Creoles, Contact, and Language Change

Abstract

This volume contains a selection of fifteen papers presented at three consecutive meetings of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, held in Washington, D.C. (January 2001); Coimbra, Portugal (June 2001); and San Francisco (January 2002). The fifteen articles offer a balanced sampling of creolists’ current research interests. All of the contributions address questions directly relevant to pidgin/creole studies and other contact languages. The majority of papers address issues of morphology or syntax. Some of the contributions make use of phonological analysis while others study language development from the point of view of acquisition. A few papers examine discourse strategies and style, or broader issues of social and ethnic identity. While this array of topics and perspectives is reflective of the diversity of the field, there is also much common ground in that all of the papers adduce solid data corpora to support their analyses. The range of languages analyzed spans the planet, as approximately twenty contact varieties are studied in this volume.

A genetic and linguistic analysis of the admixture histories of the islands of Cabo Verde

“…Furthermore, they identified variable timing of admixture events during and after the TAST, sometimes consistent with major socio-historical events such as the expansion of the plantation economic system or the abolition of slavery ( Moreno-Estrada et al, 2013 ; Baharian et al, 2016 ). From a cultural perspective, linguists have shown that novel contact-languages, such as creole languages ( Holm, 2000 ; Escure and Schwegler, 2004 ), emerged from recurring interactions between socio-economically dominant Europeans and Africans and Americans. Furthermore, they identified the languages of origin of numerous linguistic traits in several creole languages ( Quint, 2000 ; Essegbey et al, 2013 ; Baptista, 2015 ), and emphasized the complex histories of contacts that shaped language diversity on both sides of the Atlantic.…”