V61.0038 Pidgin and Creole Languages
(a.k.a Creole Linguistics)
Prof. John Singler
Spring 2004
M/W, 12:30PM - 1:45PM
new course (CAS approval pending)
Creole languages are widely spoken in the Caribbean (in Haiti, Jamaica, and Guyana, for example) and pidgin languages in the South Pacific (Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu, among other places) and West Africa (Nigeria has at least 30 million speakers of Nigerian Pidgin). These languages arose in particular types of contact situations. While these lang-uages drew most of their vocabulary from the language of the group who held political and economic power, their syntax and much of their phonology are distinct. Thus, even though an overwhelming majority of the words in Haitian Créole come from French, someone who speaks only French will be unable to understand someone who speaks only Haitian Créole.
Moreover, whatever the language of power that provides an individual pidgin and creole with its lexicon, e.g. French for Haiti, English for Jamaica, pidgins/creoles across the board show striking similarities to one another. Consequently, the two lines of inquiry that dominate pidgin and creole studies are these:
- How did individual pidgins and creoles come into being? and
- Why do pidgins and creoles have so much in common?
For many aspects of linguistic theory, pidgins and creoles constitute an exceptional case, a perennial counterexample. As a result, answers to the two basic questions, i.e. explaining pidgin/creole genesis and accounting for the shared features of pidgins/creoles, have implications for broader issues in linguistics. Pidgins/Creoles are seen as especially important for the study of language evolution, on the one hand, and the study of language contact, on the other.
This course will acquaint students with the basic properties of pidgin and creole languages, and it will explore the ways in which evidence from pidgins/creoles bear upon critical issues in linguistics more generally. An important aspect of the course will be the hands-on examination of particular pidgins and creoles. Students will work with data from pidginized Vernacular Liberian English, Bahamian Creole English, and other pidginized/ creolized varieties, including Haitian Créole.
Instructors
Professor John Victor Singler has published extensively on pidginized Vernacular Liberian English and on the historical matrix that gave rise to the creoles of Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. He is past president of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell), co-editor of the Creole Language Library series (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.
K. Chanti Seymour is a Ph.D. student in NYU's Department of Linguistics and a faculty member in the Department of English at the College of the Bahamas. Her research focuses both on the structure of Bahamian Creole English (BCE) and on BCE's interaction with standard English.
Last Modified: November 2, 2003