Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Pidgins and Creoles 237
Description and development
For many years, P/Cs were thought to be marginal languages – that is
simply corrupted versions of standard languages, spoken by uneducated
people. In the 1960s, however, scholars began to examine P/Cs and write
detailed linguistic descriptions. These showed that P/Cs are legitimate,
rule-governed varieties of language, in some ways even more complex
than their lexifi ers.
For example in Bislama gender is not distinguished in the pronoun
system, and the pronoun hem (or sometimes em) can mean ‘she’, ‘he’ or
‘it’. So, the sentence Hem i stap long haos can have three different meanings,
depending on the context ‘He’s in the house’, ‘She’s in the house’ or
‘It’s in the house’. Also, in the sentence Mi givim buk long hem, the same
pronoun hem can also mean ‘him’ or ‘her’. Thus, it seems that Bislama has
a pronoun system that is ‘simpler’ than that of English. However, this is
not the full story. The pronoun system of Bislama makes some other distinctions
that are not made in English. For example while standard
English has only one second-person pronoun, you, that can refer to either
singular or plural, Bislama has four different second-person pronouns: yu
(singular – ‘you’), yutufala (dual – ‘you two’), yutrifala (trial – ‘you three’)
and yufala (plural – ‘you all’). Thus, Bislama pronouns make a four-way
distinction in number whereas English pronouns sometimes make no
distinction, as with you, or at the most only a two-way singular–plural
distinction, as with I versus we.
Over the last few decades, many PhD students have done grammatical
descriptions of a P/C for their dissertations, and detailed grammars of
P/Cs continue to be published – for example, on Cape Verdean Creole
(Baptista, 2002), Hawai’i Creole (Sakoda and Siegel, 2003) and Bislama
(Crowley, 2004). A book comparing the grammars of 18 P/Cs was also
recently published (Holm & Patrick, 2007).
One reason for the interest in grammatical comparisons of creoles is
that various studies have reported many apparent similarities among
these languages even though they may be located in very distant parts of
the world – for example, Hawai’i and Haiti. Considering these purported
similarities, along with the supposed rapid emergence of creole languages,
and the extremely simplifi ed nature of their pidgin predecessors, Bickerton
(1981, 1984) put forth his Language Bioprogram Hypothesis. This proposed
that children growing up on plantations had only a restricted pidgin
as their input for language acquisition. Since this was not a fully developed
language, they had to fall back on their innate linguistic capacity to
turn it into one. Thus, according to the hypothesis, creoles the world over
are similar because they refl ect the human biological endowment for
language – often called Universal Grammar.
For more than 20 years, the fi eld of pidgin and creole linguistics was
dominated by this universalist hypothesis, and research attempting to