Course materials for/by Peter L. Patrick. Contains copyright material used for educational purposes. Please respect copyright. 

 Notes for Lg 449

Hugo SCHUCHARDT (as summarized by Meijer & Muysken 1977: 30): "Creoles have developed from pidgins into full-fledged, complete languages. . . While creoles are lexically based on one language, many lexical items may have been contributed to them from different African languages. These African elements did not exist in the original contact language, but were added to it when the contact language became the native language of slave communities."

Robt. HALL (1966): "A creole language arises when a pidgin becomes the native language of a speech community."

Dell HYMES (1971: 84): "Creolization is that complex process of sociolinguistic change comprising expansion in inner form, with convergence, in the context of extension in use. A creole is a result of such a process that has achieved autonomy as a norm. The context of expanded use in creolization need not be internal to a speech community, but may be external instead (or as well). The starting-point of creolization need not be a pidgin, but may be a pre-pidgin continuum, or a subordinated language variety of some other sort.

John RICKFORD (1977): "Creolization is the process by which one or more pidginized variants of a language (emerging from an initial multilingual contact situation. . .) are extended in domains of use and in the range of communicative and expressive functions they must serve. Frequently, but not necessarily, this process is associated with native use by children born into the contact situation. The pidginized variants are assumed to undergo complication and expansion of linguistic resources in the process, and the term creole may be used for any new stable variety that results from this process."

Derek BICKERTON (1977): "Creolization is first-language learning with restricted input... [It] involves the acquisition of grammatical rules, the vast bulk of which are not present in either substrate or superstrate languages... [Since the pidgin is] too impoverished to serve all [his] communicative needs... the child creole speaker will be driven to expand the pidgin... [by] internalizing linguistic rules for which there is no evidence in terms of linguistic outputs."

John McWHORTER (1995:240): "Creolization simply describes the structural expansion of that register [created by pidginization, see definition above], as a response to widening social domain of usage – either via first language acquisition or… adoption by adults as a primary communication vehicle… Creolization is merely a designation for a later stage of linguistic development of which pidginization is the beginning."

Some Definitions of Pidgins

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