im
no
kom
block
DEF
road
SBJV
3SG
NEG
come
‘Block the way so that s/he doesn’t come in.’ (Jamaican)
iin.
in
The occurrence of subjunctive mood across the three functional domains (directives, complement clauses, and purpose clauses) is, however, unevenly distributed across the AECs.
There are roughly speaking three groups of AECs with respect to the role of subjunctive
mood. Group (1) contains all African AECs. These have a unitary system, in which all three
func-tional areas are characterized by the use of subjunctive mood. Group (2) consists in
geographically isolated AECs of the Americas (e.g. Tobagonian) and AECs that have not
been in contact with the lexifier English for a considerable time. These have instead been in
contact with a non-lexifier superstrate. For instance in Suriname, Sranan has been in constant
contact with Dutch since the 1670s, and less so the maroon Creoles Ndyuka and Saamaka. In
all three Creoles, the unitary system is (still) available. However, MAKE-subjunctives compete
with other modal strategies. In Sranan, for example, SBJV may but need not occur in the
subordinate clauses of deontic main verbs like wani, as opposed to the obligatoriness of SBJV
in this context in the African AECs), compare (6) and (9):
(9)
mi
wani
dati
a
musu
kari
en
1SG
want
COMP
3SG.SBJ
must
carry
3SG.OBJ
‘I want him/her to carry it for me.’ (Sranan; Suriname)
gi
PREP
mi.
1SG
Group (3) are AECs that have been in continuous close contact with English over the centuries. In these, mek(i) - subjunctives are now largely restricted to the less central functions of
directives, and sometimes, purpose clauses. In Jamaican, the non-finite modal
complementizer fi is far more common than mek as a modal complementizer for the
subordinate clauses of deontic main verbs; compare (6) and (10). Also note that (10) no
longer involves an African-like ‘balanced’, but rather an English-style ‘deranked’ structure.
Trinidad English Creole has gone further. Constructions that involve subjunctive mek in
Group 1 and 2 AECs have generally been replaced by more English-like alternatives;
compare (11):
(10) mi
no
wahn
dem
fi
shout
aafa mi.
1SG
NEG
want
3PL
MOD
shout
after 1SG
‘I don’t want them to shout at me.’ (Jamaican)
(11) a
doon
wont
yu
kam,
yu
noo.
1SG.SBJ
NEG
want
2SG
come
2SG
know.
‘I don’t want you to come, you know.’ (Trinidadian English Creole)
Deontic subjunctives are an areal African characteristic. We assume that the AEC protolanguage had an African-type unitary system of subjunctive marking, which has gradually
become fragmented in accordance with the amount of exposure to European superstrates.
187
Without going into too much detail, we provide the following examples from West African
languages of diverse genetic affi liations. The field data contains examples of the full range of
possibilities of subjunctive use in fi fteen West African languages (for details on the corpus,
see 2017c). In the five languages provided below, a subjunctive complementizer is found
across the three domains of directives, complements of deontic main verbs and in purpose
clauses, like in the African AECs. In all instances we find the same kind of ‘balanced’ structure
involving a subjunctive complementizer and a finite subordinate clause with a subject (not an
object) pronoun. Compare the following examples with the AEC examples previously. Note
that Kriyol (16), the Portuguese-lexifier Creole of Guinea-Bissau, behaves no differently from
the non-Creole African languages listed:
(12) kí
ó
wá!
SBJV
3SG.SBJ
come
‘Let him/her come!’ (Yoruba; Nigeria)
(13) i
po
kanɛ
kɔ
kama
1SG.SBJ
PFV
tell
3SG.OBJ
SBJV
‘I told him/her to go.’ (Temne; Sierra Leone)
ɔ
3SG.SBJ
(14) má
lɔ̀ɔ̀
mə́
tá
à
1SG.SBJ
want
COMP
SBJV
3SG.SBJ
‘I want him/her to come.’ (Bafut; Cameroon)
zí.
come
kɔnɛ.
go
(15) ɔ̀-má-à
mà
ɔ̀-kɔ́-ɔ̀.
3SG.SBJ-cause-COMPL
SBJV
3SG.SBJ-go-COMPL
‘S/he made him/her go.’ Lit. ‘S/he made that s/he go.’ (Fante; Ghana)
(16) aos
n
bin
prasa pa
n
toma kafe
na
Imperio.
yesterday
1SG come town
SBJV 1SG take
coffee loc PLACE
‘Yesterday, I came to town (in order) to take coff ee at the Hotel Imperio.’ (Kriyol)
There is therefore an east- west areal cline across the Atlantic basin. The widest distribution of mek(i) ‘ SBJV’ in a unitary deontic domain is found in the African AECs, hence in the
core of the Afrosphere. The most fragmented, non- unitary expression of deontic modality
through various forms (complementizers, auxiliaries, and preverbal markers) is found in the
AECs with the historically most profound exposure to the Eurosphere. Other AECs fall
between these two poles, depending on their individual contact trajectory. The issue of postformative contact-induced change with the lexifier is addressed further in the following
sections.
3. Critical issues
Much ink has been spilt on the controversy around the so- called Creole prototype, represented
in extremis by the work of Bickerton (1984) and derivatives (e.g. McWhorter 1998). The
prototype idea is founded on a terra nullius scenario, in which Atlantic basin Creoles arose
ex nihilo via the simplification of European lexifier languages. The methodological
foundations of this approach have been criticized from various angles including its typological
assumptions (Aboh & Ansaldo 2007), circularity (Fon Sing 2017), the ahistoricity of its social
premises (Mufwene 2000), its epistemology (DeGraff 2005), the paucity of the data (Lupyan
& Dale
188
2010) and the shallowness (Spears 2009) of the linguistic analysis (also see Yakpo 2019a).
The core assumption of the terra nullius scenario that there was a transmission bottleneck in
the early stages of creolization has been called into question (see Blasi et al. 2017 for a
recent study based on large amounts of comparative data).
In Section 3.1, we briefly discuss the idea that enslaved Africans did not have sufficient
possibility to learn English and therefore pidginized it. In Section 3.2, we place the equally
much-discussed concept of ‘decreolization’ within the broader context of post-formative
change in the AECs, by addressing differences in the outcomes between lexifier and nonlexifier contact.
3.1 The social context of the formation of Proto-AEC
Enslaved Africans spoke quite a variety of languages, and as a result of regional fluctuations dur-ing
the European slave trade, the linguistic balance among enslaved Africans kept shifting. This
meant that it was usually out of the question for enslaved Africans to adopt a common African
language. In the initial phase of the fi rst colonies, the number of enslaved Africans was small,
and this phase is often referred to as the ‘homestead’ phase, because enslavers and enslaved
lived together in close proximity. The ratio between Blacks and Whites is assumed to have been
relatively balanced so that newly arrived Africans would have learned English rapidly, within a
few years at most.
From here on the opinions among creolists begin to diverge rapidly. The standard approach
is that the increasing numbers of newly enslaved Africans from Africa as well as larger
plantations meant that access to English was reduced more and more, and that the end result
was a Creole language. Such theories ignore the fact that a body of Black speakers of English
had most probably already been created in the homestead phase. Therefore newly enslaved
Africans would have had access to Black speakers of English if it had been advantageous to
them to learn and use English as a lingua franca. Instead, the Proto-AEC would have served as
language of ‘identity alignment’ (Ansaldo 2009) and resistance (cf. Alleyne 1980; Faraclas et
al. 2007). The linguistic evidence seems to indicate that English was widely known among
enslaved people during the formative period of Proto-AEC and thereafter (as shown, for
example, in the subtle English-derived distinctions in the use of definite determiners in AECs;
see Aboh 2015: 74–75).
It is instead more likely that there was multilingualism among early enslaved Africans
including two lingua francas, next to other (African, European, and in some cases Indigenous)
languages. The first lingua franca would be English, indeed to communicate with the colonists
at least during the homesteading period. The second would be a variety of the Proto-AEC that
spread through the Caribbean with the movements of English colonists and their enslaved
workforce. The Proto-AEC, in turn, would have developed in the early 17th century when the
English only had a few small colonies in the Caribbean. It must therefore have developed prior
to the expansion of English colonization in the Caribbean. This is demonstrated by the
presence of ‘Ingredient X’ lexical items in all AECs (see Section 2.1). Further evidence comes
from a core of common grammatical items (Smith 2015: 83–87, 2017), among them the
sub-junctive complementizer mek(i) (see Section 2.3).
3.2 The role of contact with the lexifier in Creole language change
A second question much debated in the literature next to the social conditions that engendered
the AECs is that of post- formative change. This question was discussed from a broader, areal
perspective in Section 2.3. Here, we look at the specific role of contact with the superstrate,
189
which has traditionally been studied in linguistically rather homogenous Creole-speaking
societies like Jamaica and Guyana (see Winford 1997 for an overview). The variation of forms
encountered in a continuum between a basilectal and a mesolectal Creole variety has been
assumed to reflect diachronic stages of a Creole’s development including ‘decreolization’ (e.g.,
DeCamp 1971; Bickerton 1973; Rickford 1987).
The continuum approach has, however, not been successfully transferred to more com-plex
multilingual ecologies (e.g. Nigeria, see Deuber 2005). Equally, the terms ‘superstrate’ and
‘lexifier’ are used interchangeably in Creole linguistics (but see Snow 2002; Selbach 2008).
The diff erence is significant, however. The formal- lexical similarity between a Creole and its
lexifier appears to facilitate change of phonologically similar Creole words in the direction of
lexifier etymons, including the development of multiple variants and hybrid forms, a
phenomenon also found in dialect contact (Gaetano 2005). Existing overlaps in form and
meaning make the Creole amenable to faster semantic change toward the lexifier than in cases
of contact between unrelated languages. A shared genealogy may also result in the
interchangeability of grammatical elements between lexifier and Creole even in more
tightly organized areas of the grammar (cf. Law 2013). Yakpo (2017c, 2017d) provides first
systematic accounts of diff erences in outcomes between lexifier and non-lexifier contact in
African and Caribbean AECs. However, a high degree of societal multilingualism including the
Creole and a non- lexifier superstrate may also engender far- reaching typological change in
the direction of the superstrate (Yakpo 2017b). Work therefore still remains to be done on the
fine differences between Creole change induced by contact with a lexifier vs. a non-lexifier
superstrate.
The diff erent outcomes of lexifier-Creole and non-lexifier-Creole contact can be explained by
the fate of certain phonological features. One of these is the treatment of the diph-thongs /ai/
or /əi/, and /au/ or /əu/ in closed syllables in English; the other is the presence of anaptyctic
vowels, i.e. supporting vowels that prevent certain consonants from appearing word-finally (for
a detailed treatment, see Smith 2015). Languages with little exposure to English (Group 1) in
the ‘post-founder’ period (Mufwene 1996) show the short-mid vowel monophthongs /ɛ, e/
and /ɔ, o/ as in /fait/ vs /fɛt/ ‘fight’, and /haus/ vs. /(h)os/ ‘house’. Languages with much
exposure to English (Group 2) have diphthongs and lack anaptyctic vowels. Compare Table
9.2 :
Table 9.2 Phonetic isoglosses compared
English
Sranan
(Suriname)
Ndyuka
(Maroon)
Saamaka
(Maroon)
MSL
(Jamaica)
Jamaican
Krio (Sierra
Leone)
black
dead
knock
talk
walk
climb
time
fight
night
white
blaka
dede
naki
taki
waka
kren
ten
feti
neti
weti
baaka
dede
naki
taki
waka
kelen
ten
feti
neti
weti
baaka
dɛdɛ
naki
taki
waka
*
ten
feti
ndeti
weti
blaka, braka
dede
naki
taki
waka
klem, krem
tem
fete
net
wete
blak
ded
nak
tak, taak
waak
klaim
taim
fait
nait
wait
blák
dédè
nák
tɔ́k
wákà
klém
tɛ́m
fɛ́t
nɛ́t
wé t
*Saamaka uses a Portuguese-derived word for ‘climb’
190
Group 1 consists of Sranan (Suriname) and the Maroon AECs of the Caribbean (Ndyuka,
Saamaka, Windward Maroon), as well as Krio, the African off shoot of Leeward Maroon
Creole (Jamaica) and the direct descendants of Krio (e.g. Pichi). Group 2 consists of all
other AECs today spoken in the Caribbean (e.g. Jamaican) and in Africa (e.g. Ghanaian Pidgin
English). The parallelisms between the Group 1 languages MSL and the Suriname Creoles
include anaptyctic vowels and monophthongization of pre- coda English diphthongs as
phonological parallels (see Table 9.2 ). The Group 1 language Krio also has monophthongs and anaptyctic vowels appear in some, but not all common words (e.g. w á k à
‘walk’). Of the languages in Table 9.2 , only Jamaican (the only Group 2 language)
therefore has diphthongs in words whose English model had a diphthong-consonant
sequence, and no anaptyctic vowels.
The Suriname Creoles and the Proto-AEC that spawned them had contact with English for
a maximum of about seventy years: an unknown period of maximally twenty-five years on
Barbados, St Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat from whence Suriname was colonized by the
English in 1651, followed by sixteen years in Suriname until the Dutch take-over of 1667.
Conceivably, English was still spoken for another twenty-five years in Suriname after the
Dutch conquest (Smith 2009: 315).
The Suriname Creole languages show striking structural and lexical parallels with the
Maroon Spirit Language (MSL) of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica (Bilby 1983). MSL
is today still used to address spirits of maroons who were born in Jamaica. Up till the early
1930s MSL seems to have represented the everyday language used by the Windward Maroons
(Harris 1994), but it has now been supplanted by Jamaican. The conservative nature of MSL
shows that even within Jamaica, where English has been spoken without interruption for more
than 350 years, the relative isolation of the Windward Maroons preserved Proto- AEC
features that are today still found in the Suriname Creoles (see Bilby 1983 for some grammatical features as well).
Smith (2015: 92–106) argues that Krio is largely descended from Western Maroon Creole
( pace Hancock 1986), hence another, now extinct Maroon Creole spoken on Jamaica in the
18th century similar to MSL. The fate of the these two phonetic isoglosses therefore shows
how varying degrees of exposure to the lexifier English have led to diff erent contact outcomes.
4. Future directions
We still know too little about the fi ne details of grammar, phonology, lectal variation, and the
effects of contact with adstrates and superstrates in the Atlantic basin to make broad claims
about Creole typology. Detailed studies are necessary in order to catalogue the immense
genealogical and typological diversity in linguistic structures; an observation already made in
the 19th century by Schuchardt, that pioneer of contact linguistics. Future work will be
complemented by quantitative approaches, with data drawn from language-specific (e.g.
Green et al. 2016; Caron 2019) and typological databases (e.g. Kortmann & Lunkenheimer
2011; Michaelis et al. 2013).
Contact-related work will have to factor in the tectonic demographic shift and
far-reaching socio- economic changes underway in Africa, and their consequences for patterns
of language use and contact along the Atlantic rim. The population of Africa is reckoned
to quadruple in the next eighty years, reaching over four billion by 2100. Nigeria alone
is projected to grow in excess of seven hundred million until 2100 (United Nations
2017). Demographic growth rates for the other major AEC- speaking countries Sierra Leone,
Ghana, and Cameroon are similar. It is therefore not unrealistic to expect up to half a
billion speakers of AECs in West Africa alone
by the end of the 21st century. The mutually intelligible string of African AECs would then
overtake Spanish, Portuguese, and French as the most widely spoken (group of) language(s)
of the Western hemisphere besides English.
Research on other large and small Atlantic rim languages that make for equally exciting
subjects of study in language contact has barely begun. This includes, for example, the
Mande zone across the Atlantic rim states Senegal, Gambia, Guinea- Bissau, Guinea, Liberia,
and Côte d’Ivoire (e.g. Diallo 2014). Between eastern Ghana and the Benin- Nigerian
borderlands, languages of the Gbe cluster (Ewe, G ɛ̃, Adja, Gun, and Fɔn among others) are in
intimate con-tact with each other, English in Ghana (Amuzu 2015), French in Togo and
Benin (Essizewa 2007), and with other African languages (see e.g. the studies in Ameka
2017). Hardly any work has yet been done to describe contact-induced changes that the
languages of the Beti-Bulu-Fang cluster, Lingala, and Kikongo have undergone in recent
decades in their expansion to the cities and along the coastal zones of Cameroon, Equatorial
Guinea, Gabon, the two Congos, and northern Angola.
The African capitals dotting the Atlantic rim are, in turn, sites of intense contact that have
seen the emergence of urban lingua francas, koines, and youth languages that are only beginning to be studied. Among them feature urban Wolof in Dakar (McLaughlin 2001), the
French-lexifier contact language Noutchi in Abidjan (Kube 2005), the Gbe koine of Lomé
(Sédji 2013), the Akan koine of Accra (Yankson 2018), and the vernacular Portuguese
varieties of São Tomé (Bouchard 2018) and Angola (Nzau et al. 2013).
Adstratal influence from African languages on the European-lexifier contact languages
spoken in Africa, as well as on the standard European superstrate varieties spoken in Africa,
require detailed scrutiny. Recent research is beginning to show, for example, that many African varieties of European colonial languages have tone systems (for French, see Bordal 2012;
for English, see Gussenhoven 2017; for Spanish, see Bordal Steien & Yakpo 2020), thereby
calling into question established ideas about the vulnerability of tone during language contact
and creolization.
So far, only a small body of work has addressed the expansion of the communicative functions of contact languages in the Atlantic basin (e.g. Heyd & Mair 2014; Moll 2015). The
absence of top- down, state- administered language policies requires looking at the standardizing and multiplier roles of private digital media (e.g. Beltman 2018), instant
messaging, social media, film, and pop music. The emergence of more formal registers in
contact languages on both sides of the Atlantic, including the spread of vernacular
orthographies opens up possibilities for the study of language policies and language
ideologies (e.g. Migge et al. 2010; Yakpo 2016). In the coming decades, the importance of
the Atlantic will only grow as a crossroads of language contact, and a site for
the emergence of new languages, speech styles, and plurilingual practices.
Further reading
Alleyne, M. C. 1980. Comparative Afro-American: an historicalcomparative study of Englishbased
Afro- American dialects of the New World . Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Publishers. Well ahead of its
time in its holistic approach and coverage, and in continuation of earlier pioneering work such as
Hancock (1969), this book looks at the evolution of the Afro-Caribbean European-lexifier Creoles
through the lense of historical, comparative, genetic, and typological linguistics, without shunning
the discussion of socio-cultural aspects of Creole genesis.
Linebaugh, P. & Rediker, M. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press.
192
The Atlantic
This history from below reconstructs the crucial role that enslaved, oppressed, and marginalized
women and men of African, European, and Indigenous descent played in fashioning the modern
Atlantic area in the interstices between colonial conquest and slavery.
Muysken, P. & Smith, N. (eds.). 2015. Surviving the Middle Passage: The West Africa-Suriname Sprachbund (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs (TiLSM) 275). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
This edited volume is the first to systematically conceptualize the African and American Atlantic as a
linguistic area. It contains fifteen studies in socio-history, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, lexicography, and phylogenetic analysis that assess and show the extent of the areal connections
between Gbe and Kikongo, and the Suriname Creoles.
Ureland, P. S. (ed.). 2011. Language Contact across the North Atlantic (Linguistische Arbeiten 359).
Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
This 500-page volume contains over twenty studies of pre- and postcolonial (Trans-)Atlantic contact
in the Northern hemisphere. The focus is on Germanic (and Scandinavian in particular), but Celtic,
Romance, and Krio are also included.
Yakpo, K. 2017. Towards a model of language contact and change in the English-lexifier creoles of
Africa and the Caribbean. English World-Wide 38(1). 50–76.
The first study to present a comprehensive typology of post-formative contact and change in the
Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles on both sides of the Atlantic, this article shows the
importance of areal and stratal forces in the genealogical differentiation of this group of languages. )
Related topics
Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, and Hawai‘i; Caribbean, South and Central America;
Diachronic studies of Pidgins and Creoles; The Typology of Pidgin and Creole Languages;
Pidgin and Creole Ecology and Evolution; Identity Politics.
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