Middle English creole hypothesis

Last updated

The Middle English creole hypothesis is a proposal that Middle English was a creole, which is usually defined as a language that develops during contact between two groups speaking different languages and that loses much of the grammatical elaboration of its source languages in the process. The vast differences between Old English and Middle English, and English’s status as one of the least structurally elaborated of the Germanic languages, have led some historical linguists to argue that the language underwent creolisation at around the 11th century, shortly after the Norman conquest of England. Other linguists suggest that creolisation began earlier, during the Scandinavian incursions of the 9th and 10th centuries.

Contents

Much of the debate over the Middle English creole hypothesis revolves around how terms like "creole" or "creolisation" should be defined. While there does not exist a consensus that Middle English should be classified as a creole, there does exist a consensus that Old English underwent fairly radical grammatical simplification in the process of evolving into Middle English, and that this evolution was due in large part to contact with speakers from other language groups.

Middle English as a French creole

Only an estimated 26% of English words are of Germanic origin. However, these include the core vocabulary and most commonly used words in the language. Origins of English PieChart.svg
Only an estimated 26% of English words are of Germanic origin. However, these include the core vocabulary and most commonly used words in the language.

This hypothesis was first proposed by C.-J. Bailey and K. Maroldt in 1977, [1] followed by Nicole Domingue [2] and Patricia Poussa. [3] These authors argued that Middle English was a creole that developed when the Norman French-speaking invaders learned Old English imperfectly and expanded their reduced English into a full language. Evidence cited in support of the hypothesis was the heavy admixture of French words into the English lexicon, including some basic words such as the words for uncle, niece, danger, trouble, cause; the frequent loss of Old English verb- and adjective affixes in favor of loans from the French (e.g. enclosid, inpacient, disheritance); a number of grammatical changes that appear to have been modeled after the French, such as expression of the perfect aspect using the verb "to have" (as in “she has eaten’"), the use of "of" to express the genitive (as in French le livre de Jean), and constructions such as “it is me”, “it is him” (compare modern French c’est moi, c’est lui); and English’s complete loss of case and gender markers on nouns.

Defining "creole" and "creolisation"

Linguists’ conception of what constitutes a creole has changed substantially in the years since Bailey & Maroldt’s original proposal, and the question of whether Middle English is a French creole depends to some extent on how one defines the term "creole". [4]

Broadly speaking, two definitions of creole and creolisation are current in the linguistic literature: [5]

1. A socio-historical, or diachronic, definition. According to this, creoles are natural languages that emerge when learners of a “target” language receive only fragmentary input from that language’s native speakers as a result of social or psychological separation. In need of a full language nevertheless, they create one from this incomplete material, often in two stages: first a pidgin (by the adults), and later (perhaps by their children) a creole. A fundamental feature of this evolution is a reduction of overt grammatical apparatus due to the imperfect second-language learning by the adults; as a result, the creole is grammatically less elaborated than the target language.

As C. Dalton-Puffer notes, [6]

It is indeed quite clear that there are historical facts which make it plausible to see Middle English in terms of a [French] Creole: certainly the initial stages of the Norman rule over England can be viewed as colonization and we know that pidgins and Creoles are post-colonial phenomena.

However the scholarly consensus has largely turned away from the French creolisation hypothesis, for mostly socio-historical reasons: [7] [4]

2. A structural, or synchronic, definition. Some authors have suggested that “creole” be defined in terms of a “checklist” of features, even with no knowledge of the language’s sociohistory. [13] [14] [15] Proposed checklist features include lack of gender distinctions or overtly marked passive voice; SVO word order; tense-modality-aspect systems that use exactly three preverbal particles; among others.

Most, and possibly all, of these checklist features can sometimes be found in non-creole languages as well. [5] John McWhorter, [16] in a comprehensive survey of all known creoles, argued that the absence of only three features is sufficient to define a creole: little or no inflectional affixation (such as gender markings); a lack of functional tone marking, that is, tone that serves to distinguish lexical items (e.g. Mandarin Chinese mā ‘mother' vs. mǎ 'horse'); and a lack of semantically opaque word formation, that is, a lack of words like understand or make up, the meanings of which are not analyzable in terms of the component meanings. McWhorter defined the term “creole prototype” to describe any language that lacked these three features, and argued that it would be natural for a language that underwent a significant “break” in transmission to have this character, although the language might re-acquire the features gradually over time.

Middle English comes reasonably close to satisfying the three criteria that define McWhorter’s creole prototype. For instance, by the end of the twelfth century, grammatical gender was all but lost in northern English dialects, and two centuries later it had disappeared even in the south. [11] However Middle English did not lose all of Old English’s noncompositional derivational morphology; for instance, Old English understandan => Middle English understanden => English understand. Nevertheless, Middle English is highly simplified compared with Old English, suggesting, according to McWhorter, a contact-based explanation, though not necessarily contact with French:

Loss of inflection is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of Germanic features that English has shed, complemented by many other losses unconnected with analyticity. Overall, a comparison with its [Germanic] sisters reveals English to be significantly less overspecified semantically and less complexified syntactically. … I argue that a contact-based, external explanation provides a principled account for the relevant facts. [17]

Scandinavian influence

While they emphasised the influence of French, both Bailey & Maroldt [1] and Poussa [3] also discussed the possibility that it was contact between Old English speakers and the invading Vikings (i.e. Scandinavians), during the ninth and tenth centuries, that was responsible for much of the loss of Germanic inheritance, followed only later by a Norman French influence. According to this scenario, Middle English would be more appropriately described as an Old Norse creole rather than a Norman French creole.

A number of arguments have been advanced in support of the hypothesis that Scandinavian contact profoundly influenced the course of English’s evolution prior to the Norman invasion: [7] [18]

McWhorter, [17] in summarizing the evidence for Scandinavian influence, writes that “the evidence strongly suggests that extensive second-language acquisition by Scandinavians from the eighth century onwards simplified English grammar to a considerable extent.” More specifically, the claim is that the inflectional and other losses in English resulted from Old Norse speakers’ incomplete acquisition of English. [22]

Creolisation of English might have occurred due to interaction between Common Brittonic and English, however evidence supporting the influence of the Celtic languages on English is hampered by a lack of written sources. [23]

Middle English as a semi-creole

A number of linguists, e.g. John Holm, [24] have argued that creolisation occurs along a cline, that is, that a language can be creolised to various degrees. Even if Middle English does not fully satisfy the criteria that would make it a creole, it has been argued that it might still be characterisable as a “semi-creole”. [25] A semi-creole is defined as a language that harbors symptoms of a break in transmission due to large-scale adult acquisition, without those symptoms being extreme enough to put it in the creole class. Such languages are often thought of as dialects of the lexifier language rather than as different languages. Recognized examples of semi-creoles include Afrikaans (Dutch as morphologically streamlined by contact with Khoisan), Reunionnais French, Lingala, and Shaba Swahili. McWhorter [18] argues that English is even more extreme than Afrikaans in having shed much of its Germanic content, and therefore that the case for describing English as a semi-creole is even stronger than for Afrikaans.

See also

Related Research Articles

Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.

A pidgin, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside. Linguists do not typically consider pidgins full or complete languages.

An analytic language is a type of natural language concept of which a series of root/stem words are accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers, using affixes very rarely, as opposed to synthetic languages which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly. Syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily by the word order. For example, by changing the individual words in the Latin phrase fēl-is pisc-em cēpit "the cat caught the fish" to fēl-em pisc-is cēpit "the fish caught the cat", the fish becomes the subject, while the cat becomes the object. This transformation is not possible in an analytic language without altering the word order. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes. No natural language, however, is purely analytic or purely synthetic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creole language</span> Stable natural languages that have developed from a pidgin

A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period of time. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Middle English</span> English as spoken from c. 1100 to 1500

Middle English is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but Oxford University Press specifies the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1100 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly followed the High to the Late Middle Ages.

English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence on the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proto-Indo-European language</span> Ancestor of the Indo-European languages

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages.

In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a historical layer of language that influences or is influenced by another language through contact. The notion of "strata" was first developed by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829–1907), and became known in the English-speaking world through the work of two different authors in 1932.

Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.

The Germanic substrate hypothesis attempts to explain the purportedly distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European languages. Based on the elements of Common Germanic vocabulary and syntax which do not seem to have cognates in other Indo-European languages, it claims that Proto-Germanic may have been either a creole or a contact language that subsumed a non-Indo-European substrate language, or a hybrid of two quite different Indo-European languages, mixing the centum and satem types. Which culture or cultures may have contributed the substrate material is an ongoing subject of academic debate and study.

A mixed language is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole or pidgin language in that, whereas creoles/pidgins arise where speakers of many languages acquire a common language, a mixed language typically arises in a population that is fluent in both of the source languages.

In linguistics, relexification is a mechanism of language change by which one language changes much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, with the lexicon of another language, without drastically changing the relexified language's grammar. The term is principally used to describe pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English language</span> West Germanic language

English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain.

Deflexion is a diachronic linguistic process in inflectional languages typified by the degeneration of the inflectional structure of a language. All members of the Indo-European language family are subject to some degree of deflexional change. This phenomenon has been especially strong in Western European languages, such as English, French, and others.

The language bioprogram theory or language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages. As articulated mostly by Derek Bickerton, creolization occurs when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured pidgin; these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar. As this capacity is universal, the grammars of these new languages have many similarities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dutch language</span> West Germanic language

Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives English and German. Afrikaans is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible sister language of modern Dutch, and a daughter language of an earlier form of Dutch. It is spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inflection</span> Process of word formation

In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc, as declension.

Brittonicisms in English are the linguistic effects in English attributed to the historical influence of Brittonic speakers as they switched language to English following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon political dominance in Britain.

Language complexity is a topic in linguistics which can be divided into several sub-topics such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity. The subject also carries importance for language evolution.

Port Jackson Pidgin English or New South Wales Pidgin English is an English-based pidgin that originated in the region of Sydney and Newcastle in New South Wales in the early days of colonisation. Stockmen carried it west and north as they expanded across Australia. It subsequently died out in most of the country, but was creolised in the Northern Territory at the Roper River Mission (Ngukurr), where missionaries provided a safe place for Indigenous Australians from the surrounding areas to escape deprivation at the hands of European settlers. As the Indigenous Australians who came to seek refuge at Roper River came from different language backgrounds, there grew a need for a shared communication system to develop, and it was this that created the conditions for Port Jackson Pidgin English to become fleshed out into a full language, Kriol, based on English language and the eight different Australian language groups spoken by those at the mission.

References

  1. 1 2 Bailey, Charles-James N.; Maroldt, Karl (January 1, 1977). "The French Lineage of English". In Meisel, Jürgen M. (ed.). Langues en Contact - Pidgins - Creoles. TBL Verlag Gunter Narr. pp. 21–53. ISBN   9783878080756.
  2. ↑ Domingue, Nicole Z. (October 1977). "Middle English: another Creole?". Journal of Creole Studies. 1: 89–100.
  3. 1 2 Poussa, Patricia (1982). "The evolution of early Standard English: The creolisation hypothesis". Studia Anglica Posnaniensia. 14: 69–85.
  4. 1 2 Singh, Ishtla (2005). The History of English. Hodder Arnold. p. 127. ISBN   9780340806951.
  5. 1 2 Sebba, Mark (1997). Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. St. Martin’s Press. p. 127. ISBN   0312175698.
  6. ↑ Dalton-Puffer, Christine (1995). "Middle English is a Creole and its opposite: On the value of plausible speculation". In Fisiak, Jacek (ed.). Linguistic Change under Contact Conditions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 35–50. ISBN   3-11-013950-2.
  7. 1 2 3 Thomason, Sarah Grey; Kaufman, Terrence (1988). Language Contact, Creolisation, and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press.
  8. ↑ Heath, Jeffrey (1981). "A case of intensive lexical diffusion". Language. 57: 335–367. doi:10.2307/413694. JSTOR   413694.
  9. ↑ Bakker, Peter (1997). Language of our own: The genesis of Michif, the mixed Cree-French language of the Canadian Métis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN   9780195097115.
  10. ↑ Dekeyser, Xavier (1986). "Romance loans in Middle English: a reassessment". In Kastovsky, Dieter; Szwedek, Aleksander (eds.). Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries. In honour of Jacek Fisiak. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 32. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 252–265.
  11. 1 2 Strang, Barbara M. H. (1970). A History of English. London: Methuen.
  12. ↑ Hiltunen, Risto (1983). The decline of the prefixes and the beginnings of the English phrasal verb. Helsinki: Turun Yliopisto, Turku.
  13. ↑ Bickerton, Derek (1981). Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Press.
  14. ↑ Markey, Thomas L. (1982). "Afrikaans: Creole or Non-Creole?". Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. 49 (2): 169–207. JSTOR   40501733.
  15. ↑ Mufwene, Salikoko S. (1997). "Jargons, pidgins, creoles, and koines: what are they?". In Spears, Arthur K.; Winford, Donald (eds.). The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 35–70.
  16. ↑ McWhorter, John (January 1998). "Identifying the creole prototype: Vindicating a typological class". Language. 74 (4): 788–818. doi:10.2307/417003. JSTOR   417003.
  17. 1 2 McWhorter, John H. (2005). Defining Creole. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780195166705.
  18. 1 2 McWhorter, John H. (2002). "What happened to English?". Diachronica. 19 (2): 217–272. doi:10.1075/dia.19.2.02wha.
  19. ↑ Lass, Roger (1992). "Phonology and morphology". In Blake, Norman (ed.). The Cambridge History of the English Language (Volume 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 23–155.
  20. ↑ Barnes, William (1886). A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with a Grammar of its Word Shapening and Wording. London: Trübner.
  21. ↑ Heusler, Andreas (1950). Alt Isländisches Elementarbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
  22. ↑ Danchev, Andrei (1997). "The Middle English creolization hypothesis revisted". In Fisiak, Jacek (ed.). Studies in Middle English Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 79–108.
  23. ↑ Görlach, M., "Middle English – a creole?", in Linguistics Across Historical and Geographical Boundaries, Part 1, de Gruyter 1986, pp. 329ff.
  24. ↑ Holm, John (2000). An introduction to pidgins and creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  25. ↑ McWhorter, John H. (2011). Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress?. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN   9781934078372.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.