Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

240 Part 3: Language and Variation
widely recognized standard grammar or writing system, although many
dictionaries and grammatical descriptions have been written by linguists.
Most signifi cantly, however, P/Cs are often not considered to be legitimate
languages, but rather deviant and corrupt forms of their lexifi ers.
This is especially true in situations where a P/C coexists with the standard
form of its lexifi er as the offi cial language. This view is reinforced by the
fact that, at least superfi cially, the P/C and the standard share the same
lexicon. It is thought that the P/C does not have its own grammatical
rules, and consequently, the way it is spoken is considered to be the result
of performance errors rather than language differences. This lack of autonomy
is exacerbated in countries like Jamaica and Guyana, where a P/C
and the standard form of its lexifi er are both commonly used and there
seems to be no clear dividing line between them.
Hawai’i Creole, for example, has had a history of denigration by teachers,
administrators and community leaders. It is still commonly referred
to as a corrupt form of English, as indicated by this extract from a letter to
the editor of a local newspaper: ‘It’s broken English. And when something
is broken, you fi x it’ (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 12 October 1999). Another
letter stated: ‘For the benefi t of Hawai’i children, pidgin should become a
thing of the past .... There are some things that deserve to die’ (Honolulu
Advertiser, 4 September 2002). And some people still make statements such
as the following: ‘pidgin is not a language, it’s a sign of a stupid [person]
that is lazy, and it rubs off on others’ (from a Honolulu Advertiser blog, 31
March 2008).
However, with more understanding that P/Cs are legitimate languages,
with their increased use in literature and the media, and with more realization
of their importance to local identity, attitudes have begun to
become more positive in some places, such as Hawai’i, Jamaica and other
Caribbean countries (see Romaine, 1999; Shields-Brodber, 1997; Mühleisen,
2002). In fact, a large-scale survey of attitudes in Jamaica in 2005, described
by Devonish (2007: 219–224), showed a signifi cant shift in attitudes, with
a desire for Jamaican Creole to be used in more public formal contexts,
such as speeches in Parliament and education.
Variation
Another clearly sociolinguistic area of research in P/C studies focuses
on the variation found in what is known as the ‘creole continuum’ – a cline
of speech varieties of the creole ranging from what is called the ‘basilect’
(furthest from the lexifi er) to the ‘acrolect’ (closest to the lexifi er), with
intermediate varieties, the ‘mesolects’. This is illustrated for Jamaican
Creole in Figure 9.1 (adapted from Alleyne, 1980).
The social conditions for a creole continuum, fi rst outlined by DeCamp
(1971: 351), include a standard form of the lexifi er language being the