Creole Languages: Theories of origin

· One of the oldest and most hotly contested issues inpidgin-creole studies is how these languages

arose, or more specifically, how their similarities are to be explained. Originally, the competition was

between polygenetic theories, which assume that most varieties arose independently at different

times and in different places, and monogenetic theories, which assume that most varieties are derived

from one or a small number of ancestors which subsequently diffused or spread to other locations.

But for the past two decades, discussions of the bioprogram theory – which is neither polygenetic nor

monogenetic – have dominated the literature.

· The basic strategy which polygeneticists adopt is to point to one or more

factors in the contact situations that create pidgins and creoles which might cause them to develop in

parallel ways.

One such factor – and one of tremendous interest to sociolinguists – is the parallel social contexts in

which pidgins and creoles arise and the parallel functions they are required to serve. This is indeed a

component of the so-called Independent Parallel Development theory attributed to Hall (1966) by

Todd (1974: 31) and Romaine (1988b: 92–102) and the Common Social Context theory attributed to

Sankoff (1980) by Muysken (1988: 286–7) and Muysken and Veenstra.

· Hall (1966) is

essentially an exposition of the baby talk theory, one which recognizes both superstrate and (some)

substrate influence in the context of imperfect second language acquisition.

· For Bloomfield (1933: 472–3), as for Hall (1966: 5), the parallel factor in polygenesis is the process by which speakers of the superstrate might have deliberately simplified their language to facilitate its understanding and acquisition by substrate speakers. In its initial formulations, this baby talk theory (so called because adults produce similar simplifications to facilitate comprehension by children) was both simplistic and racist. But an even bigger problem for it was to explain how separate acts of simplification by speakers of different superstrate languages (English, French, Portuguese, Chinook) could result in pidgins and creoles with so many striking structural similarities. The nautical jargon theory – that pidgins and creoles are outgrowths of an international jargon developed and spread by ship's crews – could explain some of the lexical items (e.g., kapsaiz“turn over”, hais“lift”) found in many (European-based) pidgins and creoles, but not their structural similarity. The notion that there are widespread if not universal patterns of foreigner talk (Ferguson, 1971; Ferguson and DeBose, 1977) – and that these involve conventional reduction processes similar to those found in pidgins and Creoles – has served to legitimize and rescue the baby talk theory somewhat. But the baby talk theory has other weaknesses, including the fact that it is often substrate rather than superstrate speakers who are the main creators and users of pidgin-creole varieties (Whinnom, 1971), the fact that pidgins and creoles are usually unintelligible to uninitiated speakers of the superstrate, and the unlikelihood that central pidgin-creole features resulted from deliberate simplification.

· Monogenetic theories, unlike their polygenetic counterparts, come in only two varieties.

The first is a broad scope variety which suggests that many of the world's pidgins and creoles are derived from a Portuguese contact language developed in the course of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century contacts between Portuguese and West Africans, perhaps itself related to Sabir, the medieval lingua franca of the Mediterranean. The other monogenetic

theory is restricted in scope to the English-based pidgins and creoles, which Hancock (1986) sees as descendants of a putative Guinea Coast Creole English (GCCE) which developed on the West African coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

· The theory which has in fact dominated discussions of creole genesis since the 1980s is Bickerton's (1981, 1984, 1986) Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH), which views creoles as inventions of the first generations of children who acquire them natively.

· On the face of it this is a polygenetic theory, since it posits independent creation

in the separate places in which creole languages developed (note that this hypothesis is strictly

limited to creole rather than pidgin origins). But in a sense it is simultaneously a monogenetic theory, insofar as it sees the development of these creoles as guided by a single linguistic bioprogram which is common to all human beings.

· Evidence in favor of the bioprogram includes the contrasts between the rudimentary HPE spoken by Japanese and Filipino immigrants who arrived between 1900 and 1920 and the expanded HCE spoken by people born and raised in Hawaii thereafter, and the fact that the very features in which HPE and HCE differ – movement rules, TMA markers, and so on (see above) – are those found in creoles from a variety of different lexical bases elsewhere. Arguments against the bioprogram have been varied. One of the earliest was the fact that the LBH is not a comprehensive theory of creole genesis insofar as it does not account for non-European-based varieties like Lingala (Mufwene, 1984), nor for late creolized varieties like Tok Pisin. A quite different argument is that the HPE documented by Bickerton was not the real progenitor of HCE, but that the latter had its roots in an older and more fully developed English-based pidgin which replaced the earlier pidginized Hawaiian as a lingua franca in the late nineteenth century.

· Both demographic and linguistic evidence have been introduced in recent years in support of the gradualism hypothesis – the view that many creoles developed over a long period of time rather than in the short time-span LBH requires, and that stabilization rather than nativization was the crucial milestone in their genesis