West African languages and creoles worldwide

Abstract

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.