If You Build It, They Will Come

I would like to thank Semantic Compositions and Language Hat for spreading the word about this weblog. It is rather remarkable how quickly it has appeared on the proverbial "map". Not a bad start for a first week.

Terry Crowley

Language Log is reporting the very sad news that Terry Crowley, the University of Waikato linguist best known for his work on documenting Oceanic languages and Bislama (the creole English of Vanuatu) has passed away at the age of 52. Terry published both a reference grammar and dictionary for Bislama, as well as the classic 1990 From Beach-la-Mar to Bislama which traced the origins of the language and reconstructed with written texts how the modern grammar of Bislama arose. He was also on the editorial boards for Oceanic Linguistics and the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.

Our field has just lost one of its brightest shining stars; he will be sadly missed.

Linguists on the Internet

The current issue of the Economist (1/20/2005) has an article on linguists on the web and linguablogging. Its main focus is on linguists' use of Google and the web in general as a data resource -- and the pitfalls such research presents. The article also mentions Philip Resnik's Linguists' Search Engine and recent discussions on Language Log.

I personally have not yet used the web as a ready-made corpus, except for checking on the status of particular linguistic forms. For instance, tense/aspect/marker combinations were among the most basilectal features of Hawai'i Creole English, and the past progressive been/wen stay VERB was the most frequently attested TMA combination in historical texts (e.g. You wen stay wait by the tree how long? "How long were you waiting by the tree?"). Derek Bickerton's research in the 1970s found them still in existence, but they are not attested in Viveka Vilupillai's recent book on tense and aspect in contemporary HCE. Do they still exist or are they found only among certain speakers or in certain registers? With Google, I was able to find some examples on the web:

(1) Lyk da ada dae... he wen stay making troubLe... so den she wen make hym go in tha breakout room... en den Lyk he was pLaying wif everything in there. | link

(2) HO! BOY My eye wen lite up. Da back wen stay swell jus like wan KP! | link

Past searches also provided other examples, which no longer exist on the web (the ephemeral nature of the web is an interesting issue). However with the internet, we need to be careful about the quality of the evidence. In general, how representative is literary HCE of the spoken vernacular? Are some features distorted or exaggerated in terms of frequency? What kinds of sampling errors do we expect with this kind of corpus? And most important — do we know whether these writers are actually native speakers of HCE at all? These are important questions and they pertain to the study of historical pidgin/creole texts as well.

UPDATE: Language Log has some comments on the Economist article.

Polari Revival in London Soho

Polari, the famous gay men's slang of Britain, appears to be having another revival. Two articles have just appeared in the British press on its use at the Madame Jo Jo's nightclub in Soho. As the Guardian (1/17/2005) correctly reports, Polari is actually a vestige of Lingua Franca (the earliest known European-based pidgin) which flourished between the 13th and 18th centuries. That is to say, Polari as it continues to be spoken today contains lexical input from medieval Lingua Franca. The name of the language itself derives from Italian/Lingua Franca parlare 'to speak'.

BBC News (1/8/2005) is reporting that words used by the staff at Madame Jo Jo's include aqua 'water,' bona 'good,' dinarli 'money,' fabulousa 'great,' and funt 'pount', and a word list with the article also mentions manjaree 'to eat' (from Lingua Franca mangiare, manjar). The article in the Guardian also notes that linguistics lecturer Paul Baker from Lancaster University gave the club staff a list of Polari words to use. Now that's applied linguistics! BBC News quotes Chris Allan, promotions manager for Madame Jo Jo's, on the use of Polari:

"It's just the ideal thing. We have a real problem when we get members of staff together where some speak, say, French and others Italian, but not everyone has a common language - it is a common problem in the West End. Finding a communal language is not always easy and Polari seemed a good place to start. It's gone down amazingly well with the staff. They have picked it up really quickly, probably because it's made up of elements of their own languages. Polari would have been prevalent when Jojo's first started - there's been a club here since the 50s. In a way we have reinvented Esperanto for the modern clubber."

The Guardian also cites what the owner Paris Tkaczyk has to say on the matter: "By offering staff the option of learning and using Polari to refer to familiar aspects and objects of their work, we are offering a fun, yet practical, way of bridging any language gaps, as well as celebrating the cultural history and diversity of Soho."

Notes on the January SPCL Conference

The Annual Meeting of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics took place on January 8-9, 2005 at the 79th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Oakland, CA. It was not as well attended as previous meetings (perhaps everyone else went to Curaçao last summer?), and we missed seeing many of the "old faces" we tend to see year to year. Even the traditional SPCL banner was nowhere to be seen.

As always, of course, there were a number of very stimulating and important papers that were presented. The standout for me was "(Re)conceptualizing the Creole (and Pidgin) Prototype" by Ian R. Smith, which sought to find the middle ground between John McWhorter's arguments for a creole prototype and objections (especially by Salikoko Mufwene) against McWhorter's proposal. This involved recasting McWhorter's prototype idea more in terms of standard prototype theory (SPT), which Smith argues satisfies many of Mufwene's objections and allows creoles to "still be seen as occupying a significant corner of the variation space populated by natural languages". This approach towards defining creole prototypicality departs from McWhorter's proposal in a number of key repects. For instance, McWhorter's prototype is economically restricted to three prototype attributes believed to be sufficient for defining creoles as a synchronic class. Although gradience of creolehood is an important facet of the model (which critics sometimes overlooked by citing the lack of clear-cut boundaries between creoles and non-creoles as an empirical problem), it can be quite difficult — if not impossible as Smith suggests — to define gradience with these three features. In SPT attributes are weighted as more central to the category than others, and the number of potential attributes is unrestricted, which allows the creolist to consider other structural characteristics and even sociohistorical factors. This results in a non-discrete category that is defined not by its borders but through the degree of internal similarity among its members. McWhorter's three features may be highly weighted in comparison to other potential attributes, but these may not be the only highly weighted attributes that determine core similarity and thus the category may include members that "differ among themselves" without having a single "best exemplar," as Mufwene (2000:65) puts it. This is by no means the first attempt to discuss creole prototypicality in terms of SPT, but Smith's contribution looks like a positive direction for a debate that has too often been mired in unfruitful controversy, and I look forward to reading more on this — including hopefully critiques on Smith's proposal by Mufwene, McWhorter, and other leading figures in the debate.

I also enjoyed "Contact-induced grammaticalization in early bilingual development" by Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip which concerns treating one-relatives in Singapore English (e.g. "They grow one very sweet," meaning "[The fruit] that they grow is very sweet") as deriving from "replica grammaticalization" on the basis of Cantonese structures. One-relatives were also the considered in Bao Zhiming's paper on "Markedness in Creole Genesis". Matthews and Yip examined acquisition data from Chinese-English bilingual children and found similar patterns and suggested that contact-induced grammaticalization forms part of bilingual L1 acquisition. However another possibility is "apparent grammaticalization" (as Adrienne Bruyn defines it), which involves merely the transfer of the result of a grammaticalization process, but the acquisition data may indeed suggest an ontogenetic process of grammaticalization. I eagerly look forward to Matthews and Yip's forthcoming Cambridge University Press book which will explore the matter in detail.

Jessica White presented on "Women and Linguistic Choice in Creole Genesis: A Sociohistorical Account," which stands quite close to my research interests. White is reexamining the social context in which Guinea Coast Creole English developed in the 17th-19th centuries and specifically the role of women in shaping linguistic practice. In particular, White considers how African and Afro-European women functioned as linguistic mediators in contact situations and used contact English as symbolic capital for attaining and sustaining socio-economic power. It remains to be seen however whether White's more nuanced account will help clarify whether earlier GCCE played a significant role in the genesis of Sierra Leone Krio (as held by Ian Hancock) or not.

These were some of the papers I found most interesting, and special mention should be made to Aya Inoue of the Univeristy of Hawai'i who presented "A Quantitative Study on Past Tense Reference in Hawai'i Creole English," which focuses on language internal and external factors in the variation of the past tense marker wen. I will have more to say about this interesting study sometime in the coming weeks. Also, Carol Myers Scotton gave a plenary on "The Grammatical Abruptness of Language Shift," and she gave the following as an example of Hawai'i Creole English as data:

(1) Get wan wahine shi get wan data. "There is a woman who has a daughter."

Scotton however characterized the second get as a "relative" when it is really a possessive verb (the relative is instead marked by shi, see the discussion of pronoun copying in relative clauses in Sakoda & Siegel 2003:104 and in Derek Bickerton's Roots of Language [1981]). This is a very minor point tho, since the example is still valid as an instance of reanalysis with respect to the first get, which functions as an existential.

ACLU: Threat of Lockdown For Speaking Pidgin

The Associated Press State & Local Wire | link
October 12, 2004
Attorney: Hawaii girls accuse state of lying to them

Seven girls sent from Hawaii's youth prison to a detention center in Utah say they were told Tuesday that the state has no plans to bring them back after two months as promised, according to an attorney who spoke to them.

State officials, including Gov. Linda Lingle, denied the girls would be kept longer than they were told.

"That's not true - absolutely, unequivocally not true," said Sharon Agnew, director of the state Office of Youth Services. "I don't know who from staff they would even be talking to."

Unrelated to the complaints, Lingle plans to visit the girls on Saturday on her way back to Hawaii from a trip to attend the presidential debate in Tempe, Ariz. She said the state had no plans to keep the girls there beyond the end of November.

The girls were sent to Utah two weeks ago to open up more space for overcrowded male inmates at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility.

Agnew, who visited them at the Salt Lake Valley Detention Center on Monday, said there may have been some miscommunication.

But Lois Perrin, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii, said the girls were upset when she spoke to some of them by phone Tuesday because staff members at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility told them they weren't coming back....

She said the ACLU's other main concern was that staff members at the Utah facility weren't being culturally sensitive, noting some of the girls are being threatened with punishment for speaking pidgin.

"They are repeatedly threatened with lockdown," Perrin said. Agnew said she didn't believe that to be the case. She said the girls were more likely punished because of their behavior.

"They're asking the girls to participate or behave just like any other resident," Agnew said. "They're being asked to uphold the facilities' rules. I wouldn't think that they would be locking them down for speaking pidgin."

Blake Chard, director of Utah Juvenile Justice Services, said the girls were disruptive at first because they weren't accustomed to the Utah center's treatment environment.

Does anyone know more about this case? If the complaint is true, it's quite disturbing how speaking in a way that comes most naturally is construed as an act of insubordination worthy of punishment. However, it is not clear to me from this very brief description how Pidgin came to be singled out as the basis for the discrimination -- whether the girls inferred it from context or whether staff members had made direct statements about their language. It is interesting that Agnew simply regards the matter as "not obeying the rules," but there is a huge grey area in the subtleties of interpersonal communication, especially if it includes interlocutors wholly unfamiliar with another's way of speaking. If the "rules" include "treat the staff with respect," and if the staff members thought the girls were, say, "sassy" or disrespectful for using a certain tone of voice with them when they were simply speaking according to their usual HCE intonation patterns, the girls could have easily inferred (correctly) that their accent was being used against them and the staff members could have inferred (incorrectly) that the girls were breaking the rules by being disrespectful. Without more information, it is impossible to say much more.

Namu Pa'i 'Ai: A New Blog on Pidgins and Creoles

This post represents my first foray into the growing world of internet blogging. As a matter of introduction, my name is Sarah Roberts and I am a "Third Wave" sociolinguist -- that is to say, my approach towards language variation seeks to understand how variation is used as a resource for constructing social identity and how ideologies shape linguistic practice.

My primary interest is contact-induced language change, especially as found in pidgin and creole languages. These languages are particularly interesting because of the relative rapidity with which they develop and, at least in the case of early-stage pidgins, their drastic restructuring in comparison to their source languages. The post-creole continuum is also a rich area for exploring the role of identity in stylistic variation.

My own work has mostly involved the vernacular non-standard English of Hawai'i, Hawai'i Creole English (HCE), which drew on several simplified pidgins during its genesis in the 19th and early 20th centuries. HCE is known to most people simply as "Pidgin," and it occupies a contested place in contemporary Hawai'i society. It is frequently characterized as "bad English" and blamed for the scholastic shortcomings of students. It is also cherished as a vibrant cultural resource and vehicle for expressing identity. In my work I explore both how this language came into existence (in terms of grammatical and lexical changes) as well as how attitudes about it arise and change over time. Since HCE co-existed with other languages in its historical setting, my work is perhaps more accurately described as reconstructing the history of language contact in Hawai'i from the time of Captain James Cook to the present.

This blog will chiefly concern itself with the linguistic situation in Hawai'i (as it is my area of expertise), but it will also cover news and research concerning other pidgin/creole varieties around the world. In no sense will I attempt to give a "balanced" coverage of research in pidgin and creole studies; the purpose of this blog is rather to create a place on the web where I may comment on topics that interest me. Rather, I hope other creolists and pidginists will join the growing linguablog community and better represent the field as a whole.

I will be writing mostly for a linguist and language specialist audience but I hope this blog will interest non-specialists as well -- especially Pidgin speakers and those who take an active interest in the language. For everyone, welcome!

Finally, a word on the name of the blog itself. Although "Pidgin" is the usual English name for the language, in Hawaiian it is also known as 'ōlelo pa'i 'ai, which literally translates as "hard taro-root language". This term was originally used in the 19th century to refer to Pidgin Hawaiian (a Polynesian-based pidgin spoken especially on the plantations), Hawai'i Pidgin English (the direct ancestor of HCE), and a mixture of the two languages. Namu pa'i 'ai is a variant of this name and was first attested in a newspaper article in 1887. Namu is Hawaiian for "gibberish", from which the Pidgin Hawaiian word naminami "to talk, converse" was derived. The "hard-taro" metaphor latent in the name is especially obscure and is open to various unsatisfactory interpretations, which nicely evokes the state of affairs in pidgin and creole studies regarding the obscure origins of contact languages and the often unsatisfactory attempts to understand them.