Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Pidgins and Creoles 243
involved: ‘status planning’ – dealing with the role of the language in
society – and ‘corpus planning’ – dealing with the language itself. With
regard to status planning, the aim has been to increase both the status and
functions of the P/C so that it is used in offi cial contexts alongside the
existing offi cial language. (This is called ‘instrumentalization’.) Many of
the arguments for such expansion are socio-political, pointing out that a
large proportion of the population is disenfranchized by not knowing the
established offi cial language. The use of the P/C in formal education,
government and other offi cial domains would give people greater access
and allow them to participate in decision-making processes, thus counteracting
neo-colonialism and elitism (see e.g. Devonish, 2007). At present,
P/Cs are accorded offi cial status in the constitutions of less than a handful
of countries, including Haiti, Vanuatu and PNG.
With regard to corpus planning, the major efforts have been in codifi cation:
choosing a ‘standard’ variety of the P/C to be used for these wider
functions and developing a writing system for it (graphization). But
because of the socio-political underpinnings of language planning efforts,
and the lack of perceived legitimacy of P/Cs, as described above, the codifi
cation of a P/C has two goals not usually found in other contexts: (1)
choosing a variety of the P/C that would be accessible to the majority of
speakers of the language and (2) making the P/C autonomous from its
lexifi er so that it is perceived as a separate, legitimate language. In other
language contexts, the standard is based on a prestige variety used by the
social elite and found in an established literary tradition. In many cases, it
is modelled on an already established standard used in the community
(such as Latin in Europe in ancient times). In contrast, a P/C normally
does not have an established literary tradition. Furthermore, the prestige
variety of the P/C is the form closest to the lexifi er and the established
standard is often the lexifi er itself – both generally spoken by only a small
elite class (see Sebba, 1997). Obviously, the goals of accessibility and
autonomy would not be accomplished by developing a standard form of
the P/C on the basis of the lexifi er.
This is most relevant to the choice of orthography (i.e. writing system).
There are basically two types of orthographies used for P/Cs: etymological
and phonemic. An etymological orthography is based on the conventional
spelling of the lexifi er language – for example in Hawai’i Creole:
They stay coming for talk with that old bugger. ‘They’re coming to talk with
that old guy’. A modifi ed etymological orthography distinguishes some of
the salient linguistic features of the P/C, especially in pronunciation
(Winer, 1990). So the same example from Hawai’i Creole with modifi ed
etymological orthography would be: Dey stay coming fo talk wit dat ol
buggah. In contrast, a phonemic orthography is based on the sounds that
actually occur in the P/C without any reference to the lexifi er, ideally with
one letter for each phoneme (a sound that is used to distinguish meaning),