More Creole Languages

[xsampa]

Creole languages arise from contact between two separate languages groups— and where the result becomes L1 for the children of a community. Creoles have a language which gives the grammar, a lexifier language, and a language which provides the underlying grammar and structure, known as the substrate.

Creoles have simpler sound systems than their lexifier languages, an a grammar without many prefixes or suffixes. Their word order is influenced often by substrate

Examples include Tok Pisin (an English lexifier creole ) and Haitian Creole (French Lexifier )among others.

Creoles are often stigmatized and thus were never really written or given a phonetically accurate alphabet. The stigma can cause it to disappear, a process called Decreolization.
How can more creole languages last to the present?

One possibility for the survival of Bamboo English is a worse Operation Downfall

 

[pathfinder]

I always did wonder why more creoles/pidgins didn't develop in North America, what with the several hundred years of being neighbors with euros.

 

[xsampa]

An example of a severely endangered creole is Kristang, a Portuguese lexifier creole with influence from its sound system and grammar from Malay.

 

[xsampa]

I always did wonder why more creoles/pidgins didn't develop in North America, what with the several hundred years of being neighbors with euros.

The enforcement of Spanish and English helped destroy many creoles, although there are recorded AIPE samples .

 

[xsampa]

There were pidgin languages in the Chinese concessions— Kiaotschou German and several pidgin Englishes. Maybe more and longer lasting concessions.

also the Germans briefly wanted to use Malay as a lingua franca in German New Guinea because it was grammatically easier than German even though neither Germans nor New Guineans spoke it — so a Malay derived creole could emerge

 

[funnyhat]

I always did wonder why more creoles/pidgins didn't develop in North America, what with the several hundred years of being neighbors with euros.

There were numerous pidgins. But a creole is a special type of language, which emerges when a pidgin becomes a native language of a community (and thus develops a regular grammar). That generally happens only under specific circumstances - most often, slavery.

 

[Dr Dee]

A much older one: a mix of Anglo Saxon and Old Welsh that would develop in western Mercia and evolve into a Marches creole.

 

[Lord High Executioner]

A much older one: a mix of Anglo Saxon and Old Welsh that would develop in western Mercia and evolve into a Marches creole.

An even older one, so old that it is no longer talked about as a creole by others than nit-pickers and anglocentric trolls: French.

 

[Dr Dee]

An even older one, so old that it is no longer talked about as a creole by others than nit-pickers and anglocentric trolls: French.

All languages then?

 

[Lord High Executioner]

All languages then?

Well, I'm not sure all languages can be summed up/dismissed as "grew out of an illiterate Roman soldier
trying to buy eggs from an illiterate Gaulish farmer" or its equivalent, but there's certainly an argument
to be made for the case.
One of the key questions is "When does a creole language stop being a creole?"
Another is "And when does it stop being described as descended from a creole language?"
(Exempli gratia: the languages described as having evolved from the local dialect of Latin.)

 

[Victoria]

An even older one, so old that it is no longer talked about as a creole by others than nit-pickers and anglocentric trolls: French.

By that logic, what about English? It gets the grammar and structure from Anglo-Saxon (although simpler) and a lot of vocabulary that comes from French.

 

[Lord High Executioner]

By that logic, what about English? It gets the grammar and structure from Anglo-Saxon (although simpler) and a lot of vocabulary that comes from French.

Yes, what about it? Does it qualify as a creole or just as a language that developed from Ingvaonic and along the way, as the saying
goes, "occasionally pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary"?
If nothing else, Old English did not develop from "Anglo-Saxon trying to talk to Frenchman".

 

[Atterdag]

How about making some otl ones survive? I’ve always been fascinated by Russenorsk I.e Russo-Norwegian spoken in Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula, as well as Basque-Icelandic, which just sounds so made up.

 

[Wendell]

I always did wonder why more creoles/pidgins didn't develop in North America, what with the several hundred years of being neighbors with euros.

Many did, but the demographics of the continent ultimately worked against them.

 

[xsampa]

There are African creoles spoken by millions of English and French lexis but as with Haiti, elites favor English, French, Portuguese

 

[funnyhat]

An even older one, so old that it is no longer talked about as a creole by others than nit-pickers and anglocentric trolls: French.

The ancient Gauls may have spoken a pidgin Latin, or even a creole descended from it, but if they did, it became decreolized at some point, because modern French is clearly derived from Vulgar Latin and is very close grammatically to Italian (though pronounced quite differently).

 

[Lord High Executioner]

The ancient Gauls may have spoken a pidgin Latin, or even a creole descended from it, but if they did, it became decreolized at some point, because modern French is clearly derived from Vulgar Latin and is very close grammatically to Italian (though pronounced quite differently).

The ancient Gauls didn't start out speaking any kind of Latin...

To be frank*, we may be heading towards the lingustic equivalent of "Aliens must have helped building
Macchu Picchu and Great Zimbabwe, but Akropolis and Chartres Cathedral were obviously built by
humans using the technology available to them at the time" here.

If a creole language decreolizes - evolves from a creole into a standard language or a variety of
a standard language (Merriam-Webster) - does that mean that it never was a creole or that
the later language did not grow out of a creole?

*Who one assumes would be in there somewhere in the history of French as well...

 

[funnyhat]

The ancient Gauls didn't start out speaking any kind of Latin...

Which is the point : pidgins emerge when two groups of people have no common language but need to communicate. So the Gauls, following Caesar's conquest, probably did speak pidgin Latin to communicate with their new overlords.

But it is a mistake to assume that modern French is derived from that pidgin. What happened was that eventually, over the centuries of Roman rule (and then Frankish rule, as the Franks still used Latin as an administrative language), the population experienced a language shift to Vulgar Latin, which finally evolved into French. Like the Gaulish language, Gallic Latin pidgin simply died out.

In the same way, the English that native tribes speak in North America is not necessarily derived from a creole ; it's just English. Their ancestors almost certainly spoke pidgins, and possibly creoles, but they went through a language shift to English.

 

[Awkwardvulture]

I know little of linguistics, but a Creole language of Arabic and Greek could be interesting.....

 

[Hugh Third of Five]

Maybe have Old English with more Celtic Britonnic influence?

An even older one, so old that it is no longer talked about as a creole by others than nit-pickers and anglocentric trolls: French.

Or French with more Gallic or more Germanic influence.