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A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. 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.
African-American English is the set of English sociolects that are spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like other widely spoken languages, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
African-American Vernacular English, also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics, is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians.
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies," such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present-tense verb morphology.
In English, the word like has a very flexible range of uses, ranging from conventional to non-standard. It can be used as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, hedge, filler, and quotative.
Palenquero or Palenque is a Spanish-based creole language spoken in Colombia. It is believed to be a mixture of Kikongo and Spanish. However, there is no sufficient evidence to indicate that Palenquero is strictly the result of a two-language contact. Palenquero is the only surviving Spanish-based creole language in Latin America, if Papiamento is excluded. Over 6,600 people spoke this language in 2018. It is primarily spoken in the village of San Basilio de Palenque which is southeast of Cartagena, and in some neighbourhoods of Barranquilla.
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.
Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Nancy Currier Dorian is an American linguist who has carried out research into the decline of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic for over 40 years, particularly in the villages of Brora, Golspie and Embo. Due to their isolation from other Gaelic-speaking communities, these East Sutherland villages presented a good opportunity to study language death. Dorian's study is possibly the longest such study in the field. She is considered "a prime authority" on language death. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland, is considered "the first major monograph" on language death. According to linguist Joan Argenter, Dorian's name "is well known to scholars working in" several areas of linguistics.
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.
Prithee is an archaic English interjection formed from a corruption of the phrase pray thee, which was initially an exclamation of contempt used to indicate a subject's triviality. The earliest recorded appearance of the word prithee listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1577, while it is most commonly found in works from the seventeenth century. The contraction is a form of indirect request that has disappeared from the language.
Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.
Frances Jane Hassler Hill was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family and anthropological linguistics of North American communities.
José María Sánchez Carrión is a Spanish linguist, specialised in Basque language, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. He is an associate member of Euskaltzaindia since 1983. Despite being arguably the best known local academic proponent of reversing language shift measures, he has never held a stable university post in the Basque Country.
Ingrid Marijke Tieken-Boon van Ostade is a professor emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University's Centre for Linguistics. She has researched widely in the area of English socio-historical linguistics having looked at such diverse fields as English negations, historical social network analysis, the standardisation process and the language of 18th-century letters. She has recently published a book on Bishop Lowth (1710–1787). Her work on a collaborative project on English usage was featured in the BBC Radio 4's Making History programme.
Suzanne Romaine is an American linguist known for work on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. From 1984 to 2014 she was Merton Professor of English language at the University of Oxford.
Linguistic ecology or language ecology is the study of how languages interact with each other and the places they are spoken in, and frequently argues for the preservation of endangered languages as an analogy of the preservation of biological species.
Terttu Nevalainen is a Finnish linguist and the current Chair of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. She has been a Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences since 2001 and was inducted as a First Class Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 2015. Nevalainen works on corpus linguistics, the History of English, and historical sociolinguistics.
Mikel Zalbide Elustondo is a Basque linguist and sociolinguist.
Jeremy J. Smith is a British philologist who is Professor of English Philology at the University of Glasgow.
References
- McWhorter, John H. 2000. The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages. University of California Press. Berkeley.
- Nevalainen, Terttu. 2003. Socio-Historical Linguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. Longman. London.
- Nevalainen, Terttu / Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena (eds.) (1996), Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
- Romaine, Suzanne. 1982. Socio-Historical Linguistics: its Status and Methodology. Cambridge University Press. New York.
- Sánchez Carrión, José María. 1992. Las lenguas vistas desde la historia versus la historia vista desde las lenguas (o el giro copérnicano de un nuevo discurso social). Eusko Ikaskuntza. Donostia-San Sebastián. [5] [Languages seen from the point of view of history versus history seen from the point of view of languages]
- Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press. Berkeley.
- Jucker, Andreas H. (2000), History of English and English Historical Linguistics, Stuttgart: Klett.