What is Creole? [1]
Excerpt from Language Instinct
Once invented, language would entrench itself within a culture as parents taught their children and children imitated their parents. From cultures that had language, it would spread like wildfire to other, quieter cultures. At the heart of this process is wondrously flexible human intelligence, with its general multipurpose learning strategies.
So the universality of language does not lead to an innate language instinct as night follows day. To convince you that there is a language instinct, I will have to fill in an argument that leads from the jabbering of modern peoples to the putative genes for grammar. The crucial intervening steps come from my own professional specialty, the study of language development in children. The crux of the argument is that complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation—not because they are taught, not because they are generally smart, not because it is useful to them, but because they just can’t help it. Let me now take you down this trail of evidence.
The trail begins with the study of how the particular languages we find in the world today arose. Here, one would think, linguistics runs into the problem of any historical science: no one recorded the crucial events at the time they happened. Although historical linguists can trace modern complex languages back to earlier ones, this just pushes the problem back a step; we need to see how people create a complex language from scratch. Amazingly, we can.
The first cases were wrung from two of the more sorrowful episodes of world history, the Atlantic slave trade and indentured servitude in the South Pacific. Perhaps mindful of the Tower of Babel, come of the masters of tobacco, cotton, coffee, and sugar plantations deliberately mixed slaves and laborers from different language backgrounds; others preferred specific ethnicities but had to accept mixtures because that was all that was available.
When speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity to learn one another’s languages, they develop a make shift jargon called a pidgin. Pidgins are choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of colonizers or plantation owners, highly variable in order and with little in the way of grammar. Sometimes a pidgin can become a lingua franca and gradually increase in complexity over decades, as in the “Pidgin English” of the modern South Pacific. (Prince Philip was delighted to learn on a visit to New Guinea that he is referred to in that language as fella belong Mrs. Queen.)
But the linguist Derek Bickerton has presented evidence that in many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop: all it takes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue. That happened, Bickerton has argued, when children were isolated from their parents and were tended collectively by a worker who spoke to them in the pidgin. Not content to reproduce the fragmentary word strings, the children injected grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a brand-new, richly expressive language. The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole. (They are 2nd and 3rd generation mixture of cultures)
Bickerton’s main evidence comes from a unique historical circumstance. Thought he slave plantations that spawned most creoles are, fortunately, a thing of the remote past, one episode of creolization occurred recently enough for us to study its principal players. Just before the turn of the century there was a boom in Hawaiian sugar plantations, whose demands for labor quickly outstripped the active pool. Workers were brought in from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and a pidgin quickly developed. Many of the immigrant laborers who first developed that pidgin were alive when Bickerton interviewed them in the 1970s. Here are some typical examples of their speech:
Me cape buy, me check make.
Building—high place—wall pat—time—nowtime—an’ den—a new tempecha eri time show you.
Good, dis one. Kaukau any-kin’ dis one. Pilipine islan’ no good. No mo money.
From the individual words and the context, it was possible for the listener to infer that the first speaker, a ninety-two-year-old Japanese immigrant talking about his earlier days as a coffee farmer, was trying to say “He bought my coffee; he made me out a check.” But the utterance itself could just as easily have meant “I bought coffee; I made him out a check,” which would have been appropriate if he had been referring to his current situation as a store owner. The second speaker, another elderly Japanese immigrant, had been introduced to the wonders of civilization in Los Angeles by one of his many children, and was saying there was a sign high up on the building which displayed the time and temperature. The third speaker, a sixty-nine-year-old- Filipino, was saying “It’s better here than in the Philipines; here you can get all kinds of food, but over there isn’t any money to buy food with.” (One of the kinds of food was “pfrawg,” which he caught for himself in the marshes by the method of “kank da head.”) In all these cases, the speaker’s intentions had to be filled in by the listener. The pidgin did not offer the speakers the ordinary grammatical resources to convey these messages—no consistent word order, no prefixes or suffixes, no tense r other temporal and logical markers, no structure more complex than a simple clause, and no consistent way to indicate who did what to whom.
Da first japani came ran away from japan come.
“The first Japanese who arrived ran away from Japan to here.”
Some filipino wok o’he-ah dey wen’ couple ye-ahs in filipin islan’
“Some Filipinos who worked over here went back to the Philippines for a couple of years.”
People no like t’come fo’go’wok..
“People don’t want to have him go to work [for them].”
Do not be misled by what look like crudely placed English verbs, such as go, stay, and came, or phrases like one time. They are not haphazard uses of English words but systematic uses of Hawaiian Creole grammar: the words have been converted by the creole speakers into auxiliaries, prepositions, case markers, and relative pronouns. In fact, this is probably how many of the grammatical prefixes and tense ending –ed may have evolved from the verb do: He hammered was originally something like .He hammer-did. Indeed, creoles are bona fide languages, with standardized word orders and grammatical markers that were lacking in the pidgin of the immigrants and, aside from the sounds of words, not taken from the language of the colonizers.
Bickerton notes that if the grammar of a creole is largely the product of the minds of children, unadulterated by complex language input from their parents, it should provide a particularly clear window on the innate grammatical machinery of the brain. He argues that creoles from unrelated language mixtures exhibit uncanny resemblances—perhaps even the same basic grammar. This basic grammar also shows up, he suggests, in the errors children make when acquiring more established and embellished languages, like some underlying design bleeding from a veneer of whitewash.
When English-speaking children say
Why he is leaving?
Nobody dont’ likes me.
I’m gonna full Angela’s bucket.
Let Daddy hod it hit it,
They are unwittingly producing sentences that are grammatical in many of the world’s creoles.
Bickerton’s particular claims are controversial, depending as they do on his reconstruction of events that occurred decades or centuries in the past. But his basic idea has been stunningly corroborated by two recent natural experiments in which creolization by children can be observed in real time. These fascinating discoveries are among many that have come from the study of the sign languages of the deaf. Contrary to popular misconceptions, sign languages are not pantomimes and gestures, inventions of educators or ciphers of the spoken languages of the surround community. They are found wherever there is a community of deaf people, and each one is a distinct, full language, using the same kinds of grammatical machinery found worldwide in spoken languages. ... Indeed, because the deaf are virtually the only neurologically normal people who make it to adulthood without having acquired a language, their difficulties offer particularly good evidence that successful language acquisition must take place during a critical window of opportunity in childhood.
Extraordinary acts of creation by children do not require the extraordinary circumstances of deafness or plantation Babels. The same kind of linguistic genius is involved every time a child learns his or her mother tongue.
[1] Pinker, Steven. (1994). Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. (pp. 32-39)
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