Remember that superstrate languages are typically major world languages, such as English, French, and Arabic, with international prestige. It often happens where creole speakers have lower social status than superstrate language speakers. Decreolization is a term for this.ĭecreolization occurs along a continuum as speakers of creoles change them to make them conform more closely to the superstrate language. Creoles, however, do not disappear as readily, but some factors endanger their existence. They do this because, by definition, they do not become first languages. Pidgins go extinct when the social conditions that created them no longer favor their use. These come about through processes such as the geographic isolation of different groups of speakers. Creoles are typically seen as having little of either.Ĭreoles, like many other languages, sometimes have different dialects. These are summed up by the term creoleness and include not just lexical richness (amount of vocabulary) but also the amount of inflection and tone. Linguists do categorize and measure creoles in numerous ways based on specific characteristics. While the vast majority of identified creoles have the trade languages mentioned above as their superstrates, others have come about by mixing non-colonial languages, such as Sango, described below. Even languages such as German and English have been suggested as originating through creolization! It is seen as a worldwide and universal process. One accepted fact is that "creolization" in the linguistic sense is now not recognized as limited to the Americas. 2 - Anti-littering notice in Belizean Creole Though this is no longer considered valid, the exact ways creoles are created is greatly disputed.įig. ![]() The study of creoles is a controversial subject in linguistics, so there are many ideas about how they start and work.įor starters, there is an academic legacy of treating creoles as "primitive" or unsophisticated languages, not "true" languages. ![]() Creoles become new languages when parents teach them to their children and use them as the first language in the home ("mother tongues"). They add vocabulary words from one or more superstrate languages, usually trade languages, while their grammar is derived from the substrate language, typically an important vernacular language.ģ. Pidgins that survive often become creoles with time. Hundreds of pidgins were invented based on these, though most died out.Ģ. Since 1500 AD, most of the significant maritime trade languages have either been those of European colonial powers (French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, German), Malay, or Arabic. ![]() They are often a hodge-podge of different local languages and one or more trade languages. Pidgins are thrown together quickly and, as a result, start with a small, functional vocabulary and simple grammar with flexible rules. Many creoles start as pidgins, trade languages invented to facilitate communication between groups who want to buy and sell products from each other and have no language in common. Here are the steps in the creolization of language:ġ. In the linguistic sense, creolization is the process of native language creation by mixing two or more languages: the grammar of a vernacular language and the lexicon (vocabulary) of a trade language, particularly a language brought by Europeans in the process of colonialism. It is important to note that this means that both in Europe as well as in the world as a whole, English is now a language that is mainly used by bi- and multilinguals, and that its (often monolingual) native speakers are a minority.Creolization: In its broadest sense, a process of cultural mixture referring specifically to the adoption of African, European, and Indigenous traits in language, religion, food, and identity in the Greater Caribbean area since the 1500s AD. Clearly, the role of English as the chosen foreign language of communication in Europe is an extremely important one, and one that is on the increase. In this definition, then, a lingua franca has no native speakers, and this notion is carried over into definitions of English as a lingua franca, such as in the following example: ' is a 'contact language' between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication' (Firth, 1996, p. "But what do we mean by the term English as a lingua franca? The term lingua franca is usually taken to mean 'any lingual medium of communication between people of different mother tongues, for whom it is a second language' (Samarin, 1987, p.
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