Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Creoles are not distinct languages!
There is a constant debate in creolistics as to whether creole languages form a typologically distinct class. Put simply: Are creoles distinguishable from natural human languages as reported in the story of Babylon, or do these speech forms display specific properties that make them cluster together as a unique class of human languages?
Twenty three years ago, Muysken (1988: 300) answered this question negatively: “The very notion of a ‘creole’ language from the linguistic point of view tends to disappear if one looks closely, what we have is just a language”. This view appears to be shared by the majority of creolists, even though many scholars maintain that there is something about creoles that makes them a separate group of language (e.g., McWhorter 1998, 2001, Parkvall 2008, Bakker and al 2010). Recurrent arguments in favor of this view are often based on supposedly morphosyntactic and semantic properties such as morphological simplicity i.e., absence of rich agreement and inflectional morphology, TMA sequencing, serial verb constructions, semantic transparency, etc.
While work by Mufwene (2001), DeGraff (2003, 2004, 2005, 2009) have shown that such views are not linguistically grounded and might be influenced by some unconscious postcolonial ideological bias, this lecture shows that the claim that creoles are structurally distinct results from a misconception of the structural properties that are often assigned to such languages as opposed to so-called ‘old languages’. I show, on empirical ground, that the supposedly creole structural properties are found in all languages to various degrees. This conclusion supports Muysken’s (1988) observation in the previous paragraph, but it also suggests that the idea that there may be a single Language in the world that is structurally distinct from all other languages is untenable.
I further propose a theory of the genesis of contact languages based on the emergence of hybrid grammars. I adopt a biological approach to the evolution of language (e.g., Mufwene 2001, 2003, 2005), and suggest that a new language (e.g., a contact language) may emerge from the recombination of distinctive syntactic features (by analogy to gene recombination in biology) from different varieties or languages into a coherent system representing the speaker’s Internal-language (Aboh 2006, 2007, 2009, forthcoming). Under this analysis, the so-called creoles are linguistically hybrid (in the biological sense). They emerged from the recombination of linguistic features from typologically different languages. As a result of this recombination, creoles develop diverse and often syntactically and semantically opaque features which could not have arisen in the context of their source languages taken individually. It appears from this view that what is needed is not a theory of creolization, but a formal account for how distinct syntactic features may recombine into a more complex and viable linguistic system. This leads me to conclude that understanding the genesis of new languages, such as creoles, represents the first step to understand the emergence of (complex) linguistic systems that underlie language acquisition and language evolution.
Felix Ameka (University of Leiden, The Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; University of Ghana)
Multilingualism, contact and covergence on the West African littoral: implications for Trans-Atlantic Sprachbund
Investigations of the role of West African languages in the creation of Atlantic creoles have tended to assume that the populations that created the languages comprised monolingual speakers of these languages. Thus Fon is claimed to be the substrate for Haitian (Lefebvre 1998). Recently there has been a move to recognise a cluster of languages, e.g. Gbe, as possible sources of substrate influence in the Surinamese Creoles (Muysken et al. To appear). The possibility of the agents in the creation being multilingual has not been explored. Judging from current language ecologies and synchronic linguistic practices in the West African “speech area” (Hymes 1972), it would appear that the repertoire of linguistic structures of the individual agents during the formation of the Creoles would have been the result of contact and convergence among the languages in the area. In this presentation, I examine some contact scenarios and their outcomes in the Volta Basin of West Africa with a view to showing that the Creoles may not constitute radical departures from pre-existing systems, but can be seen as pretty "normal" extensions of patterns of West African language practices, multilingualism, convergence, and restructuring as they have probably existed for thousands of years in the region, and continue today.
References Hymes, Dell. 1972. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds) Directions in Sociolinguistics. The ethnography of communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 35-71. Lefebvre, Claire. 1998. Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: the case of Haitian Creole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muysken, Pieter C et al. (to appear). The trans Atlantic Sprachbund. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kofi Baku (University of Ghana, New York University Accra)
African agency, forts and castles and the African slave trade in the Gold Coast
For nearly 300 years, Europeans traded in millions of Africans across the Atlantic into the New World of the Americas. This large trade was made possible and sustained by profitable commercial interactions between African and European slave dealers. Forts and castles loomed large in the history of the Gold Coast; they were (and still are) the most visible symbols of Euro African contact on the Gold Coast littoral. For a relative short distance of about 300 kilometres, there were nearly 60 European lodges, forts and castles. Indeed, their presence was unmistakable; no wonder they have been described as “ships in permanent anchor” on the Gold Coast littoral.
In the Ghana coat of arms a castle finds a pride of place. From their establishment in the 15th century through the 21st century, forts and castles have played a variety of roles in shaping the texture of the history of the Gold Coast and Ghana. Forts and castles symbolize the integration of the country into the global system; they were the operational bases of European nations in the Gold Coast, and in our own time, the Christiansborg castle has been the seat of the government of Ghana and the residence of its head of state since independence except for a brief period in the 1960s when the presidency was relocated to Flagstaff House. Today, Ghana has a new presidential lodge, built on the grounds of the old Flagstaff House, but the President lives and works in the Christiansborg Castle.
The aim of this paper is to examine briefly how African agents in the Gold Coast facilitated trade in Africans by ensuring continuous flow, for nearly 300 years, of slaves to European merchants in the Forts and castles on the Gold Coast littoral for shipment to the Americas.
Mary Esther Dakubu (University of Ghana):
The birth of languages in Ghana: contact the onlie begetter?
There is a curious tension between the current concern for endangered languages and an interest in pidgins and creoles, which at the moment is not quite so fashionable. The first is at least partly predicated on a fear of future uniformity, perhaps impelled by fears of unpredictable and undesired effects of globalization. The second is at least partly informed by consciousness of another side-effect of globalization, namely urbanization, or more fundamentally, new agglomerations of people, and the effect of this on hitherto accepted standards of language, whether these standards are institutionally recognized and maintained or not – in other words, language change in circumstances in which change is popularly regarded as corruption, decay and other bad things. At a more programmatic level, the one is concerned with loss of forms of expression, the other with the innovation and development of new forms. Neither of these processes is new in the linguistic history of the world. In this lecture I shall discuss the history of language in Ghana with attention to the origins of three languages: Gonja, Chakosi and Ga; the differing contact circumstances under which they developed and took root; and whether or not there is evidence that any of these languages originated as pidgins and/or creolized versions of the language(s) to which they are genetically most closely related.
Francis O. Egbokhare (University of Ibadan, Nigeria)
Becond chance, sentiments and prejudice: Engaging the challenges of Nigerian Pidgin development
The fortunes of a language are inextricably tied to the fortunes of its speakers. The profile of a language may improve positively if it becomes associated with a thriving culture, religion, trade, science and technology and education, or if it is associated with a dominant political or economic power (Liberson 1982). In the face of the pervading endangerment of local languages due to the forces of globalisation, Nigerian pidgin has continued to spread and deepen its functions and relevance. In this presentation we examine issues relating to its origin, identity, spread and changing profile and situate these historically and synchronically within the dynamics of the Nigerian environment. We identify lack of a standard variety and orthography, official recognition, use as a medium of instruction, learning and teaching materials as some factors undermining the development of Nigerian Pidgin. Others include the fear that it will negatively affect the learning of English language. This has tended to generate apathy among the elite and lack of commitment in the critical linguistic community. As a way of tackling some of these problems and stirring Nigerian Pidgin in the right direction, the Naija Langwej Akedemi was established as a language development, research, capacity building and advocacy platform. We report here on its effort to harmonise and standardise the orthographic practiceses and build capacity towards the compilation of a representative dictionary and grammar. We argue that if Nigerian Pidgin must attain the respect and recognition it deserves and perform its role as a language of regional integration in West Africa, it must move from the market place, the mass media to intellectual domains. Equally important, it must be tied to the global information infrastructure and other vectors of modern socilisation.
