Languages in Contact: The Partial Restructuring of Vernaculars

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Languages in Contact The Partial Restructuring of Vernaculars

There is widespread agreement that certain non-creole vernaculars are structurally quite different from the languages out of which they grew: African American English, Afrikaans, Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese, Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish, and the Vernacular Lects of Réunion French. Until now, however, these languages have proved remarkably resistant to the attempts of linguists to provide a plausible theory to account for either their genesis or their synchronic structure. Informed by the first systematic comparison of the social and linguistic facts in the development of these languages, this book argues that the transmission of their source languages from native to non-native speakers led to partial restructuring, resulting in the retention of a substantial amount of the source languages’ morphosyntax, but also the introduction of a significant number of substrate and interlanguage features. This study concludes with the proposal of a formal theoretical model identifying the linguistic processes that lead to partial restructuring, throwing into focus a key span on the continuum of contact-induced language change which has not been coherently analyzed up to now. It demonstrates how the insights gained from the comparative study of such vernaculars cast much-needed light on the relationship between the diachronic development and synchronic structure of this important group of languages, with some 200 million speakers. John Holm is Chair, English Linguistics and Director, Graduate Program in Descriptive Linguistics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He has written widely on the issues surrounding contact languages, and his previous publications include Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Pidgins and Creoles (Cambridge University Press, Volume 1, 1988; Volume 2, 1989).

Languages in Contact The Partial Restructuring of Vernaculars John Holm

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom Published in the United States by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521430517 © John Holm 2004 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2003 ISBN-13 978-0-511-06755-6 eBook (EBL) ISBN-10 0-511-06755-0 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-521-43051-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-43051-8 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Mary, with love

Contents

List of maps List of tables Preface Acknowledgments List of abbreviations 1. The study of partially restructured vernaculars 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7

Introduction Partial restructuring versus decreolization The study of African American English (AAE) The study of Afrikaans The study of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (BVP) The study of Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish (NSCS) The study of Vernacular Lects of Réunionnais French (VLRF) The comparison of partially restructured vernaculars

2. Social factors in partial restructuring 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Introduction AAE: the sociolinguistic setting of its development Afrikaans: the sociolinguistic setting of its development BVP: the sociolinguistic setting of its development NSCS: the sociolinguistic setting of its development VLRF: the sociolinguistic setting of its development Common sociolinguistic factors

3. The verb phrase 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

Introduction The AAE verb phrase The Afrikaans verb phrase The BVP verb phrase The NSCS verb phrase The VLRF verb phrase A comparison of the verb phrase

page ix x xi xvii xix 1 1 4 10 13 15 17 19 21

24 24 29 41 47 60 65 70

72 72 73 77 80 83 85 90

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Languages in Contact

4. The noun phrase 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

Introduction The AAE noun phrase The Afrikaans noun phrase The BVP noun phrase The NSCS noun phrase The VLRF noun phrase A comparison of the noun phrase

5. The structure of clauses 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

Introduction The structure of AAE clauses The structure of Afrikaans clauses The structure of BVP clauses The structure of NSCS clauses The structure of VLRF clauses A comparison of clause structure

6. Conclusions 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Introduction Social factors in partial restructuring Linguistic factors in partial restructuring Linguistic processes in partial restructuring Comparative studies in restructuring

References Index

92 92 93 96 101 105 108 112

116 116 116 120 123 127 129 133

135 135 135 137 142 144

147 166

Maps

1 United States: ‘Coloured Population, 1900.’ Originally published in Darby and Fuller (1978), The New Cambridge Modern History Atlas (Cambridge University Press). page 31 2 Southern Africa. Originally published in Holm (1989), Pidgins and Creoles Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press). 43 3 ‘South America, 1830–1956.’ Originally published in Darby and Fuller (1978), The New Cambridge Modern History Atlas (Cambridge University Press). 49 4 ‘Localizacion ´ aproximada de a´ reas afro-hispanas en América.’ Originally published in Perl and Schwegler (eds.) (1998), América Negra: panorámica actual de los estudios lingü´ısticos sobre variedades hispanas, portuguesas y criollas (Iberoamericana). Reproduced by kind permission of Iberoamericana. 61 5 (a) ‘Carte de l’ˆıle de la Réunion.’ Réunion Ethnic groups. Originally appeared in the Chaudenson (1998), Créolisation du fran¸cais et francisation du créole: Le cas de Saint-Barthélemy et de la Réunion (previously unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages, University of Regensburg, June 24–27, 1998). Reproduced by kind permission of Robert Chaudenson. (b) ‘Réseau ALRé.’ Réunion Lects. Originally appeared in the Chaudenson (1998), Créolisation du fran¸cais et francisation du créole: Le cas de Saint-Barthélemy et de la Réunion (previously unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages, University of Regensburg, June 24–27, 1998). Reproduced by kind permission of Robert Chaudenson. 66

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Tables

1 Degree of restructuring and social factors 2 Estimated population of (East) Virginia, 1685–1790 3 Estimated proportion of blacks in American colonies in 1750 4 Estimated population of South Carolina, 1685–1775 5 Estimated population of the Cape Colony, 1658–1798 6 Estimated population of Brazil, 1538–1890 7 Estimated proportion of whites in the Greater Antilles in the late eighteenth century 8 Estimated proportion of whites in various societies in the late eighteenth century 9 Key morphosyntactic features in partial restructuring

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page 26 32 33 35 45 50 64 71 138

Preface

The naming of books is a tricky business, and it has consequences. In the case of this book – a comparison of five languages with a surprising commonality in structure and social history, and an account of the linguistic processes that formed them – the first thing that may strike anyone who knows my work is not so much the title, as what the title is not. Since the late 1980s, I have used the term “semi-creolization” for the process I discuss here. This book, however, is not called “semicreolization”. The change is in part strategic: I wish to make an argument which is, I think, original about the nature of these language varieties, which all raise current and important issues of politics and culture. I am not interested in exercising an imperial right to label, especially if it obscures discussion about the issues raised by this book. Creole language studies was one of the first post-colonial disciplines: Reinecke was surely far ahead of his times in seeing creoles from the perspective of their speakers rather than those who sought to be their speakers’ imperial masters. I am very aware that the social sciences’ long demand to label at will is always problematical. I also know that the use of a new or unfamiliar term in an established field is an irritant to others who, perhaps, have a word they like better or even a certain resistance to thinking again about issues of taxonomy. “Semi-creolization” has been the traditional term for what I am about to discuss since Reinecke first referred to Afrikaans as “semi-creolized” (1937:559). As used among linguists, this term has the advantage of a certain transparency: its first morpheme clearly means “half ” or “partly” in reference to the process of creolization. The problems that have emerged in connection with this term have entirely to do with the second morpheme. Creole linguistics is part of sociolinguistics, which is the most politically charged area of language study. At the very least, creoles involve the contact of different cultures and thus cultural frontiers and cultural politics. Usually the social setting of creolization has been that of enslavement, xi

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with all the racism and brute violation of human dignity on which slavery depended. Nobody who studies creole languages can be indifferent to all the resonances of their work, particularly among the people who speak the languages we study. Mufwene (2000c:67) has written that linguists’ self-licence to go around the world baptizing some vernaculars “creoles”, when in some cases their speakers do not even know the word creole, let alone how it is used in linguistics, is . . . the disenfranchising act by which some vernaculars are marginalized . . .

The problem with this honorable concern is that all social scientists, to some degree, work by setting the reality of other people’s lives within a framework and a vocabulary that is particular to a discipline; it is inevitably a question of power, but it is also how analysis becomes possible. To refuse that task is to refuse the science. Not every Englishman is glad to know he speaks a “Germanic” language; but the classification has its uses, even if it reflects the German origins of historical philology. Not everyone knows what a “clitic” and a “copula” are, but these are terms of art which linguists need to analyze language. And the disenfranchising of a language, and of its speakers, may have more to do with economic and political issues than the choices of labels made by social scientists far away. Still, Kautsch and Schneider are certainly correct in their assertion that “Terms such as ‘semi-creoles’ . . . suggest certain undesired associations and are found inappropriate by many” (2000:247). Linguists do indeed have a duty to be sensitive to such questions. But these questions may be exceedingly complex, and relative. Many creole-speaking areas are now independent countries where creole-speakers themselves control the media, and to that extent the local use of words; most of them seem to find the term creole to have positive connotations. Some do not, particularly in some areas where partially restructured languages are spoken. Few words are truly neutral. The term Geechee (sometimes used in reference to Gullah) can have undesirable connotations in African American English, i.e. “a Gullah or any Black person whose speech is peculiar or unintelligible to the hearer” (Folb 1980); “She was a big, burly-looking, dark type sort of girl, a real geechy-looking girl” (quoted by Labov 1972a:390). In fact, the American Dialect Dictionary defines Geechee as “a negro from the islands, as from the Bahamas” (Wentworth 1944), while for Bahamians, “A Geechee is what you could call a Merican who’s work field” (Holm with Shilling 1982). And therein lies the analogy: a descriptive word will carry the burden of attitudes to those it describes, and come in time to be identified with those attitudes. Whatever terms linguists may

Preface

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use, many African Americans and Brazilians find semi-creole or semi-crioulo unacceptable in reference to their own speech – while many Réunionnais find semi-créole unacceptable because it is not creole enough. For all these reasons, I have decided to refer to semi-creoles as “partially restructured languages,” although I will continue to refer to creoles as such, rather than as “fully restructured languages.” My logic is that linguists still need to distinguish creoles from other fully restructured languages, such as those that are intertwined (partially intertwined languages having never, to my knowledge, been reported). There may be some loss of precision here, since I am not convinced that the processes which produced the languages discussed in this volume are in all points the same as those which produced partially restructured language varieties such as Irish English (Hickey forthcoming, pace Winford 2000:216). It is also true that the languages examined here share at least part of their substrate with the Atlantic creoles, which means that they also share to varying degrees a broader cultural heritage. The more neutral term does not convey this cultural difference. But it may be that this cultural and historical difference is why some find the term semi-creole unacceptable. I believe that my choice of terms is not euphemistic; that is, it is not an attempt to deny historical realities, like the social position of slaves, in order to make the world seem more tasteful or untroubling than it actually is. Thus I will continue to use one term with which linguists have developed the most surprising problems: the world “creole” itself. “Creole” is a term of art for linguists, as is “creolization”; we try to give it a precise meaning in order to analyze and understand a particular kind of language contact and change. It must clearly be something beyond the obviously circular definition: “the process which produces a creole language.” We think we mean something like McWhorter’s pithy definition: “radical reduction by non-natives followed by reconstitution into a natural language” (2000:115), but the problems begin as soon as we try to explain how and why this happens. It does sometimes seem that we are more interested in debating the general processes even before we have provided a proper account of the specifics involved, but this failing may be understandable if not forgivable: there are so many creole languages and they appear to have been produced by such a wide range of social and linguistic circumstances that it often seems unclear precisely what a creole language is, much less what the processes are that produce such a language. This has led to a singularly unhelpful confusion. Parkvall (2002:362) has written that “for most creolists, there is nothing at all that sets creoles apart from non-creoles.” If this is so, it has to do with the belief that

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the typological similarity that creole languages may or may not bear to one another is analogous to the typological similarity of languages whose structural affinities can be attributed to a family resemblance – that is, the similarities found between genetically related families of languages such as the Germanic or the Bantu languages. The confusion undermines the fundamental and useful meaning historical linguists give to the genetic relationship between languages when it comes to discussion of the relationship of creoles to their superstrates. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) maintain that because creoles (and the pidgins from which they developed) were not passed from one generation of speakers to the next by normal language transmission, they are not genetically related to the languages spoken by their creators – in the technical sense used in historical linguistics, which requires systematic correspondences between languages not only in lexicon but also in structure. This position has been attacked by Mufwene (2000a:9–11) as “disenfranchising” the creoles, and by DeGraff (2001) for implying that creoles are “abnormal.” Thomason (2002) responds that it would nonetheless be unwise to abandon the traditional definition of genetic relatedness: it is the central concept of the comparative method, which has, for well over a century, enabled historical linguistics to accumulate a vast and reliable body of knowledge about language change. Perhaps, before attempting to dismantle a science, we should have reasons more substantial than the possibility that others will misconstrue its technical terms. In any case, the category to which creole languages belong is sociolinguistic rather than typological in the genetic sense. To indulge again in the tautology, creoles are creoles because they have undergone a sociolinguistic process called creolization, not because they “attest the features that define creoles as creoles” (Markey 1982:170). Because the study of Atlantic creoles has dominated the field, and because these varieties happen to share genetically related Indo-European superstrate and Niger-Congo substrate languages as a historical result of the Atlantic slave trade, it has perhaps come to seem that certain syntactic features found in most of the basilectal Atlantic creoles are “creole features” in a sense compatible with Markey’s. But this is not the case. Creolization is a sociolinguistic process: there is widespread consensus that its defining characteristics must include social as well as linguistic phenomena (Holm 2000a:68–71). Because it is a sociolinguistic process, like language attrition or code switching, there is no logical reason to expect that languages which have undergone creolization necessarily bear any more typological similarity to one another than languages that have not. The nub of the problem seems to be confusion over what “typology”

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means in linguistics. Genetically dissimilar languages can, by coincidence, be typologically similar (i.e. isolating, synthetic, etc.). In respect to its paucity of inflectional endings, English is typologically closer to Chinese than it is to Latin (Crystal 1986:319) despite the fact that genetically it is closer to Latin. On the other hand, certain linguistic processes can also result in closer typological similarity: two genetically unrelated languages undergoing drift can eventually emerge with a similar degree of loss of inflectional morphology. There is, indeed, abundant evidence that genetically unrelated languages that are creolized undergo an extensive if not complete loss of inflectional morphology. Building on Chaudenson’s (1992) view of creoles as simply varieties of their superstrate languages – approximations of approximations of the earlier regional dialects spoken by European colonists – Mufwene (1994, 1996, 1997) concluded that creole is not a valid term for classifying languages, and therefore one language cannot be said to be more or less “creole” than another. McWhorter (1998) countered that creoles are indeed synchronically distinguishable from non-creole languages in that they combine all three of the following traits: they have little or no inflectional affixation; they make little or no use of tone lexically to contrast monosyllables or encode syntax; and they have semantically regular derivational affixation. This creole prototype, graded like most phenomena, is “the direct result of severely interrupted transmission of a lexifier, at too recent a date for the traits to have been undone by diachronic change” (1998:812). Later, McWhorter (2000) specified that the gradience in the proximity of creoles to the synchronic prototype that he had proposed could be accounted for by sociohistorical factors such as the continuing presence of the lexifier language. This reaffirmation of the validity of the concept of “creole” has nonetheless been challenged by the claim that the differences between creoles and other languages, such as their lexifiers, are in fact the result of differences in parameter settings, which determine various interrelated morphosyntactic configurations in current generative theory. For example, historical syntacticians such as Roberts (1999) have argued that in languages with highly inflected verbs, the verb tends to move to I, the locus of tense and agreement, whereas in languages with verbs having few or no inflections (such as creoles) verbs tend to remain in place (but note the strict verb-second rule of Afrikaans, a language with scarcely any verbal inflections, section 3.2.1). McWhorter (2002) further argues for the validity of creoles as a delineable syntactic class with evidence that “the syntax-internal model . . . is, by itself, inadequate to explain creole genesis” (2002:31). Distinguishing between features that are universal to all languages for cognitive reasons

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(e.g. definite/indefinite opposition) and those which are “ornamental” (e.g. grammatical gender), he points out a number of differences between creoles and their source languages that cannot be explained by the syntaxinternal hypothesis. This is “because much of what distinguishes creoles from older grammars is that, as recent descendants of pidgins, their grammars are less accreted with such ‘grammaticalizational overkill’ ” of highly particular, non-universal features (2002:9). Whether or not McWhorter’s characterization of creoles as a delineable synchronic class of languages is supported by future research, I must point out here it will still be the case that creoles differ from languages that did not result from contact: creoles develop much more rapidly. One of the earliest creolists, Van Name, recognized this: The changes which [creoles] have passed through are not essentially different in kind, and hardly greater in extent than those, for instance, which separate the French from the Latin, but from the greater violence of the forces at work they have been far more rapid . . . here two or three generations have sufficed for a complete transformation. (Van Name 1869–70:123)

For example, there could have been no Caribbean Creole French before the French brought their first slaves to St. Kitts in 1626 and then captured Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635. Yet we find the existence of the language documented by a text dated 1671 containing linguistic features unequivocally identifying it with the modern creole of the latter islands (Carden et al. 1991). The structural gap between French and Creole French is at least as great as that between French and its source language, vulgar Latin: it is the difference in the speed of formation – a lifetime instead of a millennium – that is justification enough for distinguishing creoles from languages whose genesis was not induced by contact. All this confirms a simple point which has direct relevance here: the concept of a “creole” remains an essential point of reference in our understanding of language contact and its relation to language change. Without it, we have a less accurate, less truthful, view of language.

Acknowledgments

My greatest debt is to my former doctoral students at the City University of New York (CUNY) for the insights on language restructuring that I gained from their research. A number of talented young linguists participated in the seminars I organized at CUNY on partially restructured languages, some of whom were native speakers of the varieties they described or the source languages involved. These seminars were extraordinarily productive, leading to publications on American Indian English (Craig 1991), Dominican Spanish (Lorenzino 1993, 1998), Surinamese Dutch (Healy 1993), and Afrikaans (Slomanson 1993; de Kleine 1997). Others wrote relevant dissertations on Nagamese (Bhattacharjya 2000), Dominican Spanish (Green 1997), Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (Mello 1997), and the Vernacular Lects of Réunion French (Chapuis forthcoming). I am happy to have this opportunity to acknowledge my gratitude to them. I would also like to thank the following linguists for help and advice while I was working on this volume: Alan Baxter, Jeanette Béraha, Hans den Besten, Ernesto d’Andrade, Raymond Hickey, Liliana Inverno, Alexander Kautzsch, Alain Kihm, Ernst Kotzé, Dante Lucchesi, John McWhorter, John Rickford, Paul Roberge, Edgar Schneider, Armin Schwegler, Dominika Swolkien, Sarah Grey Thomason, Jean-Philippe Watbled, and Walt Wolfram. I am also grateful to my editors at Cambridge University Press, particularly Andrew Winnard and Helen Barton, for their excellent support. Of course the present volume builds on my earlier work, and I would like to thank once again those who helped me with that. I am particularly grateful to Michael Pye for unearthing the quilombo song (section 2.3.2), possibly one of the earliest examples of restructured Brazilian Portuguese. However, responsibility for the errors, omissions, and other shortcomings in this book is mine alone. Finally, it is a pleasure to thank the following institutions for travel grants that allowed me not only to exchange ideas at international meetings, but also to do fieldwork and library research relating to language re´ structuring: from the Comité International des Etudes Créoles to present xvii

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a paper at a conference on Réunion (2002); from the University of Puerto Rico to give a mini-course in San Juan on restructuring (2001); from the Linguistic Society of Southern Africa to present a paper at a conference at the University of Cape Town (2000); from the University of Coimbra to present a paper at a round table discussion of the sociohistorical origins of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese in Recife (2000); from the Associa¸ca˜ o Brasileira de Lingu´ ¨ ıstica to teach a course on language restructuring at their XIV Instituto Lingu´ ¨ ıstico at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianopolis ´ (1999); from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to present a paper at the International Symposium on Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages at the University of Regensburg (1998); from the Colombian government to present a paper at a colloquium in Cartagena (1996); and from Hunter College of the City University of New York to present a paper with Gerardo Lorenzino at a conference at the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba (1992).

Abbreviations

A, AFK AAE AAVE ANT ART ASM AUX BVP CD CE CF CLP CP CS CV CVC D DARE DEM DET DO E EP F HP IO INFL LPV KA NEG

(standard) Afrikaans African American English African American Vernacular English (term used in some quotations) anterior tense article agentive subject marker auxiliary Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese Creole Dutch Creole English Creole French copula-like particle Creole Portuguese Creole Spanish consonant-vowel consonant-vowel-consonant (standard) Dutch Dictionary of American Regional English (see Cassidy and Hall, [eds.]) demonstrative determiner direct object (standard) English European Portuguese (standard) French Helvécia Portuguese indirect object inflection L´ıngua dos Pretos Velhos (see section 1.4) Kaaps Afrikaans negator xix

xx

NP NSCS OBJ ORA P PAST PERF POSS PRES PS QW REL S SB SBP SOV SVO SWVE V VLRF VOS VP 1s 3p {}


noun phrase Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish object (marker) Orange River Afrikaans (standard) Portuguese past tense perfective aspect possessive present tense Palenquero Spanish (section 1.5) question word relativizer (standard) Spanish; subject Substrate Standard Brazilian Portuguese subject-object-verb word order subject-verb-object word order Southern White Vernacular English verb vernacular lects of Réunion French verb-object-subject word order verb phrase first person singular, etc. third person plural, etc. boundaries of an embedded clause

Note: the varying orthography used in this volume for VLRF and some other language varieties is in each case that of the author cited.

1

The study of partially restructured vernaculars

Introduction Language is a kind of social behavior, one of the many ways in which individuals interact with those around them. Thus linguistics is a social science, and linguists take pride in thinking of themselves as scientists, with all the objectivity that word denotes. Unfortunately, objectivity is very hard to achieve, especially in the social sciences, and linguistics is no exception. It is hard to imagine any study of language which manages to put away all ideology, but in the case of the languages discussed in this book, the task is unimaginable. African American English – also called AAE, Ebonics, or just Black English – is a good case in point. Until at least the middle of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of white Americans saw their country and its culture as the product of their European roots flourishing in a new land. This ideology allowed very little room for the contribution of other cultures, so that even the distinctiveness of the folk ways and speech of African Americans was attributed to their frequent lack of access to education and general ignorance – if not to their very intelligence. Thus well into the 1950s Negro Nonstandard English (as AAE was then called) was usually considered bad English in need of eradication rather than study. In so far as its origins were considered at all, it was assumed to have descended solely from British dialects that had been left untended in America. In the 1960s the civil rights movement sharply changed this ideology: equal citizens could not logically be unequal human beings, and there was a new willingness to reconsider African Americans, as well as the development of their language and culture in the United States. By the 1970s there was widespread agreement – at least among linguists – that the distinctive features of AAE identified it as a post-creole: the descendant of a variety of English that had first been creolized or restructured when it was learned by adult African slaves on plantations (as English had been creolized in Jamaica, for example). Subsequently this speech 1

2


underwent decreolization, or the loss of many of its distinctive creole features through contact with standard English. Dillard’s influential book, Black English (1972) popularized this view, convincing many that AAE, like its speakers, was much more African than anyone had realized. This was part of another growing ideology, supported by many blacks, that affirmed a very separate cultural identity for African Americans. But there were problems in explaining AAE as a post-creole. Most importantly, no one could find reliable historical evidence of the widespread, stable creole from which AAE had supposedly decreolized. The known passages purporting to represent the speech of blacks in North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remain ambiguous. Quite aside from the inherent problem of the authenticity of such fragments, almost all of which were actually written by speakers of standard English, there is an even greater problem in accurately identifying the kind of speech represented. Unless the purported speaker’s background is documented, it is impossible to determine whether it represents the foreigner’s English of Africans, the Caribbean Creole English of slaves imported from the West Indies, a pidginized variety of English from West Africa, or an indigenous creole such as Gullah, the fully restructured variety spoken along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Up to this point linguists had generally assumed that decreolization could account for the varying distance between the grammatical structure of different creoles and that of the European language they were based on: AAE and Caribbean creoles based on English were viewed as postcreoles at different stages of decreolization away from some very early fully creolized variety. By the mid-1980s there were growing objections to this all-or-nothing model of creolization and skepticism that it could account for what was becoming known about the earlier structure of AAE (Hancock 1987:264–265; Schneider 1989; Holm 1991:247). Much of the most recent debate focuses on the nature the language of blacks born in North America (outside of the creole-speaking Gullah area): whether it was from its very beginning a fully restructured creole or rather a compromise between the pidgin or creole brought in by slaves from the West Indies and Africa and the regional speech of British settlers (Winford 1997; Rickford 1997, 1999), and whether partial restructuring can account for the known sociohistorical and linguistic facts concerning AAE and some other languages that apparently had a similar genesis, such as nonstandard Brazilian Portuguese and Caribbean Spanish, Afrikaans (the South African language descended from Dutch), and the vernacular French spoken on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean (Holm 1992, 2000). These language varieties, which appear to have grown out of the partial restructuring of older varieties spoken in Europe that came into contact


3

with non-European languages, today have some 200 million speakers, placing them among the major languages of the world. They present formidable challenges not only to linguistic theory but also in practical matters like the language-related problems encountered in education by speakers of nonstandardized varieties, which include all of the language varieties discussed here, except for standard Afrikaans. These problems have shown no signs of going away. And each of these languages has been studied through the prism of particular, often local, ideologies, as Heliana Mello has shown for her own language, Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (Mello 2001). Of course the concept of a partially restructured language as opposed to a post-creole (which was fully restructured but then decreolized through contact with its lexical source language) has its own ideological implications. If the restructuring of the English spoken by blacks in most of North America was only partial, this implies that the transmission of the English language (and, indeed, other aspects of English culture) to African Americans was much more complete than it has been fashionable to assume. The cultural separatism of the 1960s and 1970s may have distorted the issue by insisting on the Africanness of African Americans to the virtual exclusion of their Europeanness. These languages, then, would require new study if only because our sense of identity and ideology shift with time. But there is a more pressing scientific reason for reassessing them. The genesis and development of such partially restructured languages have become one of the most important leading edges of contact linguistics as a whole. The languages discussed here have a number of the structural features of creoles but appear, nonetheless, never to have undergone full creolization. Their reduced inflectional morphology – particularly in the verb phrase and noun phrase – seems to have been transmitted from one generation to another largely like that of unrestructured overseas varieties, rather than having been reacquired by more basilectal varieties during decreolization, which distinguishes them from post-creoles. Some of the most interesting research in this area has been the effort to correlate the synchronic structure of these languages to the sociolinguistic history of their speakers: the demographic balance of native versus non-native speakers of the target language at the beginning of the speech community’s settlement, their relative power, their migrations, and the nature of their contact. There has also been a shift in theoretical perspective that is facilitating progress in this area of inquiry. More of us working in pidgin and creole linguistics are coming to see our field as only one part of a broader area of research: contact linguistics, as defined by Thomason (1997). The scope of this wider field includes language varieties that have resulted not only from pidginization and creolization (to whatever degree) but also from

4


such processes as intertwining (Bakker and Muysken 1994), koineization, or indigenization (Siegel 1997). Such studies promise to increase our understanding of the range of possible outcomes of language contact by encompassing varieties that fail to fit neatly into the definitional boxes in which we have often tried to restrict pidgin and creole linguistics. In addition to the five partially restructured varieties mentioned above, which have received considerable scholarly attention, there are a number of less well-studied varieties that seem likely to have undergone a similar process, such as the nonstandard English of American Indians, Australian Aborigines, and others. There are also partially restructured varieties which appear to have evolved solely through community-wide language shift, such as Irish English. Whether these are indeed the same kind of language, which is the position of Winford (2000:216), has yet to be demonstrated. Specialists in Irish English such as Hickey (forthcoming) are not convinced (see section 2.1.1). This chapter examines how scholarship on each of these five varieties – based on five different European languages – has taken its own course, the literature on each being largely in the corresponding standard language. Although language barriers are still surprisingly effective in limiting the horizons of linguists, there has been a certain amount of communication across these barriers so that research on one variety has sometimes cast light on theoretical problems connected with another. After surveying general views on full and partial restructuring from the earliest creolists until the 1980s (section 1.1), this chapter examines scholarship on each variety, beginning with AAE (1.2). To a limited extent (especially in more recent years) AAE studies have provided models for interpreting the historical development of the other varieties, from (a) the model of a purely European dialect reflecting general Western European tendencies such as the loss of inflections; to (b) the model of a post-creole retaining substratal features; to (c) the model of differing degrees of restructuring, varying according to social factors. This review of the theoretical underpinnings of research on AAE will then be compared with that of work on the other four varieties: Afrikaans (1.3); Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (1.4); Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish (1.5); and the Vernacular Lects of Réunionnais French (1.6). The final section (1.7) describes recent comparative research in partial restructuring. 1.1

Partial restructuring versus decreolization

The theoretical foundations for the study of fully creolized languages have been developing since the eighteenth century – particularly since the middle of the twentieth century (Holm 1988–89:13–70). However, linguists


5

have had more difficulty developing an adequate theoretical model for dealing with partially restructured languages – one that would allow reliable predictions about the interrelationship between the social history of their speakers and the linguistic structure likely to emerge from a particular context. We have long known that fully creolized languages exist – languages whose linguistic structure differs radically from that of the older languages from which they drew most of their lexicon. For example, the generally synthetic structure of the Western European languages used by colonists (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English – which still use a number of inflections to convey grammatical information) was replaced by an analytical structure in the Atlantic creoles derived both from these European languages and from the isolating Niger-Congo languages spoken by Africans brought to the New World. There is fairly general agreement that the isolating structure of the creoles – using free rather than bound morphemes to convey grammatical information – was determined by several factors: (1) the tendency towards isolating structures that was already widespread in the European superstrate languages; (2) the almost categorical use of isolating structures in the African substrate languages; (3) the universal tendency of adults to use isolating structures when learning a second language (e.g. the pidgins that developed into creoles); (4) the internal systematicity that would have spread the use of isolating structures as the creoles developed; and (5) the converging influence of two or more of these tendencies. Of all the structural similarities of the Atlantic creoles, the common trait that indicates most clearly the completeness of their restructuring is the completeness of their analyticity. If we leave aside the non-Atlantic creoles (which have not been compared as systematically), we find that basilectal creoles – those closest to their earliest form – seem to have very few true inflections, and that varieties that do have true inflections seem not to be the same kind of language as basilectal Atlantic creoles (Holm 1989). The existence of fully restructured creoles (whatever they may have been called) has been acknowledged since the early eighteenth century, and references to what can only be interpreted as more and less fully restructured Caribbean varieties date from the latter part of that century: die creolische, oder Negersprache . . . wird aber von den blanken Creolen feiner gesprochen, als von den Negern. [. . . the creole, or language of the blacks . . . is spoken better by the white Creoles than the blacks.] (Oldendorp 1777:263, quoted by Stein 1984:92)

(Of course feiner, translated as ‘better,’ here means more like the European source language.)

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However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that a linguist observed that there were language varieties that combined features of creoles with those of non-creoles. Schuchardt (1889:480) coined the term Halbkreolisch (literally ‘half-creole’) for certain varieties of Indo-Portuguese and Caribbean Creole French that had taken on superstrate features: Ueberall wo eine kreolische Mundart gesprochen wird, liegt Mischung mit der europäischen Muttersprache sehr nahe, mit anderen Worten: es stellt sich leicht ein individuelles oder gelegentliches Halbkreolisch ein. Indem wir die Bedingungen fur ¨ dasselbe näher suchen, bemerken wir einerseits dass Europäer die des Kreolischen nicht wirklich mächtig sind, sondern nur dunkle Vorstellungen davon haben, such bemuhen ¨ von den Einheimischen verstanden zu werden – kreolisiertes Europäisch; anderseits dass Europäer die des Kreolischen mehr oder weniger mächtig sind, irgend eine Form der Darstellung wählen, fur ¨ welche das Kreolische nicht ausreicht, oder dass Kreolen die des Europäischen nicht mächtig sind, ihren sprachlichen Ausdruck zu verfeinern sich bemuhen ¨ – europäisiertes Kreolisch. (Wherever a creole dialect is spoken, mixture with the European mother tongue lies very close at hand; in other words, an individual or occasional semi-creole easily appears. When we look more closely into the underlying conditions, we see on the one hand that [1] Europeans who do not really know the creole, having only a confused notion of it, may strive to make themselves understood by the natives, producing a creole-influenced variety of the European language. On the other hand, [2] Europeans who are more or less at home in the creole may use constructions not found in it, or [3] Creoles who have not mastered the European language may attempt to refine their creole, producing a European-influenced creole).

The first situation produces a variety similar to what Muhlh¨ ¨ ausler (1982:456–457) calls Tok Masta; the second situation produces a variety like the lects of Negerhollands and Papiamentu spoken by Europeans; the third produces what are now called decreolized varieties. Schuchardt’s idea of Halbkreolisch was interpreted by Tagliavini (1931:834) as a language that was half-way in the process of being creolized, and so he translated the term into Italian as “lingue creolizzanti.” Unfortunately the present-participial ending might suggest that such languages are “creolizing” in the sense of still undergoing restructuring; Reinecke (1937:22) translated the term as “those tending toward the creole, the creolisant dialects.” Schuchardt also noted that African American English seemed to be losing its creole features: The Negro English that is most widely known is spoken in the southern United States . . . those variants which still show a creole-like character are increasingly falling into disuse by being accommodated to the English of the whites by means of an intermediate speech variety. (Schuchardt c. 1893, in Gilbert 1985:42)


7

In this view, African American English originated as a full creole that later acquired non-creole features from contact with regional English. Later Bloomfield (1933:474) reasoned that a restructured variety of English had become nativized among Negro slaves in many parts of America. When the jargon has become the only language of the subject group, it is a creolized language. The creolized language has the status of an inferior dialect of the masters’ speech. It is subject to constant leveling-out and improvement in the direction of the latter. The various types of “Negro dialect” which we observe in the United States show us some of the last stages of this leveling. With the improvement of social conditions, this leveling is accelerated; the result is a caste-dialect . . . It is a question whether during this period the dialect that is being de-creolized may not influence the speech of the community – whether the creolized English of the southern slaves, for instance, may not have influenced local types of sub-standard or even of standard English.

This view was not elaborated into a full-blown theory of decreolization until interest in AAE and the English-based Caribbean creoles became widespread in the 1960s. Stewart asserted that the non-standard speech of present-day American Negroes still seems to exhibit structural traces of a creole predecessor. . . . One of the more important changes which have occurred in American Negro dialects during the past century has been the almost complete de-creolization of both their functional and lexical vocabulary. (1968:51–52)

DeCamp (1961, 1971) developed the idea of a continuum of lects for Jamaican, ranging from the most creole-like to the most English-like. Stewart (1965) applied this idea to African American English, introducing the terms acrolect for the variety closest to the standard and basilect for the variety furthest from it, with mesolect for those between. Later the continuum model was further refined by others (e.g. Bickerton 1973, Rickford 1987). By the end of the 1970s there was a general assumption that decreolization explained the varying structural distance between different creoles and their lexical source language: Caribbean creoles based on English, for example, were actually post-creoles at different stages of decreolization away from a very early fully creolized variety that may have resembled the modern Surinamese creoles, which were cut off from contact with English in the seventeenth century. The idea behind the modern meaning of partial restructuring originated in Hesseling (1897), who pointed out that “the Dutch on the Cape was on the way to becoming a sort of creole . . . [but] this process was not completed” (1979 translation, p. 12). Shortly afterwards, Vasconcellos noted that

8


les Portugais ont e´ té obligés d’apprendre quelquefois les langues indigènes, et les indigènes d’apprendre la langue du Portugal. Le second fait est le seul qui m’intéresse pour le moment, parce qu’il en est résulté la formation des dialectes créoles, et d’autres variétés du portugais; entre les uns et les autres, on peut admettre des degrés (1901:157–158; my emphasis) [The Portuguese were sometimes obliged to learn the indigenous languages and the indigenous people Portuguese. The second fact is my only interest for the time being because it resulted in the formation of creole dialects and other Portuguese varieties. Between the two groups, one could say there is a question of degree.]

The first recognition of a whole category of such languages can be found in Reinecke (1937:61): In several instances the slaves were so situated among a majority or a large minority of whites (and there were other reasons as well for the result), that they, or rather their creole children, learned the common language, not a creole dialect; or the plantation creole dialects that had begun to form never crystallized, never got beyond the makeshift stage. This happened in . . . Brazil, Cuba and the Spanishspeaking Caribbean countries in general, and in the southern United States in general.

Reinecke was also the first to put this meaning together with the term semi-creolized, which he used in reference to Afrikaans (1937:559). He also pointed out that the English-based creoles of the Caribbean did not seem to have been completely restructured: The Surinam dialects, like West African Pidgin English, are unmistakably creole dialects in the sense of being simplified to a purely analytic structure. The other West Indian dialects are not, however, so completely pruned down [. . . and] may be regarded as what Schuchardt called creolizing languages – dialects on the way to complete analytic simplification, but which for various reasons stopped a little short of it. (1937:274–275)

As recently as l962, Stewart considered Suriname to have the only real creoles based on English in the Caribbean area: “Jamaican and other regional varieties of English are best treated as dialects of English” (1962:50–51). In a personal communication, Stewart explained that at the time it seemed more prudent to exclude these varieties from the discussion of creoles since it was unclear whether they were creoles that had acquired non-creole features or vice versa. By 1967, however, he felt confident that additional historical sociolinguistic information had made it clear that the West Indian varieties were in fact post-creoles. However, the fact that this view came to be widely accepted among creolists does not in itself prove that Reinecke had not been right – that these varieties had never been as fully creolized as the Surinamese varieties. An additional possibility that could explain the considerable structural gap


9

between the Surinamese and West Indian varieties of creolized English is that Sranan may have been repidginized in the late seventeenth century, leaving it even further from English than it had been prior to 1667. Bloomfield (1933) had indirectly implied that a non-creole language might take on creole features (a process that could lead to partial restructuring) when he asked, “whether the creolized English of the southern slaves, for instance, may not have influenced local types of sub-standard or even of standard English” (1933:474). Later Silva Neto (1950a:12) followed Schuchardt (1889) in referring to re-lusitanized Indo-Portuguese as a semi-crioulo. That same year he extended the use of the term to the Portuguese spoken by non-whites during the early settlement of Brazil: constituiu-se, no primeiro século da coloniza¸ca˜ o (1532–1632), na boca ˆ de ´ındios, negros e mesti¸cos, um falar crioulo ou semi-crioulo. [. . . there arose during the first century of colonization (1532–1632) a creole or semi-creole language used by Indians, blacks and people of mixed race] (1950b:166)

Although Silva Neto never spelled out the sequence of social and linguistic events that may have led to the partial restructuring of a language variety from the very beginning of its existence, this possibility struck me as worth exploring when I was working on the same problem of the development of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (Holm 1984). Thomason, who was then working on a comparative study of a number of different kinds of languages resulting from contact (Thomason and Kaufman 1988), agreed that it would be useful to reserve the term semi-creole for those varieties that appeared never to have been fully creolized. Therefore I contrasted the term with post-creole varieties such as (according to some) American Black English . . . or vernacular Brazilian Portuguese. . . . Others would call these varieties semi-creoles, which also means that they have both creole and non-creole features but does not necessarily imply that they were ever basilectal creoles, since both creoles and non-creoles (e.g. Caymanian English . . .) can become semi-creoles by borrowing features. Thus some believe that Afrikaans . . . particularly the variety spoken by some people of mixed race . . . could safely be called a semi-creole but not a post-creole (Holm 1988–89:9–10)

The term is also used in this sense by Thomason and Kaufman in reference to Afrikaans (1988:148). Around the same time, Mufwene (1987:99) noted that the results of half-creolization and decreolization may look alike, but the processes responsible for the structural likeness of their outcomes are certainly not the same. Whichever is the case for B[lack] E[nglish] still needs to be demonstrated.

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Bickerton (1984:176–178) proposed what he called a pidginization index to explain why the structure of some creoles is quite close to that of their lexical source language (e.g. Réunionnais) while that of others is quite far from it (e.g. Saramaccan). Although the mathematical formula which he proposed to indicate the degree of restructuring proved “unworkable” (Singler 1990:645), Bickerton did recognize that creoles stand at different distances from their source languages in terms of the degree of restructuring that they have undergone, and that this differentiation could occur at the beginning rather than the end of the process of restructuring (see the introduction to chapter 2). It was during this period that linguists began to question whether decreolization alone could adequately account for the varying distance of the structure of different creoles from that of their lexical source language. Hancock (1987) put it thus: I do not, then, believe that, for example, Black English was once like Gullah, or that Gullah was once like Jamaican, or that Jamaican was once like Sranan, each a more decreolized version of the other along some kind of mystical continuum. . . . My feeling is that most of the principal characteristics that each creole is now associated with were established during the first twenty-five years or so of the settlement of the region in which it came to be spoken: Black English has always looked much the way it looks now . . . (1987:264–265)

The theoretical importance of gradience in creolization was signaled by a conference on “Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages” at the University of Regensburg in Germany in 1998, resulting in an entire volume on this topic (Neumann-Holzschuh and Schneider 2000). 1.2

The study of African American English (AAE)

The decreolization theory for the origin of Black English – the “creolist” theory that finally received the imprimatur of Labov (1982) – was a much more satisfactory explanation for that variety’s creole features than earlier hypotheses that traced its origins solely to British dialects. However, my own work on the lexicon of two much more restructured varieties – Nicaragua’s Miskito Coast Creole English (Holm 1978) and Bahamian Creole English (Holm with Shilling 1982) – made it clear to me that archaic and regional British English must have played a primary role in the genesis of all three African American varieties. Research on possible British origins of specific creole grammatical features had been unfashionable in the 1970s, but in the 1980s two such studies – Schneider 1981 (translated in 1989) and Rickford 1986 – had an important impact on the field, reopening the question of the degree to which British syntactic patterns had been preserved in African American varieties.


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I was further led to question some of the basic assumptions of decreolization theory through work with several non-creoles that appeared to have acquired creole features: White Bahamian English (Holm 1980), and Caymanian and Bay Island English (Washabaugh and Warantz in Holm 1983). I concluded that Although long contact with creolized varieties of English has influenced the English spoken by white Caymanians and their kin on the Bay Islands of Honduras, this influence seems to be confined largely to areal contact phenomena such as word-borrowing and phonological shifts. Considering the English system of verbal inflections in the speech of Utila . . . as opposed to the system of preverbal tense and aspect markers that characterizes C[entral] A[merican] E[nglish] creoles . . . the former would seem to be not a creole but rather a regional variety of English influenced by contact with creolized English, much like the folk-speech of the southern United States. (Holm 1983:15)

In 1986 there began a debate as to whether AAE and white varieties of American English were historically converging (through the decreolization of AAE) or diverging (through AAE’s increasing isolation) as argued by Labov and Harris (1986) (see section 2.1.7). The latter interpretation seemed to support the implausible view of Poplack and Sankoff (1987) that early nineteenth-century AAE had been more similar to white varieties than current AAE is. However, what convinced me that decreolization alone could not account for the present structure of AAE was listening to tape recordings of the speech of former slaves (Bailey et al. 1991, see section 2.1.5). Even taking into account that their speech may have shifted considerably between their childhood in the mid-nineteenth century and the time they were recorded in the 1930s and later, it was clear that what I was hearing was a variety of English with some creole features rather than a variety of creole with some English features. The only honest conclusion that I could reach was that The present study supports the view that the language of the ex-slaves, like earlier attestations of the speech of blacks in the American South, indicates in the light of the relevant sociohistorical and demographic data discussed above that the language of blacks born in North America (outside of the Gullah area) was from its very beginning a semi-creole representing a compromise between the creole of slaves imported from the West Indies and the regional speech of British settlers. While American Black English has certainly undergone decreolization over the past 300 years in the sense that it has replaced many of its original creole features with those of English, this is not actually evidence that American Black English itself ever constituted an autonomous creole system. (Holm 1991:247)

A more radical view (which seems inherently unlikely, given what is known about language contact phenomena) is that the very concept of decreolization is misguided, and that it played no role in the development

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of varieties such as Gullah and AAE, which stand at differing distances from English structurally solely due to their having undergone differing degrees of restructuring. Mufwene (1991:382–383) seems to support such a view. Schneider (1990) re-examined the idea of “creoleness” as a graded phenomenon in reference to varieties of English and English-based creoles in the Caribbean area with a view to casting light on the debate over the creole origin of AAE. He concluded that the question as to whether or not a particular variety is a creole can be very difficult to answer: There is a variety of constitutive factors that contribute independently to the notion, and the label applies to some language varieties better than to others, without implying that the latter are necessarily “non-creoles.” We may distinguish prototypical, or full, creoles that combine all or almost all of these features from varieties that are less typical of the category. Even the notion of semi-creoles does not seem to be very helpful in this dilemma, because its applicability, if not defined too loosely, seems limited, and should not be taken to include the nonprototypical – but nevertheless true – creoles . . . In linguistic matters, more and less are frequently more appropriate responses than yes and no. (1990:105–106)

While Schneider considered the term semi-creole unhelpful because of the limited number of languages it could be applied to (despite the numerical importance of the speakers of partially restructured languages, as discussed above), Kaye dismissed the validity of the very notion with an analogy beyond the reach of logic: There can be no such thing, of course, as partial pidginization or partial creolization (this is why the terms post-creole, semi-creole, and creoloid are imprecise), just as there is no such thing as partial pregnancy. (Kaye 1990:301)

More recent work on AAE has focused increasingly on those sociolinguistic factors which have long been considered relevant to the study of full creoles (e.g. demographic figures suggesting the proportion of native versus non-native speakers during the early period of language contact) but which have not been systematically explored for AAE until now. Winford (1997) traces the social histories of Virginia and the Carolinas, citing early demographic figures from Wood (1989), and compares the key structures in Gullah, AAE, and Southern White Vernacular English, concluding that “AAVE was never itself a creole, but it was created by Africans, and bears the distinctive mark of that creation.” Rickford (1997, 1999) has followed a similar methodology and reached a similar conclusion; Mufwene also suggests that AAE “may simply have resulted from a restructuring which was not as extensive as what produced Gullah” (2001). However, Mufwene (2000b) lends his credibility as a creolist to support the position of Poplack (2000:1) that “. . . the many grammatical


13

distinctions between contemporary varieties of AAVE and American and British English are relatively recent developments,” i.e. not the result of earlier contact with restructured varieties of English. Such a position allows for less external influence on the development of AAE than the apartheid-era linguists in South Africa allowed on the development of Afrikaans (section 1.3). Hackert and Holm (1997) have shown that the only hard evidence ever offered for the full creolization of AAE resulted from a historical misinterpretation: the creole nature of the folk speech on the southern Bahamian islands should not be interpreted as evidence that AAVE had been fully creolized on the mainland before 1780 (and later decreolized) since the language that was brought there was in all likelihood eighteenth-century Gullah rather than eighteenth-century AAVE.

1.3

The study of Afrikaans

Afrikaans, derived from Dutch, is spoken by some 6 million South Africans; about half are white and the rest are of mixed ancestry. Afrikaans is unique among the language varieties examined here in that it was standardized and made an official state language. Its exhaustive documentation makes it much easier to contrast its structure to that of its lexical source language, which was actually seventeenth-century regional and nautical varieties of Dutch. Also of particular relevance to tracing the development of Afrikaans are its nonstandard varieties spoken by various groups, particularly those of mixed race with little education. The history of the study of Afrikaans and its origins has been summarized by Reinecke et al. (1975:323ff.) and updated and expanded by Roberge (1994), the sources of much of the following. Hahn (1882) claimed that although Afrikaans is “phonetically Teutonic, it is psychologically an essentially Hottentot idiom. For we learn this patois first from our nurses and ayahs. The young Africander on his solitary farm has no other playmates than the children of the Bastard Hottentot servants of his father, and even the grown-up farmer cannot easily escape the deteriorating effect of his servants’ patois.” Viljoen’s 1896 dissertation, focusing mainly on the phonetic system of Afrikaans, claimed it was derived from the dialects of North Holland. Hesseling (1897) provided the first extended discussion of the origins of Afrikaans. Although he recognized the influence of Hottentot (now called Khoi), he emphasized the influence of the Malayo-Portuguese creole of early Indonesian slaves and claimed that “the Dutch on the Cape was on the way to becoming a sort of creole . . . [but] this process was not completed” because of the continuing influence of metropolitan Dutch (1979 translation, p. 12). This

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characterization set off a debate that continued for a century, at times with considerable heat. Hesseling’s Malayo-Portuguese theory was adopted by the Afrikaner Du Toit (1905) and later developed further by Valkhoff (1966, 1972). It was opposed by the “spontaneous development” theory initially proposed by the Dutch linguist Kruisinga (1906), who saw Afrikaans evolving early on out of seventeenth-century Dutch dialects through what was essentially normal language transmission. This model was taken up by Afrikaans-speaking linguists such as Boshoff (1921, 1959) and Smith (1927, 1952), who agreed that Afrikaans had developed according to trends already present in earlier Dutch dialects under minimal influence from other languages. The Dutch linguist Kloeke (1950), usually included in this camp, attributed a strong “founder effect” to the South Holland speech of the first Dutch colonists. The spontaneist model was later revived in a more drastic form by Van der Merwe (1963, 1968), who went so far as to claim that Afrikaans emerged within a half dozen years after the colonists’ arrival (1968:66) due to accelerated drift, and ruled out the possibility that people of color had influenced it in any significant way (1968:29). The approach of Bosman (1923, 1947) is considered eclectic by Reinecke et al. (1975:323), who note that “this view admitted foreign influence, chiefly from Low German colonists and Hottentots, but did not admit a situation favorable to outright creolization (unless of the Dutch spoken by Hottentots).” What den Besten (1987) calls the “South African philological school” came to prevail in that country from the 1960s until majority rule in 1994. Its leading writers were Scholtz (1963, 1980) and Raidt (1974, 1983, 1991), who concerned themselves less with the origins of Afrikaans as such than the history of specific linguistic phenomena. However, their underlying theoretical model was that of ordinary language change within varieties of Dutch accelerated by the influence of non-native speakers in a multilingual setting, whose speech was influenced by their first languages and had interlanguage features, but never underwent outright pidginization and creolization. One of the most complete histories of Afrikaans is Ponelis (1993), which stresses the restructuring resulting from imperfect second language acquisition. During this period, both black and white South African linguists began examining nonstandard varieties of Afrikaans more closely for the light they might cast on the issue of the language’s origins, including “Coloured” Afrikaans and Flytaal (Makhudu 1984), Malay Afrikaans (Kotzé 1989), and Orange River Afrikaans, including Griqua Afrikaans (van Rensburg 1984, 1989) – the last variety having been studied in a book-length work by Rademeyer (1938).


15

What might be called the “Amsterdam school” of Afrikaans scholars has evolved around den Besten (1985, 1986, 1993) and his colleagues, who have focused on the effects of contact with Khoi and other languages. They see the South African school as antiquatedly Eurocentric in its approach: “If a feature can possibly be European, then it must be European,” provoking the opposite caveat regarding Valkhoff ’s approach: “If a feature can be a creolism, it must be a creolism” (Roberge 1994:40). Now that South Africans are reassessing their cultural identity with the advent of majority rule, the composite identity that “creolism” suggests has become increasingly attractive, and the ideological pendulum in linguistics may now be swinging wide of the mark in that direction. At a conference workshop on Afrikaans sociohistorical linguistics at the University of Cape Town (Mesthrie and Roberge, 2001–02) a reference was made to what distinguishes “. . . Afrikaans from other creole languages” (Holm 2001:353). 1.4

The study of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (BVP)

The history of the study of BVP from a language-contact perspective has been outlined by Holm (1987) and updated by Mello (1997). The similarity of some of BVP’s structural features to those of Portuguese-based creoles was pointed out over a century ago by Coelho (1880–86 [1967]), who concluded that “it shows a tendency towards creolization” (p. 170), but many Brazilian linguists still resist the view that the development of BVP involved significant restructuring. They have done studies of how the Brazilian lexicon has been influenced by indigenous languages like Tupi (Sampaio 1928; Marroquim 1934) or African languages (Raimundo 1933; Mendon¸ca 1933 [1973]), but in general they have followed the advice of Melo (1946), who cautioned against exaggerating the importance of such external influences when parallels could be found in archaic or regional usages in Portugal. However, Silva Neto (1950b:131) asserted that creole and what he called “semi-creole” (semi-crioulo) varieties of Portuguese had existed in Brazil, defining the latter as closer to the European variety but not speculating as to how they had evolved. Révah (1963) discounted substratal influence on BVP in favor of a general tendency towards simplification of morphology in Western European languages, a line of thought taken up later by Naro and Lemle (1976). They assumed that BVP was in the process of losing number agreement rules, which were being obscured by certain phonological rules. Among non-Brazilian linguists, Valkhoff (1966) identified BVP features shared by Portuguese-based creoles as evidence of the latter’s influence on it. Jeroslow did a detailed study of a rural dialect (1974) that led

16


her to suspect prior creolization (McKinney 1975). Guy (1981) examined the same BVP phenomenon as Naro and Lemle (1976) but reached the opposite conclusion, i.e. that number agreement in BVP was spreading as a final stage in decreolization, comparable to that of AAE in the United States. In 1981 the Brazilian linguist Celso Cunha called for the study of BVP from the perspective of modern creole studies, the goal of Holm (1984, 1987, 1992b), who concluded that partial restructuring was clearly evident in the BVP varieties of Helvécia (Silveira Ferreira 1985) and Ceará (Jeroslow 1974), and began attempting to work out the development of BVP as the product of this process. This approach has been taken up by Baxter (1992, 1997), who evaluates the importance of creole-like features through quantitative methods, and in the recent work of some Brazilian linguists such as Couto (1997) and Careno (1997). The most comprehensive of these is Mello (1997), who concludes that creolization and partial restructuring did not occur throughout colonial Brazil, but mainly in isolated areas which favored these processes . . . later decreolization through contact with B[razilian] P[ortuguese] occurred. In most of settled Brazil, the likeliest scenario was a process of imperfect language shift to Portuguese by the African and Amerindian populations and their descendants. This shift led to the establishment of BVP as the predominant dialect of Portuguese. However, as the shift was taking place, substratum structural features and interlanguage patterns were transferred to the target language, becoming fossilized. (Mello 1997:270)

Lucchesi (2000) basically takes the same position, but calls BVP the product of “irregular language transmission” that was mais leve (‘lighter’) than full creolization. Bonvini (2000) describes a creole-like lect of BVP called L´ıngua dos Pretos Velhos (LPV) traditionally used by Brazilian practitioners of candomblé religious ceremonies for the light it could shed on earlier language contact. Studies approaching BVP from a language-contact perspective have contributed to the growth of Afro-Iberian linguistics as a distinct field. For obvious historical reasons, scholars working in Afro-Portuguese and Afro-Hispanic studies are natural allies, and there has been a movement to join the two camps since the first conference on Portuguese-based creoles was held in Lisbon in 1991 (d’Andrade and Kihm 1992). Since then the journal Papia: Revista de Crioulos de Base Ibérica has been published in Brazil in both Portuguese and Spanish, encouraging further research in the coalescing field. An international colloquium on creoles based on Portuguese and Spanish in Berlin (Zimmermann 1999) was an important forum for debating the role of partial restructuring in the emergence of


17

both BVP and NSCS, as is the recently founded Associa¸ca˜ o: Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola. 1.5

The study of Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish (NSCS)

NSCS is spoken by a substantial portion of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, and coastal Venezuelans and Colombians, as well as many of the Spanish speakers of New York City and Miami. Research since the 1960s indicates that a number of features in these varieties have parallels in Spanish-based Caribbean creoles. An overview of these studies can be found in de Granda (1975, 1987, 1998) and Green (1997), the sources of part of the following summary. One of the earliest references to external influence on a variety of Caribbean Spanish is that of Sandoval (1627), who describes the language spoken by Africans on the coast of what is today Colombia as “corrupt Spanish . . . influenced by the Portuguese they call the language of São Tomé.” This and the emergence of Palenquero Creole Spanish nearby provide sufficient evidence that a Spanish-based pidgin built on Afro-Portuguese did in fact exist in the Caribbean, but it does not confirm the speculation of Bickerton and Escalante (1970:262) that there existed “a Spanish-based creole spoken in many parts of the Caribbean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” since there is no evidence that pidgins or jargons spoken elsewhere in the the region ever developed into stable creoles. One such pidgin or jargon was the habla bozal spoken by the large influx of Africans brought to Cuba (and elsewhere) in the first half of the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations (section 2.4.2). Pichardo (1862: vii, iii) described their “mutilated Castilian, without concord, number declension or conjugation,” but noted that “Negroes born in Cuba talk like the local whites.” Van Name (1869–70:125) referred to it as only “the beginning of proper Creole” – an assessment later confirmed by Reinecke (1937:271). Van Name was also among the first to recognize that Cura¸cao’s Papiamentu was a creole language rather than a dialect of Spanish. Although Cuba’s habla bozal was never nativized as a creole, it did leave its traces in the local vernacular; Ortiz (1924) documented its lexicon of African origin. Still, most linguists in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean remained reluctant to admit any significant influence of African languages on local Spanish. Henriquez Urena ˜ (1940:130, 169), for example, described Dominican Spanish as having no more words of African origin than did general Spanish; he argued for an Andalusian origin for

18


the alternation of /r/ and /l/, seeing African influence only in the loss of syllable-final -s. Most linguists of this period who recognized the possibility of external influence on local Spanish, such as Wagner (1949), were not from the Caribbean. Cabrera (1954) was an exception; a Cuban anthropologist who interviewed older people of African descent around 1930, her portrayal of their Spanish is considered accurate, revealing a number of African-like features both in their normal speech and in the special language thought to resemble that of their ancestors, used in religious contexts. An equally exceptional linguist was Alvarez Nazario (1961), who examined early texts of bozal Spanish in Puerto Rico, concluding it was a “criollo afroespanol” ˜ linking local Spanish (especially that of black communities such as Loiza Aldea outside San Juan) to African languages via an Afro-Portuguese pidgin. His work served to encourage others studying Caribbean Spanish from the approach of contact linguistics, and he is now recognized as one of the principle founders of Afro-Hispanic linguistics (Ortiz 1999). Another founder, de Granda (1968), identified the speech of Colombia’s Palenqueros as the New World’s other Spanish-based creole, and went on to identify features from African and restructured languages in NSCS, focusing on the theory of an early pan-Caribbean creole that gradually decreolized (1970, 1976, 1978). Meanwhile, Otheguy (1973), working from Cabrera’s Cuban data, identified certain phonological and morphosyntactic traits in the vernacular that had survived from the habla bozal as being specifically creole features supporting the pan-Caribbean creole hypothesis (although he has since retreated from this position). Ziegler (1976, 1977) linked the bozal Spanish of Puerto Rico to that of Cuba, also arguing for decreolization. Megenney has focused on non-Peninsular features in the vernaculars of coastal Colombia (1976), Venezuela (1985), and the Dominican Republic (1990), as well as African-derived vocabulary used in religious rites in Cuba and Brazil (1999). Lipski, coming from within the creolist camp, has offered counter arguments to the pan-Caribbean creole theory (1993, 1994), seeing substratal influence as more likely to have come into Caribbean Spanish through imperfect second language acquisition, and bozal Spanish as never having undergone complete creolization since it was not nativized (2000). Schwegler, another creolist but one working primarily on Palenquero (1993, 1996a), has also studied the effects of restructuring on Caribbean Spanish (1996b). Schwegler and Morton (2002) document the features of the NSCS of bilingual speakers of Palenquero CS (PS), casting crucial new light on the link between restructured varieties like bozal Spanish and modern NSCS. Schwegler helped to organize one of the first international


19

conferences on Palenquero and NSCS (Monino ˜ et al. 2002) as well as the first book-length survey of Afro-Hispanic linguistics (Perl and Schwegler 1998). Perl, coming from Afro-Portuguese studies, has worked on the Cuban vernacular from a creolist perspective (Perl 1985, 1988, 1989), as have Ortiz (1998) and Figueroa (1998). Other younger scholars who have dealt with varieties of NSCS as a the product of partial restructuring include Alvarez (1990), Lorenzino (1993, 1998), and Green (1997), the last describing a hitherto unknown basilectal variety of Dominican Spanish. 1.6

The study of Vernacular Lects of Réunionnais French (VLRF)

The vernacular French of Réunion, a small island in the Indian Ocean, is spoken or understood by most of the 500,000 inhabitants. Although locally called créole, its structure seems to be descended mainly from that of seventeenth-century French dialects, including maritime varieties; however, it has a number of features also found in creoles. The creole or non-creole identity of Réunionnais has long been the subject of considerable debate; this identity is the focus of the following brief review of the literature, based largely on Chapuis (forthcoming), rather than the other main point of contention, which is the historical relationship of Réunionnais to the fully restructured Ile de France creoles of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Adam (1883) grouped Réunionnais with the French-based creoles: “Creole is the adaptation of French . . . by and for the slaves of Africa . . . in the Antilles, in Réunion and in Ile de France.” Schuchardt (1885, translated 1979:15–17) analyzed a text of Réunionnais spoken by whites as “totally French . . . foreign elements merely float on the surface [making it] . . . only an apparent creole.” Reinecke (1937:526) noted that in comparison to the creole of Mauritius, “the dialect of Reunion has not departed quite so widely from the original French.” Valkhoff (1964:724) suspected authors of Réunionnais texts “of using an artificial and gallicized language which can be called ‘semi-creole’ ” and decided that the language was a form of “Creole-influenced French rather than French-influenced Creole” [“plutot ˆ du fran¸cais créole que du créole fran¸cais”] and that “there are two varieties of this Creole (without counting many intermediary nuances), namely an urban speech form and a popular speech form, and the former is more gallicized.” Vintil˘a-Radulescu˘ (1976:129) was the first to mention the the possible influence of the IndoPortuguese spoken by the wives of the earliest settlers in Réunion. She also realized that “the mountainous relief of the islands . . . explains the

20


dialectal mosaic” (1967:126). Deltel (1969) proposed that there was a continuum among the different lects of Réunionnais. The most important work on Réunionnais to date is that of Chaudenson (1974ff.), who was the first to distinguish among what are now understood to be the three principal lects: (1) the Créole des Bas, spoken by the coastal Réunionnais of African, Malagasy, and Indian origin; (2) the Créole des Hauts, used by the highland whites; and (3) the urban Creole, which is strongly gallicized. He also proposed that Mauritian and Seychellois Creole were derived from Bourbonnais (an earlier form of Réunionnais), which since decreolized due to the continuing presence of French on Réunion. He argued that there had been no substratal influence on Réunionnais, which had simply evolved out of the fran¸cais avancée or colloquial French that had developed beyond the reach of those who would have kept it more in line with the standard. Bollée (1977:116) argued for Mauritian and Seychellois having resulted from a “higher degree of reduction . . . than Réunionnais.” Papen (1978) provided a comparative study of the grammar and social history of all three varieties, concluding that Réunionnais represented a postcreole continuum. Valdman (1978) was the first to draw parallels between Réunionnais and the patois of St. Barts, a comparison later furthered by Calvet and Chaudenson (1998). Hull (1979) pointed out the difference in structure between Réunionnais and the Ile de France creoles, concluding that “Maur[itian] Cr[eole] evolved on Mauritius out of a nucleus of Pidg[in] Fr[ench], with only secondary borrowings from Réu[nionnais] Cr[eole]. Seych[ellois] Cr[eole] derives from early Maur[itian] Cr[eole], not Réu[nionnais] Cr[eole].” He noted that “Where black influence was subsequently removed, a somewhat decreolized form of Cr[eole] could remain on the island, as on Réunion, or on St. Barts. . . . But on the whole Cr[eole] and French remain psychologically distinct . . . [and] No ‘postCreole continuum’ has formed, as in English Cr[eole]-speaking areas” (Hull 1979:211–213). Baker and Corne (1982) also rejected Chaudenson’s Bourbonnais theory, arguing that Réunionnais settlers were not present in sufficient numbers on Mauritius during the crucial period, while “West Africans formed a majority of the slave population of Mauritius in the period 1730–35” (1982:241), explaining the striking parallels between the French Creoles of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the same work, Corne pointed out that the “verbal system of R[éunion] C[reole] is fundamentally ‘French’ in its make-up . . . [while its] Creole features . . . are rather marginal” (1982:102). In more recent work, Chaudenson (1992, 1995, 2000) has described creolization as a restructuring process that is not so different from the


21

kind of restructuring found in normal language transmission. This would certainly account for the partial restructuring of varieties such as Réunionnais, from the perspective of the present study. 1.7

The comparison of partially restructured vernaculars

In 1991 I organized a seminar on partial restructuring at the City University of New York (CUNY), followed by another in 1996. A number of talented doctoral students participated, several of whom were themselves native speakers of partially restructured vernaculars or their source languages. These seminars led to a number of publications, ranging from conference papers to journal articles (e.g. Craig 1991 on American Indian English) and dissertations (e.g. Mello 1997 on Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese, and Green 1997 on nonstandard Dominican Spanish), one of which is still in progress (Chapuis forthcoming on Réunionnais). The goal of these seminars was to identify some of the problems that needed to be solved in developing a workable theoretical model for this linguistic process by tracing the genesis and synchronic morphosyntax of a number of partially restructured languages, comparing the results, and looking for the possible relationship between the social history of the speakers and the linguistic outcome. Some of the initial results were described in Holm (1992a) and are briefly outlined below along with some further developments that grew out of later work on these varieties. The social factors that we considered potentially relevant to the linguistic outcome included the following: 1. the precise origins of superstrate and substrate speakers; 2. the (changing) ratio of superstrate to substrate speakers; if the latter came to outnumber the former, the length of time this took; 3. the degree of intimacy of early social relations between superstrate and substrate speakers (i.e. the likelihood of pidginization as opposed to normal second language acquistion); 4. the likelihood of either group’s contact with a pidgin or creole spoken elsewhere; 5. demographic changes (e.g. immigration, emigration, wars, plagues) and the effect on intergroup relations; 6. social, economic, and political changes and the effect on intergroup relations; 7. the degree of rigidity of any racial caste system; 8. education: accessibility, actual language of instruction; 9. communications: degree of geographical isolation; 10. any changes in the variety’s status (e.g. new domains of use, standardization).

22


Regarding the linguistic make-up of each variety, the following factors were considered: 1. the sources of lexicon: archaic, regional, or sociolectal usages in superstrate; substrate languages; adstrate languages; pidgins or creoles spoken elsewhere; 2. phonology: contrasts with superstrate; similarities to any varieties in (1) above, i.e. in phonotactic rules or actual phonemes and their allophones; 3. morphosyntax: contrasts with superstrate; similarities to any varieties in (1) above, e.g. the loss or retention of inflections in the NP (e.g. number/gender marking on articles, adjectives; possessive constructions) and VP (bound vs. free tense/aspect morphemes; uses of tense and aspect), as well as any other constructions not found in the lexical source language (e.g. use of prepositions and conjunctions; word order in main clauses; structure of dependent clauses). 4. the typological distance between the superstrate and substrate. The study of each variety concluded with a summary of the scholarship relating to its status as a creole or non-creole, and an assessment of its status as a partially restructured language. The group’s ultimate task was to compare the results of each study to determine whether the similarities and differences among these varieties would justify their inclusion in a group of partially restructured languages, and then to extrapolate the defining sociolinguistic and structural characteristics of that group. Since partial restructuring is a graded phenomenon, any specification of what proportion of features a variety so designated must share with creoles but not the lexifier language has to be intrinsically arbitrary. As a common-sense guideline, it seemed unhelpful to designate any language that has borrowed any creole feature as being partially restructured. For example, standard American English has borrowed some lexical items and even set phrases from various creoles such as go for broke, but this hardly seems to be grounds for classifying it as being partially restructured. On the other hand, the number of features shared with creoles but not with British varieties of English in AAE does seem significant: it has not only lexical items but also frequently occurring phonological and morphosyntactic features. It is difficult to measure objectively the degree of restructuring that a language variety may have undergone. Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish appears to have undergone less restructuring than either Afrikaans (in which one can say “Ons is bly,” literally ‘Us is happy’ in terms of Dutch) or Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (e.g. “Eu chamei ela,” corresponding to ‘I called she’ in European Portuguese). Of course the literal translations into English do not provide an objective indication of the degree


23

of restructuring, since English speakers associate violations of standard pronominal case marking with basilectal Caribbean Creole English, which is not the impact these structures have in modern Brazil and South Africa. (Parkvall 2000 uses a more objective method of measuring degree of restructuring, discussed in the introduction to chapter 2, and another method is discussed in section 6.2). We considered ways of indicating the degree of restructuring, e.g. by designating varieties as having undergone “weak” or “very weak” restructuring if they have few features shared with creoles, and as “strong” or “very strong” if they have many. The idea was to distinguish between varieties like AAE and the nonstandard varieties used by some Southern whites, containing fewer such features (albeit significant ones such as copula deletion). Such distinctions would seem to be helpful in describing the status of vernacular lects of Réunionnais French as opposed to that of the nonstandard French of Louisiana’s Cajuns or the patois of St. Barts. The criterion of distinguishing partially restructured varieties from post-creoles through the existence of basilects in the latter’s history (Holm 1988–89:9–10) proved problematical, quite aside from the very real difficulty of finding written evidence of extinct basilects. For example, while the ancestors of the Afrikaners apparently never spoke a fully creolized variety and their seventeenth-century Dutch simply underwent creole influence, the African ancestors of the so-called Coloureds apparently did speak a full creole (or at least a variety that underwent a very strong degree of restructuring, to extrapolate from modern Orange River Afrikaans). However, the modern lects of Afrikaans – both standard and nonstandard – have speakers from both groups, and there is a basilect or near-basilect in the history of these lects, although we can say that the nonstandard lects seem to be descended from this (near) basilect more directly than the standard lects. We encountered other problems as well with our own hypotheses and those of others, but recognized that these difficulties could not be adequately dealt with until we found and organized the relevant linguistic and sociolinguistic facts and then tested our theories against them. This volume, which builds on the work of the students participating in those seminars as well as my own research and that of others, is an attempt to do that.

2

Social factors in partial restructuring

Introduction The kind of partial restructuring of languages examined here is clearly related to the more complete kind of restructuring called creolization, and there is a widespread consensus that the defining characteristics of creolization include social as well as linguistic factors (Holm 2000a:68– 71). In fact, Thomason and Kaufman (1988:35) demonstrated that “it is the sociolinguistic history of the speakers, and not the structure of their language, that is the primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact.” It will be argued here that partial restructuring is also a sociolinguistic process, and to understand it we must consider phenomena that are both social and linguistic. One of the crucial social factors in creolization has to do with the proportion of native versus non-native speakers of the lexical source language present at the time the creole language emerged. Although Parkvall (2000) has questioned the centrality of this demographic ratio in determining the degree to which creoles are restructured, his comparative work actually reaffirms the validity of this correlation, which is the topic of the following discussion. Bickerton (1981:4) claimed that the maximum percentage of native speakers of the superstrate language associated with full creolization was 20 percent. He was not the first to ponder this part of the equation; over a century earlier, Van Name surmised that Of the causes which have contributed to the formation of these dialects the chief are: first, the mature age of the slaves . . . secondly, the fact that they constituted the great body of the population, the whites being in a minority seldom as large as one-fourth. (Van Name 1869–70:124, my emphasis)

While there is general agreement that non-native speakers need to constitute a substantial majority of the population for full creolization to occur, there is debate as to whether this ratio is the overriding factor in the process, and what the minimal majority might be. Rickford 24


25

(1999:235) points out that there are known instances where Africans made up less than 80 percent of the population in places that produced a creole: By 1690, 35 years after the settlement of Jamaica, Blacks constituted 75 percent of the population (Williams 1985:31) . . . In Haiti the Black population was only 34.8 percent 25 years after the colony’s founding, and in Martinique, only 51.5 percent. (Singler 1995)

The discrepancy between 75 percent and 80 percent in Jamaica seems too small to worry about; that in Haiti seems much more considerable, but this may have to do with the date simply being too early – raising the issue of the relevance of the amount of time that was necessary for the slave population to reach the required majority. Haiti’s population was over 80 percent non-European by 1713 (Singler 1995:210). The figures from Martinique seem like better counter evidence to Bickerton’s claim because of the existence of a creole text from 1671, when the population was 62 percent non-European (ibid., Carden et al. 1991). To test the correlation of such demographic ratios to the degree of restructuring, Parkvall (2000) designed a restructuring index to quantify the typological distance between some Atlantic creoles and vernaculars, on the one hand, and their lexifiers on the other. The linguistic features he used to measure restructuring included 36 grammatical features often found in Atlantic creoles but not their lexifiers (e.g. no gender distinction in the third person singular pronoun) and 9 phonological ones (e.g. the presence of tonal distinctions). By quantifying the presence or absence of these features, he was able to quantify the degree of restructuring of each language, resulting in scores (see table 1 below) varying from 90 for the completely “radical” creole to −45 for the ideal lexifier. He then compared these to social factors: the first documented slave imports (event 0); the year the non-white population exceeded 20% (20%); the interval in years; the year the non-white population exceeded 50% (50%); the interval between this and event 0; the year the non-white population exceeded 80% – purportedly triggering the bioprogram (Bickerton 1981) – (80%); and the interval between this and event 0. Table 1 was originally published with a number of qualifying footnotes; here we need note only that the demographic data for St. Thomas∗ actually refer to St. Barthélemy, the source of the former’s French-based patois. Since this table raises a good number of questions, the reader is referred to the original article, which is quite transparent considering the constraints of space: the results of the linguistic comparison are given for each feature in each variety, and the obvious problems of comparability, reliability, etc. are openly discussed.

26


Table 1. Degree of restructuring and social factors (Parkvall 2000:205–206) Score

Variety

Event 0

20%

Interval

50%

Interval

80%

Interval

68 63 51 48 48 42 41 41 41 39 38 35 35 23 20 16 −5 −5 −23 −24 n/a

Sranan São Tomé St. Kitts Jamaica Haiti Gullah Negerholl. Fr. Guiana Guadeloupe Louisiana Martinique Mauritius Papiamentu Cape Verde Barbados Virginia Dom. Rep. Brazil Bermuda St. Thomas∗ Fr. St. Kitts

1651 1485 1626 1655 1634 1670 1665 1664 1640 1708 1635 1721 1634 1462 1627 1619 1502 1549 1612 1660 1626

1652 1493? 1650? 1657 1635 1672 1668 1665 1652 1711 1636 1722 1652 1515? 1643 1712 ? ? 1618 1671 1626

1 8 24 2 1 2 3 1 12 3 1 1 18 53 16 93 ? ? 6 11 0

1662 1499? 1680 1670 1698 1708 1675 1668 1667 1726 1655 1730 1657 1525? 1657 never ? ? never 1787 1668

11 14 54 15 64 38 10 4 27 18 20 9 23 63 30 n/a n/a n/a n/a 127 42

1672 1546? 1729 1690? 1710 never 1710 1697 1725 never 1733 c. 1750 1685 1540 1705 never 1520s never never never 1710

21 61 103 35 76 n/a 45 33 85 n/a 98 29 51 78 78 n/a c. 20 n/a n/a n/a 84

30

Average

13

33

60

Parkvall concludes that “. . . there is indeed a correlation – whether causal or not – between the degree of restructuring and the demographic ratios in the formative period” (2000:197). Assuming the soundness of his method and execution of this inquiry, however, it is also the case that demographic ratios are not everything, as he himself points out. To deal first with two apparent exceptions: Table 1 indicates that two areas which developed full creoles never had a non-white population exceeding 80% (Gullah, scoring 42; Louisiana, scoring 39). “Gullah” appears to refer to the Gullah country – certain coastal counties of South Carolina and Georgia – rather than to either of these states as a whole. But, if that is the case, we must note that by the nineteenth century blacks made up some 80% of the the population of the tidewater area of South Carolina – and over 95% in its rural districts (Reinecke 1937:491). As for Louisiana, a footnote clarifies that “the non-white population reached an all-high low [sic: ‘all-time high’?] of 77,9% in 1741” (Parkvall 2000:5).


27

In other words, both areas seem to have had a slave population very close to 80%. Having dealt with the apparent exceptions to the 80% rule, we now need to consider the relevance, if any, of the amount of time that it took for the slave population to reach 80% of the total. This may account for the discrepancy noted above, namely the observation of Rickford (1999:235) that in Haiti the slave population was only 34.8% twenty-five years after the colony’s founding, and in Martinique, only 51.5%. According to Table 1, it took 76 years for Haiti’s slave population to reach 80%, and 98 years for Martinique’s. But if we look at the number of years in the final column of Table 1, there seems to be no pattern: the most restructured varieties (Sranan, São Tomé, St. Kitts) took 21, 61, and 103 years respectively to reach 80%, while the least restructured creoles (Parkvall draws the bottom line at a score of 20) are Papiamentu, Cape Verde, and Barbados (to follow his nomenclature), taking 51, 78, and 78 years respectively. Thus, if there were a correlation, these results seem counterintuitive: the places developing the most restructured creoles took both the shortest time (Sranan: 21 years) and the longest time (St. Kitts: 103 years) to reach 80%. A concern with the amount of time that was required for the slave population to reach a majority and the possible correlation this might have with the degree of restructuring can be seen in Bickerton’s (1984) discussion of the amount of time between the beginning of immigration of non-native speakers and what Baker (1982:852) had called “Event 1” – the point at which slave and master populations achieved numerical parity. . . . The longer this period, the greater the exposure of early arrivals to the dominant language and hence the richer the second-language version that would be transmitted to the first influx. (Bickerton 1984:177)

This led to Bickerton’s pidginization index (PI): “Y ×

P = PI R

Where Y represents the number of years between colonization and Event 1, P the total substratum-speaking population at Event 1, and R the yearly average of post-Event 1 immigrants. . . . A higher PI indicates a ‘richer’ pidgin, one that retains more features of the dominant language” (1984:178). However, this mathematical formula to indicate the degree of restructuring proved “unworkable” (Singler 1990:645). Later Mufwene (1996) dealt with a similar idea in his article on the founder principle:

28


In some colonies, such as South Carolina, Virginia and Réunion, the Africans remained minorities for the first 30–50 years, whereas in some others such as Suriname, Mauritius (Baker, to appear [= 1996]) and apparently Guyana (Winford, p.c. 1994), the plantation phase came about rather rapidly bringing along an early slave majority. (Mufwene 1996:98)

While the first three colonies gave rise to less restructured vernaculars, the latter three have fully creolized languages. However, the length of time it took for the slaves to become a majority may not be the relevant social factor here. All three of the latter colonies could have imported restructured languages along with their slave force. Many, if not most, of the slaves brought to Suriname between 1651 and 1667 came from Barbados, and many, if not most, brought to Guyana after 1760 came from the British West Indies and West Africa. Even in Mauritius, where the slave population grew from 30 to 1,000 between 1727 and 1730, some 600 came from French entrepots in West Africa and might well have spoken some pidginized French. Thus the relationship between the degree of restructuring and social factors like demographic ratios is not always a straightforward one, a factor Parkvall recognizes: One possible reason why there appears to be a lack of correspondence between the demographic and the linguistic data is that the creoles under investigation did not arise in the areas where they are presently spoken. (2000:193)

This complexity of the interrelationship of social factors has long been recognized in the acknowledgment of the effect of factors such as maroonage or the early withdrawal of the superstrate on a creole’s proximity to the “bioprogram” (Bickerton 1984:177–178) or its proximity to a prototype (McWhorter 2000). As to the existence of a straightforward relationship between the amount of time that it takes for a slave population to become a substantial majority and the degree of restructuring in the ensuing language, this would appear to be a question that has not yet been answered clearly, although Parkvall (2000) has cast some light on the matter. The most we can say with certainty is that it appears to have taken an average of sixty years for the non-native-speaking population to reach its greatest proportion of the total, at least in the history of the language varieties he examined – and possibly the same amount of time for these varieties to reach their present degree of restructuring. While Bickerton (1984) was certainly right to assert that time is a relevant factor, its relevance depends on still other variable, complicating factors. For example, the slave population of Réunion reached 80 percent within 100 years, but this resulted in partial rather than full restructuring because of the particular


29

sociolinguistic circumstances of the colony’s early history (see section 2.5 below). It will be argued below that, like creolization, partial restructuring is a sociolinguistic process, that a relationship does indeed exist between sociolinguistic factors in the development of these languages and their synchronic typology, and that this relationship is parallel to the one between these factors in fully creolized languages. In order to examine this hypothesis, we will first look at the sociolinguistic setting of the formation of each language variety, focusing on social factors related to its genesis and development – the topic of the following sections of this chapter (the disparate lengths of which reflect in part the disparate amounts of published research to draw on). Chapters 3 to 5 will then compare corresponding areas of their morphosyntax, and the final chapter will attempt to relate the social and linguistic facts in a theoretical model that will account for what we know about these languages. 2.1

AAE: the sociolinguistic setting of its development

2.1.1

AAE: the seventeenth century

The proportion of Africans in most of Britain’s North American colonies was so much lower than the ratio of blacks to whites in the Caribbean that it seems doubtful that full creolization ever took place outside of a few demographically exceptional areas such as coastal South Carolina and Georgia, where Gullah developed. While settlers in both the British Caribbean and North America were largely European-born indentured servants in the early seventeenth century, by 1680 the black population equalled or surpassed the white population in many Caribbean colonies, whereas in North America blacks made up less than 5 percent of the total population (Rawley 1981:329). By the 1730s blacks still made up only 14 percent of the North American population, but 80 percent of the population of the British and French Caribbean (ibid.). The sociolinguistic history of African slaves in the Americas was largely determined by the economic forces shaping the societies to which they were brought, which in turn depended on particular crops. The tobacco plantations in Virginia and Barbados to which the first slaves were brought were relatively small farms worked mostly by indentured servants from Britain. The first Africans, arriving in Virginia in 1619 and in Barbados in 1627, were outnumbered by the British laborers among whom they worked and from whom they most likely learned English largely through normal adult second language acquisition; their contact was much closer at this early period than in the plantation societies that developed later.

30


The social conditions necessary for creolization – lack of access to nativespeaker models of the target language – did not occur on Barbados until the cultivation of sugar was introduced in the middle of the seventeenth century. As the supply of tobacco in Europe rose, its price fell and farmers began looking for other products to grow in the West Indies. The production of sugar was more profitable, but this required large plantations and a large workforce. Great quantities of sugar cane had to be produced to offset the initial investment of capital in the mill and other machinery, as well as land and labor. The work was much more grueling than raising tobacco, and indentured servants were unwilling to do it. Their labor was gradually replaced by that of the African slaves: while there were only a few hundred of the latter in Barbados in 1640, by 1645 there were 6,000 – and some 40,000 whites. By 1685 the number of blacks had risen to 46,000 and the number of whites had actually dropped to 20,000. The effect of the sugar revolution on Barbados was to force the smallholders (mostly former indentured servants) off the land as large sugar plantations took over the island. The displaced peasantry chose emigration over starvation, and populated new English colonies in Suriname, Jamaica, the Carolinas, and the Leeward Islands. Thus in the second half of the seventeenth century Barbados played a central role in the dispersal of English in the New World (Holm 1994). The question is to what degree that English reflected contact with the languages spoken by Africans, especially the speech of slaves exported from Barbados and other Caribbean islands such as St. Kitts. Winford (2000:216, 242) considers modern Barbadian an “intermediate” variety, “. . . the result of targeted shift . . . quite comparable with other outcomes of communal shift such as Hiberno English . . .” Yet Hickey (forthcoming) finds that Winford has misinterpreted the facts about Irish English, such as “its preference for invariant does” (Winford 2000:232). Hickey (forthcoming) says “There is no evidence of this in Irish English. Perhaps the claim derives from a misunderstanding . . .” At any rate it seems clear that more basilectal varieties were used in Barbados in the seventeenth century; one such lect was documented in the testimony of a Barbadian slave at the 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, witch trial, e.g. “He tell me he God” (Dillard 1972:79). The cradle of the development of African American English was Virginia, the first and most populous colony in the southern part of British North America. In Virginia the status of Africans was comparable to that of indentured servants during the first part of the seventeenth century; most worked as domestics or on small farms and seem likely to have had sufficient access to local English. Mufwene (2000b:240) reasons that this would have led to their normal acquisition of the British settlers’ English

San Francisco

N E A O C

ke

Albuquerque

de ran oG Ri

Denver

o

Ar k

Kansas City

Houston

Red

0 0

250

Super ior

250

500

500 miles

750 km

Atlanta

Cincinnati

Montgomery

New Orleans

Lake Erie

Cleveland

Detroit

Lake Huron

Chattanooga Memphis

Chicago

ke La

St Louis

Little Rock

Minneapolis

Oklahoma

Dallas

San Antonio

iss

Jacksonville

Charleston

Washington

Philadelphia

Lake Ontario

Boston

New York

O C E A N

A T L A N T I C

Norfolk

St La wr en ce

Map 1 United States: ‘Coloured Population, 1900. Originally published in Darby and Fuller (1978) The New Cambridge Modern History Atlas (Cambridge University Press).

Areas without coloured population or unsettled

Under 10%

o ad lo r Co

Salt Lake City

M

i

10–30%

30–50%

Sn a

m bia

Great Salt Lake

Over 50%

COLOURED POPULATION

Los Angeles

Portland

Lake Michigan

lu Co

Lake Winnipeg

io

Seattle

Mississipp i

P A C I F I C Oh

ur

sas an

32


Table 2. Estimated population of (East) Virginia, 1685–1790

Total Red White Black

1685

1700

1715

1730

1745

1760

1790

43,600 7% 87% 6%

63,500 3% 88% 9%

96,300 1% 77% 22%

153,900 0.6% 67% 32%

234,200 0.1% 63% 36%

327,600 0.1% 60% 40%

747,800 0.03% 59% 41%

(Based on Wood 1989:38, cited by Winford 1997.)

as a second language. Africans in Virginia did not become slaves for life until the latter part of the century (2000b:238), when their numbers became more considerable. Although slaves then made up a larger proportion of the local population, Mufwene (2000b:240) believes that these later arrivals tended to adapt to the local language norms rather than imposing their own norms due to the founder principle (Mufwene 1996). However, it was established above that the founder principle can be overridden by the importation of a variety that was restructured elsewhere, and Rickford (1999:241–242) objects to the scenario proposed by Mufwene, since during this period most slaves were imported from England’s Caribbean colonies and were already likely to know English in a pidginized or creolized form. It seems doubtful that they would have abandoned such linguistic habits on arriving in North America since these would clearly have been useful to them and their local interlocutors, not only in facilitating communication but also in establishing sociolinguistic boundaries.

2.1.2

AAE: the eighteenth century

As tobacco farming spread during the eighteenth century, the importation of slaves – increasingly from Africa rather than from the Caribbean – grew as indentured labor became more expensive. The proportion of blacks in Virginia increased from 22 percent in 1715 to 40 percent in 1760. Thus later newcomers were less likely to have as much access to nativespeaker models of the target language as did those who arrived earlier, but whites still made up a substantial majority of the population: In fact, whites made up some 60 percent of the population of all the southern colonies in 1750, although it must be borne in mind that this was a large and demographically heterogeneous area. Rickford (1999:244) points out how these statistics are misleading for Georgia, which in 1750 had been founded only recently: by 1776 blacks


33

Table 3. Estimated proportion of blacks in American colonies in 1750 Colony/region

Total blacks

% of blacks

% in 13 colonies

New England Middle Colonies Southern Colonies Maryland Virginia N. Carolina S. Carolina Georgia

10,982 20,736 204,702

3.1% 7.0% 39.8% 30.8% 43.9% 27.1% 60.9% 19.2%

4.6% 8.8% 86.6%

(Based on Rickford 1999:238.)

made up 48 percent of Georgia’s population and were concentrated on the coast, where Gullah was spreading. In other words, the most likely scenario after 1715 in most parts of the American South is that English was not fully creolized but did undergo some degree of restructuring as it was acquired by speakers of African languages and of more fully restructured varieties of English brought in from the Caribbean, and was increasingly learned from other African Americans speaking an emerging sociolinguistically distinct lect of local English that became the forerunner of modern AAE. While Mufwene is surely right in surmising that “children, regardless of whether they were locally born or imported . . . slowed down the divergence of Africans’ English vernaculars from those of Europeans, because they were more likely to acquire colonial English with minimal restructuring” (2000b:240), the important issue here is the very existence of the divergence, for which the only credible explanation is restructuring. The roots of that divergence are likely to go back to at least the early eighteenth century. The recognition of a distinctively black way of speaking seems implicit in a passage in a journal of 1705, in which one white criticizes another for speaking “Negro” to an Indian (quoted by Dillard 1972:80). However, there is a problem in what the designation of “Negro” might mean. Since colonial times African Americans have spoken many varieties of English, ranging from the foreigner’s English of Africans; the creole or partially restructured English of slaves imported from the West Indies; the pidginized English brought from West Africa; the indigenous creoles of North America (such as Gullah and its offshoot, Afro-Seminole); the partially restructured varieties that had emerged by the eighteenth century; unrestructured regional English (which may have borrowed some interlanguage or substrate features from contact with the previous varieties); and

34


the standard American English first spoken by educated freedmen and now spoken by millions of African Americans – usually with AAE phonological features to signal a positive awareness of ethnic identity. This is not conjecture: Kautzsch and Schneider (2000) document idiolects in South Carolina that they identify as creole, semi-creolized, and non-creole. The accuracy of their identification is borne out by the linguistic features in these idiolects. As Schneider (1989) suggests, pockets of greater restructuring developed in localities with demographics more similar to those in South Carolina’s low country that led to the emergence of Gullah, which underwent relatively complete creolization, making AAE the product of a few presumably independent creolization processes in localities with an exceptionally dense black population . . . with a certain degree of leveling, mixture and perhaps loss or even spreading of such forms in the post-emancipation period. (Schneider 1989:278)

2.1.3

The emergence of Gullah

As in other colonies, the sociolinguistic situation of Africans in coastal South Carolina was determined by the crop they were brought there to raise. In this case it was the cultivation of rice that created a setting for the creolization of English – relatively complete if compared to the partial restructuring of AAE, but still far from the fundamental restructuring of English in Suriname. In 1670 Charles II granted the Lords Proprietors of Carolina on the mainland a patent that included the Bahama Islands, creating a single colony that endured as such for the next half century. In the same year Charleston, in what is now South Carolina, began to be settled by some 800 British settlers and 300 slaves. According to Wood (1974:24–25), almost half the whites and more than half the blacks came from Barbados. Other settlers included French Huguenots and religious dissenters from the British Isles and from other colonies in British North America (Baptists, Quakers, and Catholics), as well as settlers from Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica (ibid; Joyner 1984:13). During the first years of settlement the colonists traded with the Indians for deerskins and also raised livestock, sending meat to Barbados in exchange for slaves and sugar. By the 1690s it became clear that the coastal low country was suitable for raising rice, for which there was a growing market in southern Europe and the Caribbean. Although the British settlers had no experience in cultivating rice, their slaves did since it had long been grown in various parts of West Africa. The intensive labor needed for its cultivation led to a great increase in the importation of slaves: by 1708 the colony’s population of 8,000 was equally divided between whites


35

Table 4. Estimated population of South Carolina, 1685–1775

Total Red White Black

1685

1700

1715

1730

1745

1760

1775

11,900 84% 12% 4%

14,100 53% 27% 20%

19,200 27% 29% 45%

33,400 5% 29% 65%

62,400 2% 33% 65%

97,500 1% 40% 60%

179,400 0.3% 40% 60%

(Based on Wood 1989:38, cited by Winford 1997.)

and blacks, but by 1740 there were 40,000 slaves as opposed to only 20,000 whites (Wood 1974:143–152). The proportion of inhabitants of American Indian, European, and African ancestry underwent the shifts documented in table 4. These figures suggest that during the first generation of colonization, blacks made up a small minority who either learned English as a second language through relatively close contact with native speakers under frontier conditions, or else arrived from Barbados or other parts of the British West Indies with some knowledge of Creole English. In the next generations, however, the black population (coming increasingly straight from Africa with little or no knowledge of English or Creole) became the majority, leaving white native speakers a minority of about one-third to two-fifths of the population. It must be remembered that the above figures are for all of South Carolina not just the coastal low country, where the concentration of blacks was much higher. Segregation was instituted in South Carolina in 1720 after the colony was separated from the Bahamas and North Carolina, and a 1726 survey of two low-country parishes indicated that two-thirds of the slaves lived on plantations, defined as landholdings with 25–100 hands (Wood 1974:160). As noted previously, by the nineteenth century blacks made up some 80 percent of the the population of the tidewater area of South Carolina – and over 95 percent in its rural districts (Reinecke 1937:491). In coastal Georgia (settled after 1733) the proportion was not quite so great, but Gullah came to predominate there as well. The social and linguistic relations in Gullah country differed considerably from those in Virginia and elsewhere in the American South. Quite apart from the continuing existence of creolized English there today, the above historical, social and demographic data support the development of a creole continuum in this area during the eighteenth century – one that developed in a society with a relatively high percentage of native speakers of English, keeping the speech of most creole speakers quite mesolectal in comparison to Caribbean varieties.

36


2.1.4

AAE: the early nineteenth century

In 1790 the United States’ 757,000 blacks (only 60,000 of whom were free) made up over 19 percent of the country’s population. Large-scale slavery was restricted mainly to the tobacco-growing area of the Upper South (Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina) and central Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia, where rice and indigo could be grown (Bailey 2001:58). However, in 1793 the invention of the cotton gin made short-staple cotton a viable cash crop, leading to the spread of new cotton plantations westward into the interior South. During the first half of the nineteenth century, up to a million slaves were moved to Alabama, Mississippi, and newly acquired areas as far west as Louisiana and Texas (2001:59). By 1830 parts of the interior South, such as the Mississippi Delta, the Alabama Black Belt, and the lower Brazos Valley in Texas, had ratios of blacks as high as those in Gullah country (2001:60). Mufwene (2000b:247) claims that the cotton plantations were on average smaller than the tobacco plantations in the Upper South and rice plantations in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, but Bailey (2001:60) claims they were often just as large. While many of the slaves brought to these states came from the Upper South and spoke early AAE, many also came from coastal South Carolina and Georgia and spoke Gullah. Still others were brought directly from Africa and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean until the importation of slaves was made illegal in 1808 – although it continued until the Civil War (1861–65). The latter slaves, speaking restructured or non-native varieties of English learned from the first two groups, seem likely to have contributed to a heterogeneous mixture of AAE varieties, so it is not surprising that later creolists such as Stewart (1968) and Dillard (1972) had the impression that there existed a widespread “Plantation Creole” continuum at this time: evidence of creole features was indeed widespread outside the original Gullah area. Stewart (1968:52) claimed that decreolization began well before the Civil War; however, Mufwene (2000b:247) concludes that this was the period when AAE and Gullah were stabilizing, referring to similarities in how they were represented in fiction then and how they are spoken today. Pointing to the end of the illegal importation of slaves, he surmises that The increasing number of native speakers and the attrition of non-native speakers enabled the vernaculars that had been developing till then among descendants of Africans to stabilize, or at least not to undergo any form of restructuring motivated by language contact. (Mufwene 2000b:247)

Bailey, however, interprets the same social and linguistic evidence as supporting restructuring:


37

Given the fact that a substantial portion of slaves coming into most of these areas [of the interior South] spoke some form of English, we would hardly expect the development of a full-scale creole language, but we might well expect a variety of English showing the clear imprint of the creole and African languages that formed part of the matrix from which it derived. According to Bailey/Thomas (1998a), that is precisely what we find in the early varieties of AAVE in the interior South. (Bailey 2001:60)

2.1.5

AAE: diaspora varieties and the ex-slave narratives

One of the basic problems in reconstructing the history of the development of AAE has been the fact that it was rarely written, and what written fragments that do exist in fiction or travelers’ accounts are of limited reliability, most having been written by non-native speakers of AAE. Moreover, it is not possible to identify exactly which of the many varieties spoken by African Americans is being portrayed (native, nonnative, creole, etc.) unless something is known about the origin and background of the individual speaker (Holm 1988–89:498). One attempt to avoid this dilemma has been to examine the modern speech of the descendants of groups of African Americans who left the United States at earlier points in its history, although the information this provides is usually indirect and sometimes misleading. Such groups include those who went to the Bahamas in the 1780s (Holm 1983); Sierra Leone in the 1790s (Hancock 1971; Huber 2001); Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century (Poplack 2000); the Samaná peninsula of the Dominican Republic in the 1820s (ibid.); and Liberia, also in the early nineteenth century (Singler 1989). However, there are pitfalls in this method, as I have discovered: for example, Holm (1988–89:501) concluded that Decreolization [of AAE in the United States] would appear to have begun during this same time span [1780–1820] since the descendants of the emigrants to the Bahamas speak creolized English while those in Samaná do not.

However, a closer examination of the historical records revealed that the creole nature of the folk speech on these southern Bahamian islands should not be interpreted as evidence that AAVE had been fully creolized on the mainland before 1780 (and later decreolized) since the language that was brought there was in all likelihood eighteenth-century Gullah rather than eighteenth-century AAVE. This new interpretation undermines the most compelling evidence we knew of to support the hypothesis that AAVE was ever fully creolized, and it provides further indication that AAVE was – from its beginning – the product of semi-creolization. (Hackert and Holm forthcoming)

Another source of information about earlier forms of AAE is the body of transcribed interviews with elderly former slaves conducted during

38


the 1930s and later, known as the Works Project Administration Ex-Slave Narratives (e.g. Schneider 1989). The problem of disentangling the linguistic system of the transcriber from that of the speaker has been partly resolved with the Ex-Slave Recordings, mechanically recorded interviews with African Americans born in the American South between 1844 and 1861 (Bailey, Maynor, and Cukor-Avila 1991). Although there is some controversy over how much speakers’ grammars might change over their lifetimes, these recordings have been of great value in casting light on the structure of AAE since the middle of the nineteenth century. A recent comparative quantitative study of these sources (Kautzsch 2002:257) concludes that properly chosen interviews “can be regarded as very close approximations to speech” – much more so than letters, since literacy is so closely tied to the learning of standard English. 2.1.6

AAE: the late nineteenth century

It is not necessary for AAE ever to have been fully creolized for it to have undergone decreolization. However, if it was never a full creole, “decreolization” may be a misleading term. Mufwene (2000b) prefers “debasilectalization,” and Holm (2000:32) refers to this reapproachment with non-restructured varieties as “secondary leveling.” It has been assumed that African Americans had more freedom of movement and better access to education after emancipation, and that this accelerated the reapproachment of AAE to the non-restructured lects with which they were in contact. Evidence for a straightforward movement in this direction over time, however, is mixed. Poplack et al. (2000:100) admit that the rate of plural -s marking is lower in early AAE than in contemporary AAE (but not that this is due to decreolization; see section 4.4.1), while Kautzsch (2002:260) finds no evidence of decreolization in any of his quantitative studies of earlier AAE. Bailey (2001:64ff.) points out that the area where cotton was grown continued to expand as rapidly after the Civil War as before it, with sharecropping or farm tenancy replacing slavery as the mechanism for meeting the intensive labor demands of cotton. The main difference was that after the war, poor whites were also ensnared in this system and kept there by the lack of alternative sources of credit. Bailey makes his point with two maps of a Georgia plantation: in 1860 laborers are confined to the slave quarters, but in 1881 the shacks of both black and white tenant farmers are scattered over the plantation. He concludes that The spread of tenancy to Whites and the spatial reorganization of the plantation created new contexts for Black–White speech relationships throughout the South, contexts which allowed for interaction among African Americans and Whites that


39

was probably more widespread than before the Civil War and took place among people who were closer to being socioeconomic equals. . . . Hence we might expect their vernaculars to to have much in common and . . . they do share many features that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Bailey 2001:66)

However, the late nineteenth century also saw the rise of white supremacists who enacted Jim Crow laws throughout the South to segregate and disfavor African Americans socially, economically, and educationally. This situation triggered emigration. 2.1.7

AAE: the twentieth century

Almost a million African Americans left the South during the great migration, which began even before the opening of new economic opportunities in the North that came with the First World War and lasted until well after the Second World War. Whatley (1981:93) points out that the increasing migration of blacks to the North as well as the West Coast is reflected in the decreasing proportion left in the South: 85 percent of the national total in 1920, 77 percent in 1940; and 60 percent in 1960. By 1970, over a third of all African Americans lived in just seven major urban areas: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Bailey 2001:66). These areas became more and more segregated: the African American population of Detroit, for example, increased from 37 percent in the 1960s to 83 percent in 2000 (Wolfram forthcoming). The restricted social environment of blacks in the ghettos of Northern cities fostered the continuation of features brought from the South, but this speech took on a distinctively urban character. Labov (1972b:xiii) described AAE as having a “relatively uniform grammar” from one region to another, as one might expect from a variety that had recently migrated. The question is whether AAE and other American varieties of English have been growing apart. Mufwene speculates that Perhaps the late nineteenth century was also the time when African and European Americans were particularly eager to identify some linguistic peculiarities as ethnic markers and thus made divergent selections of features from the pool of variants that they had shared until then. Such selections would have enhanced ethnic-dialectal differences that may have been minor at the dawn of the twentieth century. (Mufwene 2000b:251)

Poplack (2000:1) interprets this as endorsing her own position that the many grammatical distinctions between contemporary varieties of AAVE and American and British English are relatively recent developments, possibly initiated during the post-Civil War period, as suggested by Mufwene [2000b] . . . in a social context highly propitious to racial segregation and divergence.

40


Rickford (1999:xix) notes that “Accelerated AAVE use – especially of salient features like be – and scathing criticism of those who ‘talk white’ are part of a symbolic statement by today’s young people of awareness of and pride in African American identity.” Kautzsch (2002) interprets his quantitative study of earlier AAE negation patterns as evidence that In the first half of the nineteenth century AAE has a largely nonstandard English basis. During the second half of the nineteenth century it gradually – though slowly and partially – moves closer to standard English. Finally, a renewed deviation away from standard English seems to have started in the early twentieth century, which is supported in some cases by present-day data (cf. ain’t for didn’t; negative concord). This return to nonstandard patterns might result from increased segregation of African Americans from the early twentieth century onwards, which at the same time favors the emergence of a black linguistic identity. (2002:88)

Concerning the relationship between Southern varieties of AAE and Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE), Cuckor-Avila (2001:116– 119) found that there were linguistic correlates to the reduced contact between speakers of the two varieties after the Second World War due to the decline of share-cropping, northern migration of blacks, and other factors. Some of the earlier shared features have survived only in AAE (e.g. copula absence after you, lack of third person singular present -s marking of verbs), and others have evolved only in AAE (e.g. be + verb + -ing). However, AAE has retained still other features that had not been shared with SWVE (zero third personal singular copula, remote time been, ain’t for didn’t). It is the last group which makes the position of Poplack (2000) untenable. However, it is still possible that historically (or at least currently) the grammars of AAE and other varieties are diverging rather than converging, as was assumed by those who saw AAE mainly as the result of the decreolization of a full-fledged creole (e.g. Stewart 1968). In 1986 Labov and Harris argued that increasing racial segregation had produced a “BEV [Black English Vernacular] that is more remote from other dialects than . . . reported before” (1986:4). The work of Bailey and Maynor (1987, 1989) (cf. Bailey [2001] above) in Texas appeared to provide independent confirmation of this hypothesis, suggesting that it might be a general pattern in the United States. A symposium, published as Fasold et al. (1987), raised the points “that Labov and his colleagues had failed to provide comparison points in either real or apparent time, and that Bailey and Maynor needed an intermediate age group to minimize the the possibility of age-grading” (Rickford 1999:262). However, Rickford’s own recent work in Palo Alto, California (1999:274) confirms this growing


41

divergence, particularly in the AAE use of invariant be and copula absence (see section 3.1.1). He notes that the first feature is “now very salient as a distinctively black form . . . be is an invariant lexical item, which can be consciously adopted and rapidly spread like slang terms and other lexical items” (1999:276). Finally, he notes that “Black teenagers are less assimilationist than their parents and especially their grandparents, and more assertive about their rights to talk and act their ‘natural way’ ” (1999:274). Whatever the current state of the relationship between AAE and other American varieties of English, this brief historical survey demonstrates that, given what we now know about what is required for full creolization to take place, that is not what happened to AAE in most parts of the American South. On the other hand, it has become clear that the features which modern AAE shares with Caribbean varieties of Creole English but not with Southern White Vernacular English cannot all be explained through the kind of borrowing associated with language contact, i.e. between a less-restructured AAE and more-restructured varieties of English brought in from Africa, from the Caribbean, or from Gullah country. While contact between creolized and non-creolized varieties of English can explain the borrowing of lexical items (including ones with syntactic implications, such as the complementizer say, discussed in section 5.1.2) and even the borrowing of morphosyntactic features, it cannot explain systemic differences like the patterning of zero copulas (section 3.1.4). The only remaining explanation for the origin of such features is that AAE is the result of English having undergone a less-extensive degree of restructuring than that which led to Gullah or the English-based creoles of the Caribbean and Suriname. Such limited restructuring would still have allowed for the features described in chapters 3–5, i.e. both the reduction of inflectional morphology and the retention of certain substrate features such as a correlation between the form of the copula and its following syntactic environment. 2.2

Afrikaans: the sociolinguistic setting of its development

2.2.1

Afrikaans: the seventeenth century

In 1652 the Dutch East India Company established the first European settlement on Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in order to supply their ships with provisions for the long voyage from Holland to the Dutch East Indies. For the first six years the principal languages in contact were Dutch (mainly the dialects of south Holland) and Khoi, spoken by the

42


original inhabitants of the Cape with whom the Dutch bartered for cattle. By 1656 it was reported that the Khoi “were beginning to speak Dutch fairly well” (cited by Scholtz 1970:85); they soon began working for the settlers as nursemaids and herdsmen. In 1658 the colony received its first shipload of slaves from West Africa and Angola; at this point “there were 166 whites against 194 slaves and freedmen, together with some Hottentot hangers-on” (Reinecke 1937:597). Thus the slaves found two kinds of Dutch in use: that of the settlers (among themselves); and that of the Khoi (used with the settlers). The latter probably played an important role in shaping the pidgin, which did not have SVO word order as did the Niger-Congo languages of the slaves, but rather SOV, the underlying word order of both Dutch and Khoi (den Besten 1989:220). In 1685 a colonial official reported that the settlers’ children were picking up the broken Dutch of the non-whites (Valkhoff 1972:40). In 1677 190 slaves were brought to the Cape from the Asian colonies that the Dutch had taken from the Portuguese in India, Ceylon, and the East Indies (Reinecke 1937:568); they seem likely to have made up a substantial portion of the colony’s 350 slaves in 1691 (1937:597). As in Batavia, the new Dutch capital of the East Indies, their lingua franca was creole Portuguese, which was spoken throughout Portugal’s former possessions. Hesseling (1897) argued that the use of Malyo-Portuguese at the Cape Colony was both early and widespread, and that this was a much more important factor in the partial creolization of Afrikaans than the influence of Khoi, although this interpretation has been seriously challenged. It has long been asserted that contact with other European languages played a role in the relatively rapid evolution of Dutch into Afrikaans. In the 1660s the Europeans were mostly Dutch (numbering 104), but there were also a considerable number of Germans (40) and individuals of other nationalities (23) (Reinecke 1937:576). However, most of the Germans were men who had come to work for the Dutch East India Company; many knew the Low German dialects closely related to Dutch, and most soon learned Dutch and became assimilated (Scholtz 1970:84). In 1688 some 225 French-speaking Huguenots sought refuge in the colony; they made up a full sixth of the white population at the time, but the Dutch governor ensured their assimilation by requiring their farms to be interspersed among those of the Dutch rather than in a single settlement. The resulting social contact led to intermarriage and their acceptance as “true Afrikaners,” so that their language disappeared within some forty years (ibid.). It seems clear that the crucial period in the formation of Afrikaans was the second half of the seventeenth century, by the end of which “gender distinction had disappeared completely; wij ‘we’ was replaced by ons ‘us’;


Windhoek

43

MOZAMBIQUE

B O T S W A N A

Rehoboth

K a l a h a r i

LIMPOPO

D e s e r t

NAMIBIA Pretoria(A)

Namaland

Griqualand Little Namaqualand

. Ora n ge R

NORTHERN CAPE

(E) . lR a a V FREE STATE

Bloemfontein LESOTHO Or a n ge R .

M MP U

WEST

A

GAUTENG

NORTH Johannesburg

N LA

GA

SWAZILAND

KWAZULUNATAL

Durban (E)

EASTERN CAPE Cape Town (A=E) 0

300 km

0

200 miles

WESTERN CAPE

East London (E) Port Elizabeth (E)

(A) Largely Afrikaans-speaking (E) Largely English-speaking

Map 2 Southern Africa. Originally published in Holm (1989) Pidgins and Creoles Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press).

the present and perfect had coalesced [although Raidt (1983) places this later]; and some verbs had already lost the infinitive suffix -en” (Hesseling 1897, translation of 1979:7). Although further development took place over the next century, during which Cape Dutch became what can now be recognized as Afrikaans (Raidt 1983:28), a major factor in the crucial early period was clearly the restructured Dutch of the Khoi and the slaves. Since the geography of the Cape was unfavorable for the kind of plantation agriculture that arose in the New World, there were no large slave holders except for the Dutch East India Company itself. While the slaves from Mozambique, Madagascar, and Asia tended to live in the Cape Town area, the Khoi often lived out in the country among the Dutch as domestics and farm hands (van Rensburg, personal communication). Their partial assimilation was not only cultural and linguistic but also genetic. Few Dutch women accompanied the first settlers to the Cape, and in the first twenty years of the colony, some 75 percent of the children born to female slaves were fathered by Dutch colonists (Valkhoff 1966:206), as were many children born to Khoi women, so that the Cape

44


Coloured population began to grow early on. In the seventeenth century such children received their freedom on reaching adulthood, provided they spoke Dutch and were confirmed members of the church (Raidt 1983:11). During this early period freed slaves of mixed ancestry were not viewed as a separate ethnic group; they had all the civil rights of whites, with whom they intermarried (ibid.), although this situation changed in the eighteenth century. Early “Hottentot Dutch” can be viewed either as a pidgin (den Besten 1989) or as the early stage of a continuum of interlanguages that the Khoi evolved in their acquisition of Dutch (van Rensburg 1989). 2.2.2

Afrikaans: the eighteenth century

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries many Khoi retreated into the interior to avoid European domination, often taking with them a knowledge of Dutch. The detribalization of those who remained at the Cape was hastened by a severe smallpox epidemic in 1713, which decimated the Khoi. Those who fled took with them what was left of their social system, and those who remained merged into the colony’s population of free blacks and Coloureds. By the end of the eighteenth century most of their descendants were monolingual speakers of Dutch (Combrink 1978:77). From the middle of the century onwards the European settlers began moving east and then north to areas populated by Bantu-speaking peoples, but it is important to bear in mind that within the Cape Colony itself the slaves never greatly exceeded the white population. In 1708 there were 1,723 free burghers, who owned 1,298 slaves; in 1798 there were 21,746 Europeans, with some 25,000 slaves (Reinecke 1937:597). Table 5 summarizes the demographic figures given above. Although these figures are incomplete, they allow some inferences regarding language contact in so far as group origin indicates likelihood of a first or second language knowledge of Dutch, or, in 1798, the forerunner of Afrikaans. (It should be noted that the estimated figure for the Khoikhoi is for the southwestern Cape from the Oliphants to the Breede River; however, the relevant figure is the unknown number of Khoikhoi who were in regular contact with the other groups.) These figures are helpful in assessing the social and linguistic developments from 1652 until the end of the eighteenth century, when Afrikaans had clearly emerged as a system quite distinct from Dutch, which most Afrikaners could no longer speak (Raidt 1983:18). Unlike Negerhollands, the fully creolized Dutch that developed in the Danish West Indies (Holm 1988–89:325–328), Afrikaans developed in a colony that had remained under Dutch control


45

Table 5. Estimated population of the Cape Colony, 1658–1798 1658 White Dutch German French Other Slaves African and freed Asian Total Khoikhoi

1660s

1677

1688

1691

166

1708

1798

1,723

21,746

1,298 ?

25,000

104 40 225 1,125

23 194 190 50,000?∗

?

?

?

350 ?

(Based on Reinecke 1937:568–697; ∗ Elphick and Malherbe 1989:3.)

up to that point. The maintenance of standard Dutch as the language of government, education, and religion undoubtedly played an important role in preventing Cape whites from adopting most of the creole features used by non-whites, as happened in the West Indies. However, there is unambiguous evidence that some such borrowing did in fact take place in the case of Afrikaans, although to a more limited extent (see below). It is also of primary significance that whites continued to make up a full half of the speakers of Afrikaans, compared to the 6 percent white minority of the speakers of Negerhollands. White Afrikaans speakers were able to impose a much more European character on their local culture and language, much like the large minority or majority of whites in the American South. 2.2.3

Afrikaans: the nineteenth century

The French occupation of the Netherlands in 1795 led Britain to seize the Cape Colony, which it gained permanently in 1814. The arrival of 5,000 British settlers in 1820 brought the first large body of Europeans not to be assimilated into Afrikaans culture. As in Ceylon, Guiana, and other Dutch colonies that the British took over at this time, English came to replace Dutch in government and education, although the Afrikaners firmly maintained it in their religion with the 1637 Statenbijbel in standard Dutch. Afrikaners had begun moving north into the interior in search of better pastures from the middle of the eighteenth century, but when the British abolished slavery in 1833, some 12,000 Afrikaners left the Cape for what became Natal in the east, despite Zulu resistance. However, Britain annexed Natal in 1843 and many of the Afrikaner farmers or Boers

46


migrated to the interior, establishing the republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in the 1850s, where standard Dutch was made the official language despite the difficulty it presented many Afrikaans speakers. The British, Dutch, and even many of its own speakers looked down upon the Boers’ “corrupt kitchen Dutch” and considered it incapable of serving any serious purpose. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century some Afrikaners, feeling increasingly threatened by the political and cultural dominance of the English, began a movement to promote the use of their language in writing (Deumert 1999). Citing the example of the Negerhollands Bible for the Danish West Indies, it was proposed that the Statenbijbel should be translated into Afrikaans to facilitate its use among the Coloureds and poor whites who had difficulty reading Dutch. Despite long opposition, this was finally accomplished in 1933, and the translation also came into general use among whites. Support for the new literary language remained divided until the Boer War (1899–1902), after which the victorious British forced the Boer republics to join the Union of South Africa. 2.2.4

Afrikaans: the twentieth century

In 1910 “Dutch” was given equal status with English within the Union of South Africa, but in 1925 it was made explicit that “Dutch” included the newly standardized Afrikaans language, i.e. Afrikaans Nederlands or ‘African Dutch.’ The three main regional varieties of the language are (West) Cape Afrikaans, Orange River Afrikaans, and East Cape Afrikaans. East Cape formed the basis of the standard, but also has nonstandard sociolects. West Cape (Kaaps) is spoken in the area that made up the Cape Colony in 1750 and has many features of the nonstandard speech of the Coloureds, who today make up 54 percent of Cape Town’s population (Makhudu 1984:134). Orange River Afrikaans, spoken by by the descendants of the Khoi who retreated to the Orange River area in the eighteenth century, is “widely recognized as a pidgin or creole” variety in South Africa (van Rensburg 1989:136), although it appears to be a post-creole. It is spoken by several groups, including the Griqua, a group of mixed Khoi, slave, and white ancestry that migrated from the Cape Colony north to the Orange River area in the eighteenth century (Rademeyer 1938; van Rensburg 1989). It is also spoken by the Rehoboth Basters, the descendants of Dutch farmers who married Khoi women on the northern fringes of the Cape Colony in the eighteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century they were driven north by encroaching white farmers and attacking indigenous peoples; in 1870 they settled in Rehoboth in what was to become the German protectorate of South


47

West Africa in 1884, thus bringing Afrikaans to the area that recently became independent Namibia (van der Merwe 1989, 1990; Luijks 2000). Finally, nonstandard Afrikaans is also spoken by many of the 127,000 Cape Malays, descendants of the slaves brought from Asia. It was their Islamic clergy who first put Afrikaans into writing in the nineteenth century, using Arabic script. Kotzé (1984, 1989) considers the Cape Malays “a small but linguistically significant core group, since it can be shown that the nonstandard characteristics that are viewed as typical of Cape Afrikaans are quantitatively strongest in the speech of this community” (1984:42). 2.3

BVP: the sociolinguistic setting of its development

2.3.1

BVP: the sixteenth century

Because African slaves were brought to Brazil in such great numbers that they and their descendants came to make up the majority of the population in certain parts of the country – and of the country as a whole at certain points in its history – it would be reasonable to expect a more fully restructured variety of Portuguese to have developed there, much as creoles developed under apparently similar sociolinguistic conditions elsewhere. As Guy (1981) put it: From the social historical standpoint, our question probably would not be “Was Portuguese creolized in Brazil?”, but rather “How could it possibly have avoided creolization?” (1981:309)

However, there is a paucity of evidence to show that a widespread, stable creole ever became firmly established in Brazil. This may be due to the way in which differing sociolinguistic conditions there affected language transmission. Yet certain features of the nonstandard variety indicate the influence of Amerindian, African, and creole languages. Brazil eventually became the world’s greatest importer of slaves, receiving 38 percent of all Africans brought to the New World, as compared to the 4.5 percent who went to British North America (Curtin 1975:41). But the point at which these Africans arrived, the sociolinguistic situation they found, and the portion of the population they made up are factors of crucial importance regarding the degree of restructuring that Portuguese underwent in Brazil. In one important respect Brazil was unlike the first places where Portuguese-based creoles became established: the Cape Verde Islands and São Tome, which the Portuguese colonized in 1462 and 1485, respectively. These islands off the coast of western Africa had no inhabitants

48


when the Portuguese came upon them, so there was no local language to learn when settlers arrived from Portugal and slaves were brought from the African mainland, putting their languages in contact and leading to the development of new creoles within a generation. Brazil, by contrast, was already inhabited. When the Portuguese began to explore its vast coast after 1500, they found it to be inhabited by Amerindians speaking closely related varieties of Tupi. As the Portuguese established settlements from the 1530s onwards, contact among the various Indian subgroups increased and there evolved a common Tupi vocabulary fitting into a shared syntactic framework which was relatively free of complicated morphology. This koine, which the Portuguese also learned for contact with the Indians, came to be called the L´ıngua Geral, or general language for communication throughout the colony. Sampaio (1928:3) claimed that during the first two centuries of colonization, L´ıngua Geral was the principal language of three-quarters of Brazil’s population, albeit with growing bilingualism in Portuguese. Even the Brazilian-born Portuguese settlers, often raised by Tupi-speaking nurses, used the language with ease and seemed to have a strong emotional attachment to it (Reinecke 1937:692). There was a great deal of intermarriage between the Portuguese and Tupis, and in some parts of Brazil people of such mixed ancestry came to predominate; their mother tongue was L´ıngua Geral. One such group was the bandeirantes of São Paulo, who carried the flag of Portugal ever further inland in their search for slaves and gold, taking their language with them. Thus it is not clear what language(s) African slaves encountered on arriving in Brazil during the colony’s first two hundred years. They may well have had to learn L´ıngua Geral more often than Portuguese, as suggested by Reinecke (1937:549), so that during the linguistically crucial first generations of the colony there was little opportunity for a fully restructured variety of Portuguese to become established among African slaves unless they had brought such a language with them from Africa. If Africans first learned L´ıngua Geral as a second language and their descendants learned it as their mother tongue, their later shift to a Tupi-influenced but unrestructured variety of Portuguese along with the rest of the population during the eighteenth century would have established such Portuguese as a second language to be learned by slaves newly arrived from Africa. Under these circumstances there would have been no need for the establishment of a creole. In any case, the first generations of Africans arriving in Brazil did not encounter the same kind of linguistic situation as those coming to the off-shore islands of Africa did, or indeed as did those arriving on Caribbean islands whose native populations had all but disappeared. Brazil also differed from most of the areas where creole languages developed in that Africans or their descendants made up only a quarter of


49

Dominica Martinique St Lucia Barbados

Caribbean Sea ao raç ire Cu Bona

Aruba

St Vincent Grenada

Tobago

A T

Trinidad

Caracas

VENEZUELA

Georgetown Paramaribo Cayenne Dutch G

L

O

A C

N E

T

A

I

C

N

British

U I French SURA N A

Bogotá

INA

COLOMBIA

M

RIO BRANCO

AMAPÁ

P A R Á MARANHÃO

AMAZONAS

U N I T E D O F

GUAPORÉ

S T A T E S

PIAUÍ

PARAIBA PER

N AM

BUCO ALAGOAS

B R A Z I L

SERGIPE

BAHIA

MATO GROSSO

PERU

RIO GRANDE DO NORTE

CEARÁ

GOIÁS

Salvador

Brasilia

La Paz

BOLIVIA Helvécia

C H I L E

SÃO PAULO

A

Asunción

G PARANÁ

São Paulo

RIO DE JANEIRO

Rio de Janeiro

SANTA CATARINA

ARGENTINA

ESPIRITO SANTO

AY

P A C I F I C

PA R

U

O C E A N

MINAS GERAIS

ATLANTIC O C E A N

RIO GRANDE DO SUL 0

URUGUAY

0

250

500 250

750 km 500 miles

Map 3 South America, 1830–1956. Originally published in Darby and Fuller (1978) The New Cambridge Modern History Atlas (Cambridge University Press).

the population from 1600 to 1650; it was not until the 1770s that they constituted over 50 percent of the population (Marques 1976:359, 435), reaching 65 percent in 1818 (Reinecke 1937:556). Yet whites, the group most likely to speak unrestructured Portuguese, never made up more than a third of the population until the second half of the nineteenth century (see table 6), when slavery ended and the linguistic dice had already been

50


Table 6. Estimated population of Brazil, 1538–1890

African-born Creole Africans Integrated Amerindians Mixed European-born Creole whites

1538–1600

1601–1700

1701–1800

1801–1850

1851–1890

20% – 50

30% 20 10

20% 21 8

12% 19 4

2% 13 2

– 30 –

10 25 5

19 22 10

34 14 17

42 17 24

(Based on Mussa 1991:163, cited in Mello 1997:85.)

cast. Thus there were proportionately fewer whites in Brazil than in most of the American South, although they always exceeded 20 percent, the maximum proportion of native speakers associated with full creolization (see introduction to this chapter). Yet national population figures for large countries can obscure the local conditions of particular speech communities. For example, in what became the United States whites soon far outnumbered all other groups, but blacks still predominated in certain areas such as coastal South Carolina and Georgia, where a creolized variety of English developed and survived (section 2.1.3). The same seems likely to have been the case in the sugar-growing areas of Brazil, where labor-intensive production required plantations with a majority of African slaves since Indians proved unsuitable for this work. Lucchesi (2000:42ff.) claims that “the expansion of the Portuguese language in Brazil until the beginning of the 18th century occurred parallel to the expansion of the sugar-plantation society in the Northeast” [my translation]. Marques (1976:362) points out that each sugar mill in Brazil required a minimum of 80 slaves, besides the hundreds needed to work the fields. The number of such mills increased rapidly, from 1 in 1533, to 60 in 1570, 130 in 1585, and 346 in 1629. According to Silva Neto (1963:79), of the 14,000 Africans in Brazil in 1597, almost all were in the sugargrowing settlements of Bahia and Pernambuco. At this time there were 10,000 Africans in Pernambuco, making up fully half of its population, which also included some 8,000 whites and 2,000 Indians. Moreover, these Africans constituted a considerable proportion of the small total population of Brazil at this linguistically crucial early stage (numbering only a few tens of thousands), making it more susceptible to influence from the fully creolized Portuguese brought to Brazil from Africa. Evidence that a more highly restructured variety of Portuguese had been the


51

language of coastal Brazilian sugar plantations rather than L´ıngua Geral can be deduced from the fact that many of the earliest Portuguese sugar planters and their slaves came to Brazil by way of São Tomé (Ivens Ferraz 1979:19). The Portuguese had settled this island in the decades following their discovery of it in 1470, intermarrying with the slaves they brought from the mainland. A creolized variety of Portuguese evolved along with the cultivation of sugar on large plantations. The prosperity that this brought to São Tomé during the first half of the sixteenth century waned during the second half as slave rebellions and maroon attacks eventually destroyed the island’s economy. The Portuguese began abandoning São Tomé in large numbers, many going to Brazil (ibid.). It is unlikely that they would have left behind the greatest financial asset needed to establish sugar plantations in Brazil, namely their creole-speaking slaves from São Tomé. Moreover, there are abundant phonological, syntactic, and lexical features linking São Tomé Creole Portuguese and BVP (Holm 1992b). 2.3.2

BVP: the seventeenth century

Further evidence of the use of restructured Portuguese on Brazilian sugar plantations comes from New Holland, the empire that the Dutch tried to carve out of northeastern Brazil from the modern states of Sergipe to Maranhão from 1630 to 1654. After the Dutch seized this area from Portugal in their struggle for independence from Spain (united with Portugal under a single monarch from 1580 to 1640), they found allies in many of the marranos (crypto-Jews) who had settled in Brazil to avoid the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. The more tolerant Dutch allowed them to revert openly to Judaism, and they were joined by other Sephardic Jews whose families had earlier fled the Iberian Peninsula to take refuge in Holland (Goodman 1987). The Dutch and the Sephardic Jews seem likely to have communicated in Spanish or Portuguese (or restructured varieties of these) with one another and with their Brazilian slaves, mistresses, and wives. Few Dutch women came to Brazil, which is why the Netherlanders were unable to establish their language or culture there during the period they held this colony – a full generation (Boxer 1965:227). When the Portuguese regained the area in 1654, the Dutch and most of their Jewish collaborators were forced to leave Brazil. Many resettled in the Carribean regions, particularly in Dutch holdings in the Guianas and on islands such as Cura¸cao (Goodman 1987). Modern Papiamentu, the creole language of the Netherlands Leeward Antilles (Cura¸cao, Aruba, and Bonaire), reveals unmistakable Portuguese influence in its most basic vocabulary (Schuchardt 1882:895; Jeuda

52


1991). In fact Hancock (1969b:26) identifies Papiamentu as an offshoot of a Brazilian variety of pidgin or creole Portuguese. However, the Portuguese element in Papiamentu has been obscured by the creole’s three centuries of close contact with the Spanish spoken by the inhabitants of nearby Venezuela. There is also a strong Portuguese element in the lexicon of Saramaccan, an English-based creole spoken in the interior of Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana). This has taditionally been attributed to the influence of the Portuguese-speaking Jewish plantation owners who fled from Brazil and made up 75 percent of the entire European population of Suriname at the end of the seventeenth century (Rens 1953:22). However, there has been considerable debate as to how Portuguese actually came to influence Papiamentu and Saramaccan. It has been suggested (e.g. Lenz 1928; Voorhoeve 1973) that this influence was via a pidginized variety of Portuguese used in the slave trade between Africa and the New World, which was partly learned by slaves and carried over into the languages which evolved in the Caribbean area. However Goodman (1987) presented considerable evidence supporting the view that the Portuguese element in Papiamentu, Saramaccan, and certain other creoles in the Caribbean area (e.g. the French-based creole of Guyane) was introduced by refugees from Dutch Brazil. If this is indeed the case, then Portuguese, whatever its degree of restructuring, must have been the language of Brazil’s coastal sugar plantations since at least the early 1600s. Under these circumstances, L´ıngua Geral could not have acted as a buffer to prevent the restructuring of Portuguese there. It has recently been debated that “no slaves could have been taken from Brazil to Surinam” (Ladhams 1999:232) and thus “the origin of the Portuguese element in the Surinam Creoles should not be sought in Brazil” (Arends 1999:204). However, Goodman (1987:368) asserted that “According to van Dantzig (1968:77) they took slaves along as well” and pointed out that the 1,200 refugees from Brazil who landed in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1654 included 300 slaves (1987:391). Smith (1999) reasons that the presence of pidgin Portuguese features found in the Portuguese-derived vocabulary of Saramaccan but not in Sranan supports their origin in Dutch Brazil. To avoid a lengthy digression here, the interested reader is referred to these articles, but it should be pointed out that the transfer of restructured Portuguese from Pernambuco to the Caribbean area does not require the massive transfer of slaves: it is well known that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whites were often proficient in creole languages and appear to have been the agent of their transfer in some cases, such as that of Creole French to Louisiana; cf. Hull (1983).


53

Furthermore, there is linguistic evidence that the Portuguese taken to the Caribbean area arrived via Brazil rather than Africa. Reinecke (1937:467) noted that the Saramaccan word plakkeh (now spelled pulakë) “a kind of eel” comes from the north Brazilian form poraquê (elsewhere in Brazil piraquê) “electric eel,” ultimately from Tupi pura’ke (da Cunha et al. 1982). Since the Saramaccans were not in direct contact with Tupi speakers, this word must have come into their language via Brazilian Portuguese. There is further evidence in the Sranan word kabúgru (whence Dutch karboeger) “a mixed Amerindian/negro group living in Western Suriname” from the Brazilian Portuguese word caboclo (Smith 2002:151). The latter, meaning “indio; mesti¸co de branco com indio” is derived from Tupi kariuoka “homen branco” (da Cunha et al. 1982). There is also linguistic evidence that the Portuguese brought to the Caribbean area had already undergone some restructuring. Wullschlägel (1856:328) notes a proverb in Suriname that he tentatively identifies as “Neger-portugiesisch?”: “Praga beroegoe no mata caballo.” This is apparently the Brazilian proverb, “Praga de burrico não mata cavalo,” or “The braying of an ass doesn’t kill a horse,” i.e. “The insults of the weak don’t affect the strong” (Diva Penha Lopes, personal communication). The lack of de “of ” in the NP “praga beroegoe” indicates a possessive construction also found in BVP and São Tomé CP (4.3.3). It should be noted that beroegoe also shows the effect of vowel harmony (Holm 2000a:151); this and the zero articles in both the Surinamese and modern BVP proverb indicate restructuring (Inverno and Swolkien 2001). Even though the English-based Surinamese creoles could have influenced these last two features, they have a different possessive construction [possessor + possessed], whereas the construction in the proverb is praga beroegoe, or [possessed + possessor]. Thus this proverb is perhaps the best indirect evidence that the language of Brazil’s coastal sugar-growing areas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was Portuguese (rather than L´ıngua Geral) and that this Portuguese had undergone some degree of restructuring. Besides L´ıngua Geral, another factor complicates the reconstruction of language transmission in Brazil as this might relate to restructuring. This factor is the retention of African languages over many generations and among large numbers of people. Such retention was largely absent from other New World societies in which creoles developed, where Africans were often put into linguistically heterogeneous groups to prevent communication in a language that their overseers could not understand in order to foil possible plots to revolt. However, in Brazil linguistic homogeneity seems to have been valued since it enabled older generations of slaves to teach newcomers more easily (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller

54


1985:33). Until 1600, most slaves came from West Africa; from then until about 1660, Bantu-speaking Angolan and Congolese slaves predominated, and afterwards they came from both parts of Africa (Marques 1976:361). Influence from both sources is confirmed in the etymological study of African words surviving in Bahian BVP by Castro and Castro (1980:46): of 1,955 words, 967 (49.5 percent) were of Bantu origin, while 988 (50.5 percent) were of West African origin. Mendon¸ca (1933:28) claimed that the West African or Sudanic people predominated in Bahia, while Bantu speakers predominated to the north and south, but this may be an oversimplification. In the northeastern part of Brazil, African languages seem likely to have been used as lingua francas in the quilombos or maroon settlements established by escaped slaves (Reinecke 1937:557). In 1579, a Jesuit priest wrote that the foremost enemies of the colonizers are revolted Negroes from Guiné in some mountain areas, from where they raid and give much trouble, and the time may come when they will dare to attack and destroy farms as their relatives do on the island of São Thomé. (quoted by Kent 1979:174)

That time came when the Portuguese were distracted by the attacking Dutch in 1630 and the great “Negro Republic” of Palmares was established in Pernambuco. Its fortified villages had thousands of inhabitants with well-organized governments; Palmares endured until the end of the seventeenth century (ibid.). Freitas (1978:48, my translation) notes that Os palmarinos falavam uma l´ıngua toda sua, que compreendia formas da l´ıngua portuguesa, das l´ınguas africanas e secundariamente, das l´ınguas ind´ıgenas. Quando queriam se entender com eles, moradores e autoridades recorriam a “l´ınguas” ou seja intérpretes. [The inhabitants of Palmares spoke a language that was all their own and included elements from Portuguese, African languages and, to a lesser degree, Indian languages. When they wanted to communicate with them, the local Europeans and their authorities took recourse to “linguists” or interpreters.]

Clear evidence that the Portuguese of such maroons was restructured can be found in the text of a quilombo song: Folga nego, branco não vem cá Se vié, o diabo há de levá . . . . Pau há de levá. [Relax, black [friend], Whites won’t come here If they come, the devil take them . . . They’ll get a good beating.] (Freitas 1978:43; translated by Heliana Mello)


2.3.3

55

BVP: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was estimated that in Bahia the proportion of blacks to whites [was] twenty to one . . . in the city of São Salvador alone twenty-five thousand Negroes were catechized and instructed in the Angolan tongue. (Nash 1926:127)

There is further evidence that Portuguese – or a restructured variety of it – was the language of the coastal sugar plantations rather than L´ıngua Geral. The latter clearly predominated in São Paulo and other areas where Indians and mesti¸cos worked on fazendas raising cattle. The shift from L´ıngua Geral to Portuguese in the interior seems to have been triggered by the gold rush in Minas Gerais during the first half of the eighteenth century. Although the gold had been discovered by bandeirantes who spoke L´ıngua Geral, Portuguese soon become the common language in the mining region (Carvalho 1977:27). This was due not only to the great influx of men from Portugal but also to the great influx of African slaves (to do the actual mining) from the coastal sugar-growing areas where such slaves were plentiful and “the inhabitants were proficient in Portuguese; we believe that they had never actually abandoned the language since their commercial activity kept them in constant contact with Portugal” (Carvalho 1977:27). However, an African-based lingua franca was also used during the gold rush in Minas Gerais, apparently among newly arrived slaves from Africa. From a detailed description of this Lingoa Minna written in 1731 and published two centuries later (Peixoto 1945), Hazel Carter (personal communication) determined that the language was based on Fon, an eastern variety of Ewe. As the mines became exhausted after the 1750s, there was a general movement of population away from Minas Gerais, and this probably played a key role in spreading a newly leveled variety of Portuguese – the forerunner of BVP – throughout the settled parts of Brazil, at the expense of L´ıngua Geral. As Portuguese gradually came to predominate, it is likely that successive generations of bilinguals had decreasing competence in L´ıngua Geral and increasing competence in Portuguese. It would be surprising indeed if there had not been considerable interpenetration of the two languages on all linguistic levels under such conditions. Describing the linguistic situation in the Amazon region in the nineteenth century as this language shift moved deeper inland, Hartt (1872:72) noted that many Portuguese idioms have crept into the Tup´ı; but on the other hand, the Portuguese, as spoken in the Amazonas, besides containing a large admixture of Tup´ı words, is corrupted by many Tup´ı idioms.

56


It would seem probable, therefore, that the L´ıngua Geral variety of Tupi left a strong mark on the BVP of rural peasants (Silveira Bueno 1963). The process involved was language shift, which can involve considerable restructuring (Thomason and Kaufman 1988:110–146). Different linguists’ attribution of BVP features to the influence of both Tupi and West African languages presents no real dilemma: such totally unrelated languages may well coincidentally share structural similarities (e.g. syllabic structure rules, progressive nasalization, a lack of many kinds of inflections) which simply converged to reinforce one another in shaping BVP. African languages continued to be spoken by large numbers of people in Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yoruba became established as a lingua franca in the state of Bahia and as late as 1900 an observer noted that The Nagoˆ [i.e. Yoruba] language is in fact much spoken at Bahia by almost all the old Africans of different nationalities and by a large number of [black] creoles and mulattoes. When in this state it is said that a person speaks the L´ıngua da Costa, invariably the Nagoˆ is meant. (Nina Rodrigues, quoted by Reinecke 1937:553)

Although it is no longer spoken natively, Yoruba is still used as a liturgical language in Bahia (Holm and Oyedeji 1984). I recorded it there in 1983 during a religious ceremony, and its identity was later confirmed by Oyedeji, a native speaker from Nigeria who listened to the tapes. Remnants of Bantu languages have also been identified (Fry, Vogt, and Gnerre 1981). Such long-term survival of African languages as lingua francas among different African ethnolinguistic groups and their descendants seems likely to have worked against the retention of an early Portuguese creole for such communication since it was not needed for this purpose. It is important to stress that European Portuguese continued to reassert itself in Brazil. Silva Neto (1963:68ff.) notes that when the Portuguese court fled to Rio de Janeiro during the Napoleonic wars, “tudo se foi re-europeizando” [“everything was re-Europeanized”], from houses to clothes. In 1808 Rio had 50,000 inhabitants and the number of whites was much lower than blacks; by 1835 the population was 110,000 with many more whites, given the arrival of 24,000 Portuguese and a large number of other Europeans (ibid.). To this day, Rio’s inhabitants are known for their palatalization of plural -s in the European Portuguese manner, a prestige pronunciation that occurs only sporadically outside Brazil’s former captial. Political independence from Portugal in 1822 saw the creation of an empire that lasted until the abolition of slavery in 1888. However, the establishment of independent Brazilian cultural institutions did not mean that the grammar of European Portuguese lost any


57

status in education. Silva Neto (1963:90) quotes a priest in the northeastern province of Maranhão writing in 1819: At present the language of this country is Portuguese; educated people speak it very well; however, among the rustics there is a certain dialect, which I believe is the result of the mixture of the languages of the diverse nations that have inhabited Maranhão.

A sociolinguistic factor relevant to the survival of a restructured vernacular was race relations. Although observers from societies with more rigid racial caste systems sometimes believe Brazil to be a country without racism, black Brazilians are usually quick to disabuse one of this notion. Although Brazilians of all races have been equal before the law since abolition, without any form of officially sanctioned segregation, blacks still tend to be poor and powerless, while the rich and powerful still tend to be white or light skinned. An important historical factor determining the present racial structure of Brazilian society was the official sixteenthcentury colonial policy of encouraging Portuguese men to marry native women in their colonies in order to establish a local part-Portuguese community with cultural and political loyalty to Portugal. In Portuguese India the founding governor, Afonso de Albuquerque, carried out this policy by granting such couples a state-subsidized dowry (Marques 1976:249). As a country with a small population – just over a million during this period (Boxer 1969:49) – it was the only way Portugal could maintain its far-flung trading empire, extending from Brazil to what is today Indonesia. Portuguese women simply remained at home in Portugal during this early period. Marques (1976) notes that on the whole the [early] social patterns of Brazil copied that of the Atlantic islands, particularly Cape Verde and São Tomé. . . . cross-breeding derived from the needs of nature, not from race equality. The whites were always considered superior to the others and held most offices of leadership, although tolerance and respect toward both mulattoes and mamelucos [Portuguese-Tupi mesti¸cos] reached a higher level in Brazil than probably anywhere else (1976:255, 360)

2.3.4

BVP: the twentieth century

The greater frequency with which Portuguese men fathered children by their slave women probably led to the far higher rate of manumission in Brazil than in the Caribbean. Racial mixing worked against the maintenance of the rigid caste system that helped to preserve creolized language varieties elsewhere. Later, as Afro-Brazilians had fewer barriers to face in rising socially, they also had more incentive to learn Standard Brazilian

58


Portuguese as a mark of their standing; such circumstances seem likely to have accelerated the loss of non-Portuguese features in their speech. As education started to become more widely available, Sousa de Silveira noted in 1921 that “even the Negroes speak better today than they used to” (reprinted in Pimentel Pinto 1981:27). The language-related problems facing modern Brazil are still daunting: out of a total population of 165 million, 17 percent, or some 28 million Brazilians, are illiterate (Famighetti 1997:746) and likely to speak only nonstandard BVP. Azevedo (1989:869) notes that Vernacular speakers must learn to read and write in a dialect they neither speak nor fully understand, a circumstance that may have a bearing on the high dropout rate in elementary schools: as recently as 1983 only 70 out of every thousand students reportedly finished the 8th grade.

Today BVP is the language usually spoken by lower class Brazilians with little education. It differs considerably from Standard Brazilian Portuguese (SBP), the literary language usually spoken by educated middleand upper-class Brazilians, particularly in formal circumstances. It should be noted that BVP is not a variety spoken only by black Brazilians. The most divergent varieties of BVP and SBP are the extremities of a continuum of lects that relate more to social class and education than to race. Although blacks are certainly overrepresented in the lower class and underrepresented in the upper class, the structure of Brazilian society is such that all sociolects have speakers of all races, just as other aspects of Brazilian culture are shared by all ethnic groups. Social variables for language usage are further complicated by the fact that most middle- and upper-class Brazilians are in fact bidialectal: Educated speakers are often ambivalent about the vernacular, caught as they are between a prescriptive norm based largely on written models . . . and a linguistic reality that departs considerably from that ideal model. In a society where literacy and grammaticality of language use are held as the hallmark of education, such ambivalence is inevitable when one is aware that the occurrence of stigmatized features in one’s own speech is too spontaneous and frequent to be dismissed as resulting from occasional slips of the tongue. It is apparent that rules considered typical of the vernacular are present in the native linguistic repertory of educated speakers, who acquire the standard largely through normative coaching, which includes not only formal school instruction but also pressure from family and peers (Azevedo l989:862)

Thus educated Brazilians are comparable to educated African Americans, who use the standard in writing and speaking in formal situations but often use the nonstandard in other social situations to signal intimacy or solidarity (1989:868). It is often not clear which variety is a speaker’s


59

first or dominant language. There are rural usages that are unlikely to be found in the speech of educated Brazilians, although many such usages have become part of urban sociolects through immigration from the countryside. 2.3.5

Helvécia Portuguese

The most extreme case of nonstandard rural usage that has been documented is the restructured Portuguese spoken in the village of Helvécia in the state of Bahia (HP), recorded by Silveira Ferreira in 1961 but published some years later (1985). HP is described by Baxter (1987, 1992, 1997), and Lucchesi (2000). The paucity of the information available about the social history and linguistic structure of HP makes it difficult to extrapolate about the general sociolinguistic conditions that shaped this variety. Discovered during the course of a dialect survey of the state of Bahia, HP was described in a short article (Silveira Ferreira 1985) that received little attention until recently. Helvécia (from the Latin name for Switzerland) is an isolated, onestreet village in the southern part of the state of Bahia, which Silveira Ferreira reached by jeep, traveling for seven hours over a rough road from Nanuque. She stayed there only one night, but the young people she first met (who spoke the usual variety of regional BVP) diziam que naquela cidade havia muita gente que falava diferente, “engra¸cado,” principalmente os mais velhos, e acrescentavam ainda que muitas vezes era dif´ıcil, para eles mismos, filhos da terra, entenderem. [“They said that in that town there were a lot of people who spoke differently, ‘funny,’ mainly the oldest people, and they added that many times it was difficult even for them – natives of the town – to understand them.”] (Silveira Ferreira 1985:23)

Helvécia was founded in the eighteenth century by Swiss (speaking both German and French) and Germans, who bought slaves in the state of Bahia in order to raise coffee. It was first referred to in 1818 under the name Colonia ˆ Leopoldina, and described forty years later (Tolsner ¨ 1858, cited in Neeser 1951) as a prosperous community of 40 plantations with 200 whites (mostly German and Swiss, with some French and Brazilians) and 2,000 blacks. Lucchesi (2000) notes that Helvécia had a relatively high proportion of African-born slaves (some 40 percent) at this time. Silveira Ferreira concluded that With the decline of the coffee industry, the whites gradually abandoned the area, leaving as their legacy the name of the town, mixed descendants, and some family names. The blacks, however, remained isolated, continuing to speak a creole that must have had general currency among them since vestiges of it persisted until 1961. (1985:22)

60


Lucchesi (2000:84) describes HP as the result of semi-creolization. From what is known about the community’s history, its main distinguishing feature is that it was founded by non-native speakers of Portuguese. German seems likely to have served as a lingua franca among the first generations of Europeans, who probably learned much of their Portuguese from their slaves in order to communicate with them. If this was the case, the Europeans’ Portuguese could not have served – as seems likely elsewhere in Brazil – as a model for decreolization. Since the slaves were originally purchased in Bahia in the eighteenth century, they must have already known some Portuguese – apparently in a restructured or second language form, to judge from the variety that survived there until the twentieth century. It is possible that this variety was also influenced by the second language Portuguese of the first generation of Europeans, although their children must have become proficient in the Portuguese of the slaves. The isolation of the community was certainly not complete, since some Brazilians joined it, slaves from Africa were brought in (at least until abolition in 1888), and trade with the outside brought it prosperity. Contact with the less-restructured BVP of the region seems likely to have increased over the years, bringing the speech of younger people more in line with that of other communities in the area. Although the sociolinguistic history of Helvécia Portuguese is not typical of BVP varieties in a number of respects, and its existence cannot be viewed as unambiguous evidence that fully creolized Portuguese was ever widely spoken in Brazil, it does demonstrate that Portuguese was restructured there to varying degrees. 2.4

NSCS: the sociolinguistic setting of its development

Today the Caribbean basin constitutes a generally definable dialect area of American Spanish, although there is some disagreement on exactly how far inland this dialect is spoken on the mainland. It includes the varieties found in the Greater Antilles (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico), pockets in Trinidad and Guyana, the Caribbean coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, and some coastal areas of Central America and Mexico, as well as offshoots in the Miami and New York City areas of the United States. 2.4.1

NSCS: the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

The Spanish colonized many parts of this area for over a century before the establishment of British, French, and Dutch colonies in the seventeenth century. The indigenous Arawakan languages of the Greater


61

U . S . A . AT L A N T I C OCEAN Miami Gulf of Mexico

Mexico Puerto Rico

Cuba Mexico Belize Coastal area of Guerrero and Oaxaca

Guatemala El Salvador

Small groups of Afro-Hispanics without numerical importance.These groups probably never spoke an Afro-Hispanic variety

Jamaica Honduras & Nicaragua

Haiti Dominican Republic Caribbean Sea Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire Trinidad

Cartagena Panama

Caracas

Costa Rica

Barlovento Parts of the

Bogotá state of Zulia The lowlands of Colombia (Chocó, Cauca Valley, Nariño)

Colombia Popayán

Ecuadorian coast (especially the province of Esmeraldas)

State of Miranda

Venezuela

Patía (Colombia)

Chota Valley (Ecuador)

Quito

Ecuador

Guayaquil P A C I F I C

O

C

E

A

N

Brazil Peruvian coast (especially between Trujillo and Chiclayo)

Per u Lima

Peruvian coast (especially between Chincha and Ica)

B ol i v i a

Map 4 ‘Localizacion ´ aproximada de a´ reas afro-hispanas en América’. Originally published in Perl/Schwegler (eds) (1998) América Negra: panorámica actual de los estudios lingü´ısticos sobre variedades hispanas, portuguesas y criollas (Iberoamericana). Reproduced by kind permission of Iberoamericana.

Antilles died out during the course of the sixteenth century as their speakers were virtually exterminated by forced labor and disease or absorbed into the Hispanicized population. During the same period the large-scale importation of African slaves began, but in most parts of the Caribbean basin the populations of the Spanish colonies did not become overwhelmingly black by the middle of the eighteenth century as did those of the British, French, and Dutch, who in the main concentrated more on laborintensive sugar plantations. Until the nineteenth century the Spanish islands generally had small farms raising various crops (e.g. tobacco, coffee,

62


cattle) on which a small number of slaves worked alongside poor whites and a steadily increasing number of free mulattos. It has been claimed that “Whites in Iberian America felt less hostility toward and a closer affinity with people of color, especially if they were light-skinned, than did the French or Anglo-Saxons” (Cohen 1980:108). Conditions on the Spanish islands were thus more conducive to the Africans’ linguistic and cultural assimilation than they were on the overwhelmingly black sugar islands with the rigid racial caste system of plantation slavery (Mintz 1971). Spanish slave laws were also more liberal; under the Cuban system called coartación, slaves could purchase their own freedom by paying instalments. Through this and more prevalent manumission, over 40 percent of Cuba’s non-white population was free by 1774 (Laurence 1974:492) – although these figures were to change in the next century. At this time Cuba’s population was 56 percent white, 18 percent free colored, and 26 percent slave (1974:495). During this period slaves accounted for only 10 percent of Puerto Rico’s population (Reinecke 1937:266), although at the the beginning of colonization in the sixteenth century whites were outnumbered four to one by Indians and African slaves (Reinecke et al. 1975:144). De Granda (1970b:76) interprets the linguistic data in Alvarez Nazario (1961) as evidence of a Puerto Rican creole that existed until the nineteenth century. In the Dominican Republic, where over 80 percent of the population has some African ancestry (Reinecke et al. 1975:146), similar social conditions seem to have led to fairly thorough linguistic assimilation. However, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, which also has a sizeable population of African descent, there is a direct reference to an early pidgin in Sandoval (1627), a Jesuit who lived there from 1605 to 1652 (de Granda 1970a). He refers to a language used between Spaniards and African slaves of various ethnolinguistic groups, which was “corrupt Spanish, as the Negroes commonly speak it . . . influenced by the Portuguese they call the language of São Tomé” (Sandoval 1627: p. 94 of 1956 edn). This and the later emergence of Palenquero Creole Spanish in northern Colombia provide sufficient evidence that a Spanish-based pidgin based on Afro-Portuguese did in fact exist in the Caribbean, but it does not confirm the speculation of Bickerton and Escalante (1970:262) that there existed “a Spanish-based creole spoken in many parts of the Caribbean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” since we do not know (apart from Cura¸cao, where there is an unresolvable question regarding the continuity of Spanish after the Dutch takeover) the fate of pidgins and jargons that may have been spoken elsewhere in the region.


2.4.2

63

NSCS: Habla bozal in the nineteenth century

However, there is fairly clear evidence that a pidgin developed on Cuba during the nineteenth century, although it is less clear that it ever became a true creole. Large-scale sugar plantations were rapidly developed in Cuba towards the end of the eighteenth century when the Spanish attempted to gain the markets for sugar lost by the French in Saint Domingue after independent Haiti plunged into chaos. This caused the importation of slaves into Cuba to increase steadily: the proportion of the population that they made up grew from 26 percent in 1774, to 36 percent in 1817, and 43 percent in 1841. Cuba’s bozales or African-born slaves developed a language which Pichardo (1862:vii) described thus: Este lenguaje es comun ´ e idéntico en los Negros, sean de la Nacion ´ que fuesen, y se conservan eternamente, a ménos que hayan venido mui ninos: ˜ es un Castellano desfigurado, chapurrado, sin concordancia, numero, ´ declinacion, ´ ni conjugacion ´ . . . en fin, una jerga más confusa miéntras más reciente la inmigracion. ´ [This speech is uniform among the Negroes, no matter from which nation they come, and is retained throughout life, unless they came very young. It is distorted and mutilated Castilian, without concord, number, declension, or conjugation . . . in sum, a jargon the more confused the more recent the arrival.]

Based on transcriptions of the speech of aged Cubans of African descent recorded earlier in the twentieth century and published later (Cabrera 1969), Otheguy (1973) concluded that the variety was a creole (1973:335). Although he was undoubtedly right in considering it to be “related to other Caribbean Creoles . . . through a common West African origin” (1973:332), this may have been via the typological similarity of the languages which influenced both rather than via a creole family tree, since there is evidence that bozal Spanish was not a creole. Its use was confined to slaves born in Africa, so it was not a mother tongue; Pichardo (1862:iii) states quite specifically that “Los Negros Criollos hablan como los blancos del pa´ıs de su nacimiento o vecinidad” [“the Negroes born in Cuba talk like the local whites”]. However, certain features of bozal Spanish survived among rural black Cubans (Reinecke 1937:271), suggesting that there was partial nativization resulting in partial restructuring (Figueroa 1999; Ortiz 1998). 2.4.3

NSCS: the twentieth century

More recently, Green (1997:190ff.) analyzed the partially restructured variety of Dominican Spanish referred to as Pororó in Villa Mella and also

64


Table 7. Estimated proportion of whites in the Greater Antilles in the late eighteenth century Colony

Year

Percent

Source

Cuba Puerto Rico Santo Domingo

1774 1776 1794

56% 45% 34%

(Laurence 1974:495) (Alvarez Nazario 1974:76) (Lorenzino 1991:13)

spoken in Cambita, two small rural communities in the San Cristobal ´ district near Santo Domingo. A considerable proportion of their population is descended from African slaves who worked on local sugar plantations during the colonial period. Today the survival of the Afro-Hispanic roots of their culture is evident not only in the local speech variety but also in their cofrad´ıas, or brotherhoods, showing syncretism with African religious fraternities (1997:6). Green based her analysis of the grammar of this variety of NSCS on her recordings of thirty-three speakers living in these communities, ten of whom spoke basilectal varieties (1997:4). It should be said that John Lipski (personal communication, October 9, 2002) has suggested that the speech of two of these thirty-three speakers may be abnormal because they may have “a congenital and probably genetically-based problem.” This seems a somewhat impressionistic diagnosis, but I have not quoted the speech of these informants without noting that they, rather than others, used a particular structure. Finally, important new light on the relationship between fully and partially restructured Spanish in the Caribbean comes from a recent study (Schwegler and Morton 2002) documenting morphosyntactic features hitherto unknown to linguists in the regional vernacular Spanish of bilingual speakers of Palenquero Creole Spanish in Colombia. In assessing the historical likelihood of partial restructuring in the region as a whole, it has to be borne in mind that sociolinguistic conditions on each Spanish island differed to some degree. However, each colony was part of the same political, economic, and cultural system, and the similarity of the distinctive features of the Spanish spoken in each country today reflects the strength of their ties to one another during the Spanish colonial period. Although colonial census figures for the Greater Antilles are disparate, taken in different years with demographic groupings that are not always comparable, we can get an overall impression of the sociolinguistic setting for the development of NSCS if we compare the proportion of whites on each island at the end of the eighteenth century. These figures will be discussed in the concluding section, 2.6.


2.5

VLRF: the sociolinguistic setting of its development

2.5.1

VLRF: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

65

Réunion, a small volcanic island lying some 400 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, was uninhabited when the Portuguese first came upon it in 1511. It was settled in 1663 by some Frenchmen and Malagasies from Madagascar. The island, called Bourbon until 1848, became a permanant colony as an outpost of the French East India Company in 1665. In 1671 the population consisted of 36 whites, 37 Malagasies, and 3 mixed children born on the island (Papen 1978:9–10). In 1674 the colonists wrote to the company and “asked for wives, most of them having had to marry Negresses, their slaves” (quoted by Cohen 1980:49). Some young Indo-Portuguese women were brought from Daman and Surate (Chapuis forthcoming) and from Pondicherry, the last a French enclave in southeast India earlier held by Portugal (Stein 1984:90), and by 1686 the island’s population of 269 included 144 children born to French fathers and mothers who were either Indo-Portuguese, French, or Malagasy (Baker and Corne 1986:167). Chaudenson (1974:455) notes that of the 36 Frenchmen with families in 1686, 12 had Indo-Portuguese wives, 14 had Malagasy wives, and 10 had French wives. They and their children made up 75 percent of the island’s population, the rest being Malagasy and Indian slaves. The vernacular French of Réunion appears to have taken something approaching its present form during this early period. In court testimony taken some time between 1715 (Chaudenson 1974:1147) and 1723 (Baker and Corne 1982:6), a sentence appears whose features are those of modern VLRF (Hull 1979:212): “Moin la parti maron parce qu’Alexis l’homme de jardin l’était qui fait a` moin trop l’amour,” “I ran away because Alexis, the gardener, made amorous advances” (my emphasis). In modern VLRF la marks the perfect (or “passé perfectif ” according to Watbled 2002) and lete ki marks the durative past (or “passé imperfectif” [ibid.]; see section 3.5.1). Because of the latter construction, Baker and Corne (1982:111) referred to the vernacular of the early colonists as lete ki French. According to their interpretation, this variety was influenced by the French spoken as a second language by the non-French wives and slaves, and it became the first language of the children (particularly of mixed marriages) who were born on the island. During this early period of settlement, free people made up the majority of Réunion’s population, and they usually had access to at least one parent who was a native speaker of French. Although some restructuring took place under these conditions, it resulted more from the borrowing of isolated non-French features

66

Languages in Contact IN D I A N

St Denis 0 0

10 km

Ste Marie Bellepierre La Montagne

N1

5 miles

Le Port

Ste Suzanne

OC E A N

La Possession

W

Dos-d'Ane Cirque de Mallate

St Paul

IN D I A N

St Andre

in

2277

dw

a

rd

St Benoit

Salazie

id

2992 3000

2896 Trois Bassins e e w

Ste Rose

N1

a

St Leu

Plaine des Makes

LEGEND (a) Areas above 400 meters

Les Avirons

e

L

O C E A N

S

Grand Ilet

Cilaos

r

Plaine des Palmistes

d

1606

La Plaine des Caffres

Entre Deux

Etang Sale

2631

i

Tampon d

Predominantly (East) Indian

Area

e

Pierrefonds N3

St Louis

Predominantly White

Vo l c a n i c

S

Predominantly Mixed and Black Scattered groups of (East) Indians predominant Main roads

Plaine des Gregues

Petite Ile

St Pierre

N2

St Philippe St Joseph

St Denis

LEGEND (b)

0

1

Basilectal varieties of VLRF

0

3

5 miles

5

6

7

Acrolectal varieties of VLRF

10 km

2

4

Le Brulé

LePort

8 9

Dos-d'Ane 11

Grand Ilet 14

IN D I A N

18

Grand Place

12

13

17

10

20

O C E A N

Lanouvelle Trois Bassins 23

22

21

Lachaloupe

Cilaos

26

25

Tevelave 28

AF RIC A

27

29

33

30

32 34

asc ar

38

36 37

St Pierre

d ag Ma

Bois Blanc

Entre Deux

35

Réunion

24

Plaine des Cafres

Riv. St Louis

31 IND I A N OC E A N

Saint Benoit

16

19

38 40

St Philippe

Map 5 (a) ‘Carte de L’ˆıle de la Réunion’. Réunion Ethnic groups. Originally appeared in the Chaudenson (1998) Créolisation du fran¸cais et francisation du créole: Le cas de Saint-Barthélemy et de la Réunion (previously unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Degrees of


67

rather than the complete reanalysis of the base language’s structure that characterizes full-fledged pidginization and creolization. The cultivation of coffee on Réunion started in 1715, beginning a plantation system that had far-reaching effects on the island’s demography. Over the next half-century the island’s population grew from 2,000 in 1717 (of whom 45 percent were whites according to Chaudenson 1974:458–459) to 27,700 in 1767, of whom only 5,300 were free as opposed to 22,400 slaves (Papen 1978:13), brought in mainly from Madagascar and East Africa, but also from India and even West Africa. Baker and Corne (1982:111, 1986:166) hypothesize that as the proportion of the slave population rose from 50 percent to 80 percent of the total, the new slaves began a period of pidginization and creolization, leading to the emergence of the predecessor of the modern basilectal Créole des Bas (see below) and a continuum of varieties ranging from the regional varieties then spoken in France to the partially restructured vernacular lects of the island, which had already stabilized before this period began but which may have taken on additional creole features. However, the sociolinguistic situation on Réunion during the eighteenth century differed in one important respect from that of Mauritius during the same period, or that of Haiti in the late seventeenth century. In both of the latter colonies, which developed fully creolized varieties of French, there was a rapid influx of a large, non-French-speaking slave population with little access to the French used by native speakers. On Réunion, on the other hand, the first half century of settlement had led to a variety of French that had undergone only limited restructuring, which was accessible to the quarter or more of the population that consisted of slaves. This group had sufficient contact not only with the early colonists but also with the later slaves to act as an effective agent of language transmission, so that the restructuring of the local French spoken on Réunion (i.e. lete ki French in Baker and Corne’s terminology) was not as complete as the pidginization and creolization of French on Mauritius and Haiti.
A: kas ‘cupboard’ (ibid.)

However, the Afrikaans plural ending -e usually preserves the consonant lost in the singular: (82)

D: kasten > A: kaste ‘cupboards’ (ibid.)

However, this is not always the case: (83)

D: kost ‘food’ > A: kos ‘food’, kosse ‘foods’ (ibid.)

This is comparable to AAE des’ ‘desk,’ which has also undergone consonant cluster simplification (Rickford 1999:4), taking the plural form for words ending in a sibilant: desses. In Afrikaans this phenomenon has led to non-historical hypercorrect forms in nonstandard varieties: (84)

D: bus, bussen > A: bus, buste ‘bus, busses’ (Donaldson 1993:69–75) (cf. D: buste ‘bust, bossom’)

The Afrikaans plural markers -s and -e can sometimes both be used on the same noun: (85)

A: beddens ‘beds’ (cf. D: bedden, plural of bed) (ibid.)

The plural endings can also alternate in Afrikaans with different meanings, e.g. man ‘man’ becomes manne in the sense of ‘units (e.g. in war, sports)’ but mans in the sense of gender, e.g. mans en dames (cf. D mannen for both) (Burgers 1963:54). Moreover, a free morpheme unknown in standard Dutch is used in Afrikaans to form an associative plural (section 4.1.1): hulle ‘they, them’ (from dialectal Dutch hun-lui, literally ‘them-people,’ according to Lockwood 1965:210). In informal standard Afrikaans hulle can be

98


used only after [+human] nouns like pa ‘dad’ and ma ‘mom’, e.g. pahulle ‘Dad and the others’ (Makhudu 1984:64). However, in Kaaps, the nonstandard Afrikaans of Coloureds, hulle can also be used with nouns that are [−human] but [+animate], e.g. die bome- hulle ‘the trees’ (ibid.). The word goed ‘goods’ can also be used as an associative plural marker in nonstandard and Orange River Afrikaans, e.g. Ma goed ‘Mom and the others.’ Webb (1989) notes that in Khoi the reduced form of the masculine plural pronoun gu ‘they’ can be used after a noun to give it plural meaning, e.g. khoe ‘man’ becomes khoegu ‘the men.’ 4.2.2

Gender in the Afrikaans noun phrase

As mentioned above, the Dutch distinction between common gender (e.g. D de man ‘the man’) and neuter (D het huis ‘the house’) was lost in Afrikaans (die man, die huis). Because of this, the rules governing the marking of these distinctions in Dutch became opaque in Afrikaans. In Dutch, for example, attributive adjectives usually take an -e ending: (86)

D: de jonge man ‘the young man’

There is an exception to this rule before neuter singular nouns with certain determiners: (87)

D: een goed

boek ‘a good book.’

This morphosyntactic rule became a phonological rule in Afrikaans: polysyllabic adjectives take an -e (aangename weer ‘pleasant weather’) but monosyllabic adjectives (except those ending in d, f, g, s, and certain others) do not (A ‘n sterk man ‘a strong man’). The problem is that the phonological rule in Afrikaans has scores if not hundreds of exceptions; Donaldson admits, “It is impossible to formulate water-tight rules for the inflection of adjectives” (1993:170; see also Lass 1990). 4.2.3

Possession in the Afrikaans noun phrase

Possession is no longer normally indicated with inflectional morphemes on common nouns in modern Dutch (cf. Vondels werken ‘Vondel’s works’), bur rather with the preposition van ‘of ’ (de werken van Vondel). The latter is a frequent structure in standard Afrikaans as well, which also has another method of indicating possession with the particle se after nouns: (88)

A: pa se hoed ‘father’s hat.’

This is apparently an extension of the function of colloquial Dutch z’n (cf. D zijn ‘his’); z’n can be used only after masculine nouns (e.g. vader z’n hoed idem), although there is no such gender restriction on the Afrikaans

The noun phrase

99

particle. Kotzé (personal communication) notes that there is a variant of the Afrikaans structure with se which is not restricted to animates: (89)

A: Die stoel wat by die tafel staan se poot. the chair which by the table stands POSS leg ‘the leg of the chair standing by the table’

Interestingly, the Afrikaans possessive marker se, like the possessive ’s in (colloquial) English, marks the end of an NP and is not a nominal inflection, as in my aunt who lives in New Jersey’s son, or (possibly more salonfähig) the King of England’s crown. 4.2.4

Pronouns in Afrikaans

Like the European Portuguese clitic object pronouns that became free morphemes in BVP (section 4.3.4), the unemphatic personal pronouns of spoken and written Dutch were not preserved in Afrikaans, which has only the forms corresponding to the Dutch emphatic pronouns – with the sole exception of the set phrase “jy weet” ‘you know,’ in which the vowel of the pronoun tends to be reduced to a schwa, like that of the corresponding Dutch unemphatic pronoun – and, coincidentally, that of the English filler phrase, “y’ know” (Donaldson 1993:126). Otherwise singular personal pronouns in Afrikaans are quite similar to those of Dutch, marking not only case distinctions but also gender distinctions in the third person (rare in fully restructured Atlantic creoles). However, the plural personal pronouns make fewer of the Dutch case distinctions for subjects, objects, and possessives: (90)

Subject

Dutch:

1. wij 2. jullie 3. zij 1. ons 2. julle 3. hulle

Afrikaans:

Object ‘we’ ‘you’ ‘they’ ‘we’ ‘you’ ‘they’

ons jullie hen/hun ons julle hulle

Possessive ‘us’ ‘you’ ‘them’ ‘us’ ‘you’ ‘them’

ons/onze jullie hun ons julle hulle

‘our’ ‘your’ ‘their’ ‘our’ ‘your’ ‘their’

The Afrikaans plural possessive determiners above can form possessive pronouns when followed by s’n: (91)

A: ons s’n ‘ours’

Afrikaans can also form possessives through the use of se after the relative pronoun wat (section 5.2.2) and the relative and interrogative pronoun wie ‘who’:

100


(92)

A: Wie se boek is dit? ‘Whose book is this?’ (Burgers 1963:101)

When no noun is being modified, this construction also serves as a possessive pronoun: (93)

A: Wie s’n is dit? ‘Whose is this?’ (ibid.)

Compare standard Dutch “Wiens boek is dit?” or “Van wie is dit boek?” with colloquial Dutch “Wie z’n boek is dit?” (Donaldson 1984:72). The Afrikaans possessive relative pronoun construction (“Die man wie se boek ek geleen het . . .” ‘The man whose book I borrowed . . .’) is also from spoken Dutch (“De man die z’n boek ik geleend heb . . .”) rather than written Dutch (“De man wiens boek ik geleend heb . . .”). However, there is also convincing evidence that coloquial Dutch was not the only source of the se possessive construction. The converging influence of parallel particles in Khoi and Creole Portuguese is more clearly seen in the use of se and s’n after personal pronouns – constructions unknown in Dutch. In standard Afrikaans possessive pronouns are formed with s’n after the pronouns u ‘you,’ ons ‘we,’ julle ‘you (plural),’ and hulle ‘they’: (94)

A: Die boek is ons s’n. ‘The book is ours.’

Moreover, nonstandard varieties of Afrikaans use this particle to form possessive determiners in an equally un-Dutch construction: Makhudu (1984) notes the frequent occurence in Coloured Afrikaans of julle se ‘your (plural)’ (but not jy se ‘your [singular]’), while Griqua, or Orange River Afrikaans, has parallel forms: (95)

ORA: hy se huis ‘his house’ (den Besten 1978:31)

In the Khoi language Nama, the genitive particle di also occurs after pronouns as well as nouns: (96)

Nama: //êib di omi ´ [literally ‘he ’s house’], i.e. ‘his house’ (ibid.)

(The symbol // represents a voicless lateral click.) The Malayo-Portuguese genitive marker sa is also used this way: (97)

Papia Kristang CP: eli-sa mai ‘his mother’ (Hancock l969:41, 1975:229)

Furthermore, a parallel marker is used the same way in Bazaar Malay (Hancock 1975:229). Although the use of se after pronouns to form possessive determiners in nonstandard Afrikaans could be viewed as an extension of the rule for its use after nouns in standard Afrikaans (which

The noun phrase

101

could then be traced to colloquial Dutch), the case for its survival from the ancestral languages of the Griqua and Cape Malay in their restructured varieties of Afrikaans seems more convincing. Of course these sources are by no means mutually exclusive, and the most likely scenario is that their influence converged in the development of the modern Afrikaans constructions with se (den Besten 1978:38). In Afrikaans the reflexive pronouns are identical to the object pronouns: (98)

A: Die professor trek hom in sy studeerkamer terug ‘The professor retreats into his study.’ (Brachin 1985:141)

However, -self can be added for emphasis (Donaldson 1993:290). In modern Dutch, the third person singular and plural reflexive pronoun is zich (Donaldson 1984:172), a borrowing from German that did not become prevalent in Dutch until the eighteenth century (Brachin 1985:13), well after the beginning of Afrikaans. Thus Brachin (1985:141) comments on “the archaic nature of Afrikaans.” 4.3

The BVP noun phrase

The BVP noun phrase preserves the categorical gender agreement found in SBP, but tends to mark plural number only on the first item in an NP. Gender and number agreement are categorically absent in the Portuguese-based creoles and variably absent in Helvécia Portuguese, although the relevant data from the latter is very limited. BVP object pronouns differ from those of SBP in their case marking and word order, in which they resemble more the pronouns of the Atlantic creoles. 4.3.1

Number in the BVP noun phrase

SBP requires that all determiners, nouns, and adjectives in a noun phrase be marked for plural number: (99)

SBP: os livros velhos ‘the old books’

However, BVP often indicates plurality by adding -s to only the first element (usually a determiner), leaving the plural -s inflection optional on following nouns and adjectives: (100)

BVP: um dos mais velho orixás ‘one of the most ancient deities’ (Holm 1987:417) SBP: um dos mais velhos orixás

However, it is not always the first element that is marked:

102


(101)

BVP: o meus irmão ‘[the] my siblings’ (ibid.) SBP: os meus irmãos

(102)

BVP: todo os mais velho ‘all the most ancient [ones]’ (ibid.) SBP: todos os mais velhos.

Regarding the tendency of BVP noun phrases to mark only the initial element for number – Guy (1989) found that over 95 percent had such marking – this pattern may, as he suggested, represent a survival of the system of marking plurality at the beginning of noun phrases in many Niger-Congo languages. An early variety of restructured Portuguese in Brazil may have had an optional system of marking plurality comparable to that of São Tomé CP, in which n˜e, the word for ‘they,’ is used before nouns, e.g. n˜e mwala ‘the women.’ This is comparable to the parallel use for the word for ‘they’ in various African and creole languages discussed in section 4.1.1. Through decreolization, this plural marker could have been replaced by a plural form of the definite article, os (which also functions as the object pronoun ‘them’). This is suggested by the attestation of earlier BVP forms such as osêle ‘they,’ apparently a combination of a pluralizing os plus ele ‘he,’ instead of SBP eles (Mendon¸ca 1933:67). Support for this interpretation can be found in the parallel use of Cape Verdean CP uʃ ˜ ʃ (cf. the P plural indefinite article uns ‘some’) as a pluralizer: (103)

Cape Verdean CP: uʃ ˜ ʃ rapaz´˜ı ‘(some) boys’ (Almada 1961:92)

It is clear that the variable rule for -s is both phonological and morphosyntactic. As a phonological rule it operates on (synchronically) single morphemes: (104)

BVP: somo ‘[we] are’ SBP: somos

Guy (1989) found clearly monomorphemic instances such as BVP onibu ‘bus’ (SBP onibus) (personal communication). He goes on to point out that at the same time a variable syntactic rule of NP plural marking is required to account for phrases such as as vez, os espanhol, as na¸cao, ˜ because if they resulted from simple S-deletion, they should be as veze, os espanhoi, as na¸coe ˜

due to certain irregularities in the formation of some SBP plurals. Viewed historically, the variable marking for number in modern BVP makes sense only if the variety evolved from an uninflected variety which began borrowing inflections from SBP at a stage when the latter’s system of number agreement within noun phrases and between subjects and verbs was still

The noun phrase

103

opaque to speakers of BVP. The inflections were probably first applied randomly (as in decreolizing English the boy go / the boys goes / the boy goes / the boys go) in free variation. The syntactic rules of the more frequent inflections (-s and nasalization) alternating with their absence in turn led to BVP phonological rules for the same alternation that could then be applied to single morphemes. Naro and Scherre (2000) have claimed that the BVP phonological rules for the variability of -s and the nasalization of vowels were inherited from European Portuguese, but such variation is very unusual in Portugal. It is not clear from the available data whether number agreement in HP is absent or resembles that of BVP. Regarding NP number agreement in the colloquial speech of educated Brazilians, Azevedo (1989:867) notes that it is frequently that of BVP, e.g. “Prova uns paozinho” ˜ ‘Try some rolls’ (SBP paezinhos). ˜ 4.3.2

Gender in the BVP noun phrase

Gender marking appears to be categorical in both SBP and BVP. However, it is not a part of the grammar of the Atlantic creoles or most of their Niger-Congo substrate languages (Holm 1988–89:195). There is evidence that in HP there is no gender agreement between nouns (or pronouns) and adjectives: (105)

HP: ’Ela E ’mu˜itu sa’idu ‘she is very meddlesome.’ Silveira Ferreira (1985:30–31) SBP: ela e´ muito saida

Silveira Ferreira (ibid.) notes that there is an absence of gender agreement between nouns and articles in HP as well, and that nouns do not necessarily take the gender marking of SBP: (106)

HP: ‘ua ˜ a’bota ‘an abortion’ (ibid.) SBP: um aborto ˆ

The variability of gender agreement in HP is the topic of a dissertation by Lucchesi (2000), who notes that such variation is disappearing among younger speakers. He points out that its origin can only be explained by what he calls the “irregular transmission” of rules of morphology, since there are no known instances of the phonological variation of /o/ and /a/, marking masculine and feminine forms, respectively, in the history of the Portuguese language. Bonvini (2000:402) notes that in the ritual “L´ıngua dos Pretos Velhos” gender agreement within the NP is variable:

104


(107) (108)

LVP: mia povu ‘my people’ (cf. SBP: meu povo) (ibid.) LVP: tera foi kiadu ‘the earth was created’ (cf. SBP: a terra foi criada) (ibid.)

Finally, Amaral (1928 [1976]:73) notes that in the language of ex-slaves, the pronoun ele (SBP ‘he’) could also be used in reference to females, like the third person singular pronoun in basilectal Atlantic creoles and in most of the Niger-Congo languages that formed their substrate. 4.3.3

Possession in the BVP noun phrase

Possession is normally indicated by the preposition de in BVP, as in standard Portuguese: (109)

SBP: A casa de Maria ‘Maria’s house’

However, in some rural varieties of BVP the preposition can be omitted: (110)

BVP: kaza

Maria [literally ‘house Maria’] (Jeroslow 1975)

There is a parallel possessive construction in São Tomé Creole Portuguese, in which the preposition di can also be omitted: (111)

São Tomé CP: donu di losa or donu losa ‘[the] owner [of the] farm’ (Ivens Ferraz 1979:69)

4.3.4

Pronouns in BVP

One of the most striking features of BVP is the use of personal pronoun forms that can be used only for emphatic subjects in EP as direct objects in BVP, replacing the clitics of the standard: (112)

BVP: Ela chamou eu. ‘She called me’ (Azevedo l989:863) SBP: Ela chamou-me.

This usage is also frequently found in the casual speech of educated Brazilians; Azevedo recorded a linguist saying the following: (113)

BVP: . . . impediu eles de passar ‘prevented them from passing’ (Azevedo 1989:864) SBP: . . . impediu-os de passar

In many Atlantic creoles there is no distinctive case marking for subject and object pronouns. Moreover, these creoles always preserve their basic SVO word order with object pronouns, unlike Romance languages, in

The noun phrase

105

which direct and indirect object pronouns usually occur before the verb. BVP preserves this word order as well: (114)

BVP: Esses porco a´ı, nos ´ ganhemo eles. ‘Those pigs, we got them as a gift’ (ibid.) SBP: Esses porcos, nos ´ os ganhamos

Turning from personal to reflexive pronouns, the latter are an integral part of SBP grammar: (115)

SBP: João cortou-se com faca. (Mello 1997:153) ‘John cut himself with a knife.’

However, these do not commonly occur in BVP; instead, the following constructions occur: (116)

BVP: a. João cortou com faca. b. João cortou ele com faca. c. João cortou ele mesmo com faca. (ibid.)

The first BVP structure without any pronoun is found throughout the Atlantic creoles and many of their substrate languages, in which any transitive verb can have not only an active meaning but also a passive one if its subject is a plausible object: (117)

Papiamentu CS: E

yama Maria. ‘She is called Mary.’ (Holm 1988:83) cf. S: Ella se llama Mar´ıa.

(118) (119)

São Tomé CP: E ple’de.. ‘He got lost.’ (Ivens Ferraz 1979:72) cf. EP: Ele se perdeu. Bambara: To` dun Mali la. ‘Millet porridge is eaten in Mali.’ millet-porridge eat Mali in (Holm 1988:84)

4.4

The NSCS noun phrase

Plural marking in the noun phrase is much reduced in NSCS when compared to the standard, but in most modern varieties this appears to be through phonological rather than morphological rules – although earlier contact could well have played a role in the development of these phonological rules.

106


4.4.1

Number in the NSCS noun phrase

The tendency of NSCS to delete word-final -s, which marks the plural forms of nouns, as well as their modifiers such as articles and adjectives in the standard, appears to be the result of a phonotactic tendency in NSCS to simplify a CVC syllabic structure to CV. At least this has been the prevailing interpretation in Spanish dialect studies. This tendency does not always do away with plural marking, which can be indicated by a weakening of /s/ to /h/, especially in feminine forms: (120)

NSCS: lah nina ˜ ‘the girls’ (Lorenzino in Holm, Lorenzino and Mello 2000:203) S: las ninas ˜

However, the total loss of /s/ throughout the NP is more frequent when the noun is masculine because the NSCS plural masculine article lo [cf. S los] still contrasts with the singular masculine form el: (121)

NSCS: lo hombre ‘the men’ [cf. S: los hombres] (ibid.)

A distinct plural form is also retained in masculine nouns ending in a consonant, such as dictador ‘dictator,’ which in standard Spanish require an e before the plural -s: (122)

NSCS: lo dictadore esto ‘those dictators’ S: los dictadores estos (ibid.)

In a more highly restructured variety of NSCS spoken in the Choco´ region of Colombia, the occurrence of the plural form lo dictador without the -e of the allomorph of the Spanish plural morpheme (Ru´ız Garc´ıa 2001) is as clear evidence of morphological restructuring (as opposed to mere phonological rules) as BVP plurals forms like as vez instead of as veze (cf. SBP as vezes ‘the times’) (Guy, personal communication; see section 4.3.1). Studies by Poplack (1978), Terrel (1979), and Nunez ˜ Cedeno ˜ (1980) analyze such plural marking in the noun phrase in the regional Spanish of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, respectively, which in each case is more pervasive the lower the socioeconomic class of the speaker. More recently, Green (1997:190ff.) analyzed the use of -se as a plural marker in an unusually basilectal variety of Dominican Spanish (see section 2.4.3). The weakening and loss of final /s/ in plural nouns ending in a stressed syllable appears to have motivated an analogical reinterpretation of -se as a plural marker in these vernacular Dominican varieties: (123)

NSCS: lo

cafése ‘cafés’ (cf. S: los cafés)

The noun phrase

107

by analogy with NSCS “lo mese ” (cf. S “los meses”) (Lorenzino in Holm, Lorenzino, and Mello 1999:46). Although the extent of the use of pluralizing -se is unclear in other varieties of Antillean Spanish in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Green (1997:190– 196) indicates that in the Dominican varieties she studied, its use has spread to nouns not stressed on the last syllable: (124)

NSCS: mucháchose ‘boys’; látase ‘tin cans’ (ibid.)

4.4.2

Gender in the NSCS noun phrase

Nonstandard Spanish throughout the Caribbean retains gender agreement in the noun phrase, which is not found in creoles based on Spanish and other Romance languages. These creoles usually derive nouns and adjectives from the masculine form in the superstrate: (125)

Palenquero CS: cabeza malo ‘bad head’ (cf. S: cabeza mala) (Lorenzino 1993:118).

(126)

Papiamentu CS: baka gordo ‘fat cow’ (cf. S: vaca gorda) (ibid.)

However, Schwegler and Morton (2003) note the sporadic lack of gender agreement in the Spanish spoken by bilingual Palenqueros: (127)

PS: cosa important´ısimo ‘important things’ (ibid.) cf. S: cosas important´ısimas

4.4.3

Possession in the NSCS noun phrase

Possession in NSCS is formed with the preposition de as in standard Spanish, and no other structure (such as that in BVP discussed in section 4.3.3) occurs. 4.4.4

Pronouns in NSCS

NSCS personal pronouns show no reduction of case or gender marking. However, in the NSCS of bilingual speakers of Palenquero (section 1.5), Schwegler and Morton note that reflexive pronouns can be omitted (128d), as they are in Palenquero and other Atlantic creoles based on Romance languages (cf. section 4.3.3), or take the subject form of personal pronoun plus mimo (cf. S mismo as in the emphatic construction yo mismo ‘I myself.’ Of the structures below, they note that (128a) and (128b) are common, while (128c) and (128d) are sporadic:

108


(128)

PS: a. Yo me lavo. ‘I wash myself ’ (ibid.) b. Yo me lavo yo mimo. c. Yo lavo yo mimo. d. Yo lavo. (2003: 118)

In the Dominican Republic, the structure in (126d) was used by one of the informants whose speech was rejected as abnormal by Lipski (Green 1997:207). However, Lipski (1998) notes the absence of reflexive pronouns in earlier bozal Spanish. 4.5

The VLRF noun phrase

4.5.1

Number in the VLRF noun phrase

In VLRF nouns and their modifiers have “no rules of gender or number agreement” (Cellier 1985a:36). For example, the following could be interpreted as either singular or plural: (129) VLRF: marmay té i sort lékol (ibid.) child PAST ASM leave school ‘The child was/the children were leaving the school.’ Above VLRF marmay comes from a collective noun in French which can only be singular (la marmaille ‘troupe de petits enfants’; cf. marmot ‘petit gar¸con’ [familiar]), much like E cousinage. The F word marmaille cannot refer to an individual, but VLRF marmay can: (130)

VLRF: . . . lo marmay evidaman li koné pa tousalà . . . (C. Warnecke, personal communication) ‘. . . the child obviously doesn’t know all that . . .’

However, in VLRF if an indication of plurality is essential, there is a free morpheme bann (cf. F bande ‘band, gang’) which can be placed before the noun as a pluralizer, as in the fully creolized varieties of French in the Indian Ocean: (131)

VLRF:

bann marmay té i sort lékol. (ibid.) ‘The children were leaving the school.’

This unbound pluralizer can also form an associative plural, as in Bann Payèt ‘the Payet family’ (Honoré 2002:37). 4.5.2

Gender in the VLRF noun phrase

Although articles in VLRF appear to match those of standard French regarding gender (e.g. la kaz ‘the house’; cf. the feminine article in F

The noun phrase

109

la case ‘the hut’), there is no gender agreement between VLRF nouns and their other modifiers such as possessive determiner and adjectives, as there is in French: (132)

VLRF:

mon kaz lé gran (Cellier 1985a:19) my house is big

(Cf. the feminine forms in the equivalent F “ma maison est grande [grãd]” versus the masculine forms mon ‘my’ and grand [grã] ‘big’.) Cellier (1985a:19) notes that “this calls into question the existence of lexical gender despite the apparent analogy with French [regarding articles]; thus la is only a frozen noun indicator and kaz does not behave like a feminine noun because there is no agreement between the adjective and the noun.” While the VLRF certainly do not have the same kind of gender agreement as French, the VLRF may indeed have true articles: Chapuis (forthcoming) notes that Malagasy has definite articles that are distinct from demonstrative adjectives (Keenan 1978:297) and suggests that this helped to ensure the survival of definite articles in VLRF. Chaudenson (1974:366) notes the use of some VLRF adjectives based on the ˜ légliz ‘a large church’ (cf. F une grande F feminine form (e.g. e grad e´glise), but these may be acrolectal forms influenced by the standard language; they appear to be sporadic and most usual in set phrases such as ˜ ravin; cf. F Grande Ravine). toponyms (e.g. grad From this perspective, the VLRF articles that seem to indicate number and gender as in French may simply preserve the form of the French article, as do the initial syllables of certain words in fully creolized varieties of French: (133)

Seychellois CF: cf. F:

Fer

letour

lakaz.

‘Take a tour of the house.’ Faites le tour de la maison. (D’Offay and Lionnet 1982:238)

The existence of analogous forms in VLRF such as lakaz ‘house’ (Chaudenson 1974:349), however rare, suggests remnants of earlier stages of more intense restructuring (e.g. the mid-eighteenth century). Nonetheless, the synchronic co-occurrence of VLRF in ‘a’ and lo ‘the’ (cf. F un ‘a [masculine]’ and le ‘the [masculine singular]’ on the one hand, coupled with the synchronic co-occurrence of VLFR inn ‘a’ and la ‘the’ (cf. F une ‘a’ [feminine] and la ‘the’ [feminine singular] on the other hand, make the question of the existence of grammatical gender and number more complicated to determine in VLRF than in fully restructured creoles like Seychellois. Still, Ramassamy (1985:249) observes that although the VLRF possessive pronouns (lé-myenn ‘mine,’ lé-tyenn ‘yours’ etc.) are derived from the feminine plural French forms (les miennes, les tiennes), the

110


VLRF forms do not carry the gender and number references of their etyma, making clear that the very concepts of grammatical gender and number are at least much more marginal in VLRF than they are in French. 4.5.3

Possession in the VLRF noun phrase

Possession, usually indicated by the prepositional de in French, is indicated by a noun complement in VLRF, i.e. without a preposition: (134)

VLRF: la kaz son momon (Ramassamy 1985:227) the house [of] her mother (cf. F la maison de sa maman)

This construction is also found in fully creolized varieties: (135)

Mauritian CF: lakaz lapay house straw house’

mo tohtoh (Baker 1972:83) my uncle, i.e. ‘my uncle’s straw

This construction is extended to more abstract connotations of de, such as association, juxtaposition, etc.: (136) (137)

VLRF: lankazman ti-fiy (Baker 1972:373) ‘the girl’s engagement’ (cf. F l’engagement de la fille) VLRF: bo la mer (Baker 1972:392) ‘by the sea’ (cf. F au bord de la mer)

In fact, Cellier (1985a:106) states that the French preposition de does not exist in VLRF except in fossilized forms like “piedmang” (

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Languages in Contact: The Partial Restructuring of Vernaculars

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Contact Structures of Partial Differential Equations

Language Contact and Contact Languages (Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism (Hsm))

Chtimi: the urban vernaculars of northern France

Turn-Taking, Fingerspelling, and Contact in Signed Languages (Gallaudet Sociolinguistics)

Contact Languages: Ecology and Evolution in Asia (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact)

Dynamics of Language Contact: English and Immigrant Languages (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact)

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