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In creole studies, there has been a long tradition of discussing the respective contributions of African languages in the genesis of creoles spoken primarily in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Creolists have often assumed that the African languages that contributed to the creation of creoles were typologically rather uniform (e.g. Singler 1988). Very few studies have compared more than a handful of languages when searching for African influences in creoles (e.g. Parkvall 2000). In this chapter, we investigate the claim that the African languages involved in the colonial settings, and hence in the creation of various creole languages, were typologically homogeneous. Moreover, we assess the extent to which a selection of proposed stable features is shared (i) between creoles with and without African influence, (ii) between creoles and West African languages known to have influenced these creoles, and finally, (iii) between creoles and their lexifiers.

This study presents a semantics-driven lexical comparison of 20 creole languages and five European lexifier languages. Breaking new ground into understanding creole semantics, it utilizes insights from both cognitive semantics (in particular, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach) and phylogenetic approaches to linguistics comparisons. We provide an extensive study of label-meaning correlations as a way of exploring the relationship between word labels and word meanings across creoles and lexifiers. We conclude that creoles are not simply “versions” of their lexifier languages, and that it is misleading to say that creoles are “based” on European languages in their basic lexical-semantic configuration. At the same time, we find that creoles do relate more closely to their historical lexifiers than to other creoles, and that the lexical-semantic perspective adds a new dimension to the typology of creoles, nuancing the pictures from grammar-based comparisons.

Lexical comparison has long dominated the study of West African language history. Ap-proaching the subject from a different perspective, this paper compares a sample of West African languages based on a selection of typological features proposed to be temporally stable and hence possible markers of historical connections between languages. We utilize phylogenetic networks to visualize and compare typological distances in the language sample, in order to assess the extent to which the distributional properties of the selected features reflect genealogy, areality, or no plausible historical signal. Languages tend to cluster in accordance with genealogical relationships identified in the literature, albeit with a number of inconsistencies argued to reflect contact influences and chance resemblances. Results support the contention that typology can provide information about historical links between West African languages.