The Consequences of Language Chapter 13. What Happens When Languages Come Into Contact?”

Westerners are accustomed to thinking that most countries are monolingual and that everyone in the country speaks the national language. Ironically, this is not true of even in most western countries. In the United States, Spanish is becoming so widely spoken that some consider it to be a second national language. This is evidenced by such phenomenon as national (global) Spanish language TV networks, the option of transacting business at an ATM in Spanish, and the availability of Spanish language phone books in Washington DC. These practices do not represent a national policy to promote Spanish, but the reality that Spanish is widely spoken in the US. But Spanish is not alone, as there are sizable groups of speakers of other languages found especially in the large cities of the US in which many of the world’s languages (Amharic, Loma, Thai, Serbian, Korean, Arabic, Chinese, Mayan, Swahili, Kashmiri) not only exist and thrive, not just as vernaculars but as community languages. The existence of such communities has changed our thinking about second language offerings in high schools and universities. Whereas previously the offerings consisted of French, German and Spanish (and before that Greek, Latin and Hebrew), our students are asking for the teaching of a wide range of heritage languages, those spoken by the parents and grandparents.

Also, still spoken in the US are a large number of Native American languages that have survived despite the efforts of the US government (through the Bureau of Indian Affairs) to exterminate these languages. But currently, in many of these communities, younger people are growing up without a full command of the languages and efforts are being made to revitalize these languages so that they are used on a daily basis.

Most European countries also have populations who speak something other than the national language, despite efforts of the national government to push for a national language. In France for example, many of the former Gaelic communities, like the Breton, are attempting to restore their heritage language, in much the same way as Native Americans are doing in the US. In Switzerland, one finds three different languages, French, German and Italian, coexisting as official languages and without much fuss. Canada and Cameroon have two official languages and of course a whole lot more. In Cameroon there are at least seventy other African languages spoken, some with as few as 20,000 speakers. It is not too unusual to find some areas, where each town boasts its own language. Such situations too call for lingua francas.

The domains of a language are often associated with a social institution, be it political (the city, the state), a social (an ethnic group, social class, gender) or economic (trade). Because institutions often overlap and interconnected, we also expect to find languages overlapping as well. This is also why the complexity of multilingual situations is very difficult to portray on a two dimensional map.

The language, known as Krio, is spoken in Freetown and adjacent areas on the Sierra Leone peninsula by people who are descendants of Jamaicans who, during the infamous period of slavery, rebelled against their captors and were able to return to Africa. Although they or their fore bearers had been kidnapped from Africa, they did not return to their homeland, which could have been anywhere on the western side of the African continent. The Krio community was also joined by people known as recaptives, those who were rescued from slave ships on their way to the new world.

Many of the early Krio began trading manufactured good for agricultural goods in the rest of the Sierra Leone Protectorate, as it was then called. This introduced Krio as a lingua franca⁹ to the area. A lingua franca is defined as a language used for communication among speakers of diverse linguistic backgrounds. And while Krio may be spoken with anyone else who speaks it, because it is associated with the trade of manufactured goods, it is most commonly spoken in the market places of urban communities.

Mende (south) and Temne (north), in addition to being vernacular (house hold) languages, are also lingua francas associated with the marketing of agricultural produce. As this is usually the responsibility of women, more women than men use these two languages as lingua francas. In addition, because of the importance of Mende, and the intermarriage of Mende and Vai people, we find that Mende is spreading to the point that some Vai communities have lost the use of the Vai language as a vernacular.

The English language is closely associated with the institutions of government, formal education and finance being conducted in this lingua franca. Of course the choice of language is one that speakers have to negotiate, given of course, that a choice is available to the conversants, but it would be common to find in southern Sierra Leone someone speaking to a kinsman in the vernacular, purchasing a manufactured good in Krio, obtaining food for dinner in Mende, and banking in English. Thus, it is quite common to find the average Sierra Leonean speaking three to four languages. And while English and Krio may be relatively recent additions to the Sierra Leonean’s repertoire, this cosmopolitan situation has been going on for centuries.

2.2 Multilingualism.

As noted above, languages tend to be associated with institutions, such that the domain of the institution (geographic, social, economic) will correspond to the distribution of the language. Thus, it is possible for some languages to have few speakers (Loko has xxx) and others to be massive. The religious institution of Islam has spread the Arabic language to Northern Africa, the Middle East and to parts of southern Asia. The political institution of the French, German, British, Spanish and Portuguese empires were responsible for the spread of their national languages into African and the New World. The institution of capitalism is responsible for the dominance of English as a world language.

We recognize multilingualism as the overlapping of different languages in the same community. This usually means that each language is associated with specific institutions, as in the Sierra Leone case. If the institutions are not exclusive (castes, racial apartheid, and the like), members of the community will be multilingual. This situation is far more common than most westerners are aware, and increasingly so as the world becomes increasingly intertwined.

3. Lingua Francas.

Religion: Arabic; Sanskrit; Latin; Nations: Russian; Hausa, Fulfulde, Bambara; Mandarin Empires: Greek (Koiné); Latin; English; French; Spanish; Commerce: Swahili; English

With increasing contact, many languages become, as noted above, lingua francas. These are languages that are used by non-native speakers as a means of communication. Lingua francas may have, but do not have to have, first language speakers. Lingua francas vary in size. Mende is the lingua franca of southern Sierra Leone; English is a global lingua franca.

Any language can function as a lingua franca. Some of the more widely spoken lingua francas are natural languages are given in the adjacent sidebar. In addition, Esperanto and Interlingua are artificial languages constructed for the purpose of serving as lingua franca. Esperanto drew most of its vocabulary from European languages, while Interlingua was more global in its sources. But despite tremendous efforts by its supporters, neither Esperanto nor Interlingua has caught on in the way its developers had hoped. This no doubt has to do with the fact that these artificial languages are not associated with a specific institution. Pidgin is a third type of lingua franca, which arises in language contact situations, deserves a good deal more attention.

Like the distinction between language and dialect, popular usage of the terms pidgin and creole does not fit the formal definition offered by creolists.¹⁰ For example, Cameroon Pidgin English is, historically at least, a creole. For this reason, I like to refer to the group of languages that includes both pidgins and creoles as pidgin/creole languages. Simply put, a creole language is a pidgin language that has stabilized and acquired native speakers. This definition makes it clear that in order to understand fully what a creole is; it is necessary to understand pidgins.

Pidgin languages evolve in multilingual situations where there is a need for people of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate, and where usually there is no convenient existing lingua franca available. In such a situation, one solution is to invent a language, based on available resources. Such languages are termed pidgins and because they are invented, they have no native speakers. As soon as a pidgin acquires native speakers, it is termed a creole. A pidgin language is often seen by a speaker as the other speaker’s language, and not one’s own. This may explain why the names given to these languages often carry a negative sense, e.g., Bamboo English (developed by Korean citizens and American soldiers during the Korean War, Broken English (used to refer to a variety of Pidgin Englishes).

Typical spawning grounds for pidgins are wars, trade and migration.¹¹ As mentioned above, Korean Pidgin English arose during a wartime situation. Trade, as we shall see, played an important role in the developing of the development of Sabir, Pidgin/Creole English, French and Portuguese. Migrations such as the flow of Italian workers into Argentina led to the development of Cocoliche in the 1920s, which was used for communication between these immigrant workers and the Spanish-speaking Argentine employers. Generally, such invented languages will disappear, as did Korean Pidgin English, when the need for communication ends. Only rarely does a pidgin survive. In the case of Cocoliche, the pidgin was fueled by a continuing influx of new Italian immigrants to Argentina. In the case of the pidgin/creole English, French and Portuguese, the continuation of the pidgin was due in part to the persistence of the slave trade. Pidgins can either remain as pidgins as was the case for Cocoliche or evolve into creoles. Communicatively pidgins tend to focus on the needs of institutions in which they developed (e.g., trade, domestic service) such that the languages are less effective in other areas of discourse.

Structural properties of pidgins. Because pidgins are so unstable and fluid, meaning that their grammars vary considerably among their non-native speakers, it is difficult to make generalizations about the grammar of a pidgin. This task is further complicated by the fact that scholars have little evidence of the manner of speech of pidgin languages. Consequently, much of what we say about pidgins is based on what we can learn from them after they evolve into creoles.

English: I have some book -s. WAPE: A get book dem. English: He walk-ed to the store. WAPE: I bin waka f sit. (dem = ‘plural’; bin = ‘past’

Typically, a pidgin will have a clearly identifiable lexical (vocabulary) base and a syntax that is not as clearly identifiable. Thus, when we talk about Pidgin English, we are speaking of a language with a vocabulary derived from English. One of the first things that happens to a vocabulary is the elimination of affixes and their replacement, if necessary by separate words.¹² For example, in Cameroon Pidgin English, plurals and past tenses (both suffixes in English) are marked by separate words. This process eliminates any irregularity, making the language easier to learn.

English WAPE glosses cow kaw ‘cow, bovine’ bull mankaw man- ‘male, man’ calf kawpikin ‘child’ heifer woman-kaw-pikin female, woman

Another common process is to decompose words semantically (e.g., a rooster is an adult, male foul) and then reconstruct the meaning with words that already exist in the vocabulary. This too facilitates the learning process meaning that it is far easier to acquire a basic skill using a pidgin language than a natural language. These processes can also be found in lingua francas. There is clear evidence that Mende (see above), which did serve as a lingua franca during the Mane invasions, has undergone the same sort of processes described for pidgins, but of course not to the same extent. The same can be said for English and French.

The question of where the syntax comes from has been answered in a variety of ways by different writers. The first explanation was that the grammar of pidgins, at least those that differed from the language of the lexical base came from African languages. This argument, also called the substratum theory stated that since The problem with this explanation is that the grammar of African languages varies so much that if you looked hard enough you could find something in some African language that would resemble the grammatical feature in the pidgin. Others looked for the same sort of things in non-literary dialects of the language of the lexical base. Another explanation offered by Derek Bickerton called attention to the faculty of language and universal grammar. He argued that much of the unity of the various pidgins/creoles around was due to the imposition of universals on PC, once they had become creolized.

Creoles are pidgins that have acquired native speakers. This means that the language must function for all communicative needs and not just those conditions of contact in which it was developed. The process of creolization, as it is sometimes termed, involves an explanation of the lexicon and a stabilization of the syntax.

The process of lexical expansion includes both the enlargement of the size of the vocabulary, but the process known as grammaticalization (Heine and xx), in which functions which were formerly syntactic, such as the plural and past tense markers for CP described above, are made into affixes.¹³ Grammaticalization is a very natural process in all languages and if it continues long enough it is possible to disguise the pidgin past of a creole .

4.3 Post Creoles.

Many pidgin-creoles are spoken in communities where the dominant language (sometimes called the acrolect) is that of the creole’s lexical base (sometimes called the basolect). In these communities, a sharp boundary between these two varieties is not always maintained and one finds as DeCamp (19xx) did in Jamaica, a continuum. This was of course facilitated by the similarity of the two lexicons. In such situation, speakers would often have one style of speech that was closer to the acrolect for formal occasions and one closer to the basolect for more ordinary conversation. Kripper (1971) shows a similar situation for Ghana.

In contrast to the continuum reported by Kripper and DeCamp, several authors have reported a situation known as diglossia (Ferguson 1959) found in Haiti, for example, in which the acrolect, Prestige French and the basolect, Haitian Creole are maintained as distinct varieties without an intervening continuum. Diglossia is not restricted to creole situations, but is found between different varieties of the same language such as between Classical Arabic and the colloquial varieties found Arabic-speaking countries. In diglossic situations, there appears to be a social reason for the two varieties remaining separate, such as a caste-like separation between the elite and peasants in Haiti, and the high prestige accorded Classical Arabic.

Several creolists (John Dillard 1972 and John Stewart 19xx) have opined that this kind of situation existed in the southeastern part of the US before the civil war with the acrolect resembling the speech of the southern whites and the basolect resembling that of the plantation slaves. Stewart further contends that over time and with the breaking down of the barriers of slavery and segregation that the range in the continuum is narrowing with the effect that the creole basolect has all but disappeared with the exception of a few isolated areas (Sea Islands Creole) and that the acrolect has acquired components of the basolect. (Words like OK, tote, .... are attributed to this process.

4.4. The distribution of pidgin-creole languages.

Many of the world’s pidgins have lived and died with virtually no notice, but even so, a large number of these languages exist and have been documented. Introduce Robert Hall’s Pidgin Book Here and list a few.

• 
  Portuguese Black Atlantic, (spoken in the Cape Verde Islands and the islands of Principe and Saõ Tomé, all of the western coast of Africa;
  
• 
  French Black Atlantic, spoken in the Caribbean on the islands of Barbados, x and z, and in the Indian Ocean on the islands of Mauritius and Réunion;¹⁴
  
• 
  English Black Atlantic, spoken in
  
• 
  West Africa: The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon.
  
• 
  The Caribbean: Surinam (3 varieties), Jamaica, Belieze, St. Kits, ....
  
• 
  North America: North Carolina (thought to be more widespread before 1850.
  
• 
  (In addition, there are English-based PCs spoken in Northern Australia, New Guinea, China and Hawaii)
  

One of my favorite memories was on the porch of the house I had rented some of us playing draughts¹⁵, others talking about the events of the day, and I, when not playing, asking about the meaning of CPE words and proverbs.

I was surprised to learn that people in neighboring Nigeria also spoke this language as a lingua franca, though with a number of regional differences. But it was not until I went to Sierra Leone a number of years later that these similarities really struck me, because I could speak and understand a language called Krio. How is it, I asked myself that these two varieties exist more than two thousand miles apart? To this, we could add to this question, the similarity to Sea Islands Creole, Jamaican English, and Sranan Tongo spoken in Surinam.