The Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles (AECs) exhibit fascinating combinations of disparate typological characteristics. I present a model of post-formative (“post-creolization”) contact and change and provide a comprehensive inventory of contact constellations in Africa and the Caribbean. I conduct a comparative analysis of causative constructions in seven African and Caribbean AECs, argue for the notional separation of the traditional creolist terms “superstrate”, “lexifier”, “substrate” and “adstrate”, and account for the linguistic-structural relevance of these distinctions. The model can explain the typological diversity within and across the AECs, help elucidate their genealogical and areal differentiation, and contribute to our understanding of the processes and outcomes of language contact and change in multilingual ecologies.

The neural systems of lexical tone processing have been studied for many years. However, previous findings have been mixed with regard to the hemispheric specialization for the perception of linguistic pitch patterns in native speakers of tonal language. In this study, we performed two activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses, one on neuroimaging studies of auditory processing of lexical tones in tonal languages (17 studies), and the other on auditory processing of lexical information in non-tonal languages as a control analysis for comparison (15 studies). The lexical tone ALE analysis showed significant brain activations in bilateral inferior prefrontal regions, bilateral superior temporal regions and the right caudate, while the control ALE analysis showed significant cortical activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus and left temporo-parietal regions. However, we failed to obtain significant differences from the contrast analysis between two auditory conditions, which might be caused by the limited number of studies available for comparison. Although the current study lacks evidence to argue for a lexical tone specific activation pattern, our results provide clues and directions for future investigations on this topic, more sophisticated methods are needed to explore this question in more depth as well.

This article presents a descriptive and theoretical framework for the analysis of prosodic systems that have emerged from contact between African tone and European intonation-only languages. A comparative study of the prosodic systems of two Romance contact varieties, Central African French and Equatorial Guinean Spanish, shows that they feature two-tone systems, fixed word-tone patterns, tonal minimal pairs, the arbitrary assignment of tone in function words, and tonal processes. Evidence from further contact varieties and creole languages shows that similar systems evolved in other Afro-European contact ecologies. We conclude that tone is imposed by default on contact varieties and creoles that take shape in ecologies characterized by sourcelanguage agentivity in tone languages. In doing so, we argue against claims that tone necessarily cedes to stress during language contact and creolization. Instead, contact varieties and creoles partake just like other languages in the convergence processes that lead to the areal clustering of prosodic systems.*

Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English Lexifier Creole (AEC) spoken by some 150,000 people on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. Pichi is an offshoot of Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with its West African sister languages. However, insulation from English and Krio, extensive contact and hybridization with Spanish, language shift involving the Bantu language Bubi, as well as koineization through the prolonged coexistence of Pichi with closely-related languages like Nigerian Pidgin and Cameroonian Pidgin have given the language a character distinct from that of the other English Lexifier creoles of the region. The study of Pichi and its comparison with other West African AECs therefore offers fresh insights into the role that language contact has played in the differentiation of the Afro-Caribbean English lexifier Creoles.