Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Pidgins and Creoles 241
acrolect: he is eating his dinner.
mesolect 1: (h)im is eating (h)im dinner.
mesolect 2: (h)im eating (h)im dinner.
mesolect 3: im a eat im dinner.
basilect: im a nyam im dinner.
Figure 9.1 Range of speech in the Jamaican Creole continuum
dominant offi cial language, the partial breakdown of formerly rigid social
stratifi cation so that some social mobility is possible, and access to education
in the dominant language. Thus, this phenomenon is supposedly the
result of the lexifi er language becoming the target and the creole then
becoming heavily infl uenced or restructured by it, a process called ‘decreolization’.
Decreolization is usually defi ned as the gradual modifi cation of
a creole in the direction of the lexifi er. However, some creolists (e.g.
Mufwene, 2001) believe that actually the reverse process led to the development
of the continuum – that is that the lexifi er was gradually modifi ed
to become more basilectal.
Creole speakers have profi ciency over different ranges of the continuum:
Those with more education or higher socio-economic status control
varieties more towards the acrolectal end, and those with less education or
lower socio-economic status, towards the basilectal end. Speakers also
shift their speech along the continuum depending on whom they are talking
to and the context – more acrolectal in formal contexts and basilectal in
informal contexts. For example an educated speaker of Jamaican Creole
might say him eating him dinner to his wife at home, but he is eating his
dinner to his boss at work. In contrast, an uneducated speaker in similar
contexts might say im a nyam im dinner and im eating im dinner.
Some well-known studies of the creole continnum include those done
by Rickford (1987) on Guyanese Creole and Patrick (1999) on Jamaican
Creole. These and many other studies use the quantitative methodology
of variationist sociolinguistics, or what is sometimes called the ‘quantitative
paradigm’ (see Bayley, 2002), to examine the use of particular
variables – that is linguistic features that vary along the continuum. For
example in Figure 9.1, there are at least two variables, each with three variants.
One concerns the subject pronoun: the use of he, him or im and the
other concerns present continuous marking: is VERBing, as in English,
VERBing (without the auxiliary) and a VERB. In a variationist sociolinguistic
study, the frequency of use of each variant would be calculated for
various speakers and statistical analysis would be done to see whether
particular frequencies correspond to social variables such as age, ethnicity,