Creole Genesis: Evidence from West African L2 French

Abstract

A pidgin is traditionally defined as a simple code which "evolves as a response to a limited need for communication" and which encodes only "the most basic functions of communication (...) the result being impoverished or absent morphology (...) limited lexical stock; a constrained number of adpositions; non-expression of the copula; and lack of sentential embedding" (Hymes 1971: 65-90). Creoles were long thought to be nativized pidgins that had become increasingly complex to meet all the requirements of a native language. There are, of course, many examples of pidgins corresponding to the general definition above: Russenorsk and Chinese Pidgin English are two well-documented cases, and there are others. However, if one looks at the history of European-lexifier creoles, in particular the exogenous varieties spoken today in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, there is little direct evidence of a pidgin stage in the development of these languages. In addition to the absence of any written attestation of Pidgin English or Pidgin French which may have been spoken on European plantation colonies in the 17th century, Chaudenson (1979, 1995), Singler (1996) and others have shown that, at least in French plantation colonies, the African/European ratio in the early stages of colonization was very low, and that both groups lived in close contact on isolated homesteads, before the shift to large-scale sugar plantations required the import of massive numbers of slaves by the early 18th century. Finally, some authors have shown (e.g., Chaudenson 1981) that the earliest recorded creole texts are much closer to their respective European lexifier texts, than contemporary creoles. The evidence would indicate that, in many European plantation colonies, there never was a pidgin stage per se, but rather the gradual development of increasingly basilectal varieties of French or English, based on increasingly divergent L2 interlanguage varieties of the lexifier language spoken by successive waves of African slaves. In a sense, one could say that creolization in these circumstances is like second language acquisition in reverse, i.e., the successive interlanguage