What Is A Creole?
By Emily Monroy
“Creole” is one of those words that like “humanist,”
“secular” and “liberal” can mean anything and
everything depending on where, when and by whom they are spoken. For
those with culinary inclinations, it brings up images of catfish,
gumbo and jambalaya. Students of history might recognize the word’s
roots in the Spanish “criollo,” the name used to designate
persons of unmixed European descent born in the New World. But “creole”
has another definition, according to Webster’s dictionary: “a
language based on two or more languages that serves as the native
language of its speakers.”
Americans may have heard the term “Creole” to describe the
language spoken by Haitian immigrants. (For the purpose of this essay,
“Creole” in reference to a specific language will be capitalized;
for a creole in general it will not.) Those who have studied French
may discern some French words, or derivatives of French words, in
Creole. This is hardly surprising; after all, Haiti was a colony of
France and French is still its official language. Creole also has
an African component, as most Haitians descend from slaves brought
there from Africa to work on plantations. Haiti is not the only part
of the world, though, whose inhabitants speak a creole as their mother
tongue.
We might first address the question of how creoles originate. Creoles
tend to emerge in areas where people of different linguistic backgrounds
interact without having a language in common. Such places include
slave or other agricultural plantations, military garrisons, and trading
posts. These people use their mother tongue to communicate with their
family and countrymen, but with others they employ what is called
a pidgin. According to author Jared Diamond in the book The Third
Chimpanzee, pidgins are primitive languages that consist largely of
nouns, verbs and adjectives with few or no articles, auxiliary verbs,
conjunctions or prepositions and no consistent grammar. However, the
next generation, that is the children of pidgin speakers, goes a step
further and develops a creole. Like a pidgin, a creole is made up
of two or more linguistic components: a “superstrate,” which
is usually based on the language of the colonizers (such as French
in Haiti and English in most former British colonies of the Caribbean),
and a substrate, in general a native or slave language or languages.
A creole is more advanced than a pidgin, having a more extensive vocabulary,
a consistent grammar as well as the ability to express anything a
regular language can, which a pidgin cannot. Creoles are nonetheless
somewhat deficient in comparison to regular languages in that they
lack things like verbal conjugations and plural forms of nouns (then
again, those who have struggled with the Herculean task of conjugating
Latin verbs might jump at the chance to study a less complex system).
_______________________
Creoles
tend to emerge in areas where people of different
linguistic backgrounds interact without having a language in common.
_______________________
As mentioned before, creoles have sprung up in many parts of the globe.
The Caribbean and several islands off Africa whose populations descend
from slaves are prime examples. In such cases, Africans of many different
nationalities, plus their European masters, were thrown together and
forced to come up with a language in which to communicate. The people
of São Tomé e Principe and Cape Verde in the Atlantic
speak a Portuguese-based creole, while those of Réunion and
the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean use one derived from French. A
Spanish creole called Chabacano developed in Zamboanga, the Philippines,
around a military installation manned by Filipinos of various ethnicities,*
Spaniards, and Native Americans and mestizos from the New World. A
language called Cristão or Kristang (both corruptions of the
word “Christian”) is spoken by a small community in the
Malaysian city of Malacca. A legacy of Portugal’s rule in Malaysia,
Kristang boasts a mainly Portuguese vocabulary but a grammar based
on Malay.
Beyond the Caribbean, the New World has been relatively creole-deficient
despite the coming together of different peoples there. A creole by
the name of Palenquero did emerge in San Basilio in Northern Colombia,
where it is still used by descendants of African slaves. Some scholars
believe that San Basilio’s isolation from mainstream Colombian
society led to the development of Palenquero. In most other parts
of Latin America, however, the process of Westernization was so thorough
that other than small minorities of unmixed Indians nearly everyone
speaks standard Spanish or, in Brazil, Portuguese.
The United States also witnessed the emergence of a few creoles. One
example is Gullah on the South Sea Islands off the Atlantic coast.
An English-based language with African elements, Gullah is spoken
by descendants of Black slaves on the Islands and was featured in
the film Daughters of the Dust. Louisiana and some of the neighbouring
Southern states are home to a French creole developed by African slaves
there. Across the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii, children of plantation
workers from places as diverse as Puerto Rico, Japan, China, the Philippines
and Portugal as well as Native Hawaiians formed an English-based creole
that is still used by some people born in the early 1900s.
_______________________
Gullah
is spoken by descendants of Black slaves on the
Islands and was featured in the film Daughters of the Dust.
_______________________
Despite the wide range of areas in which creoles sprung up, they have
many features in common. Most lack verbal conjugations, put the auxiliary
verb before the main one (“have worked” rather than “worked
have”), and use the subject-verb-object order. As the first generation
of creole speakers essentially invented the grammar from scratch yet
managed to come up with similar grammars across time and place, some
linguists, like Noam Chomsky and Derek Bickerton, speculate that the
human brain may be “hardwired” for a certain grammar. Jared
Diamond theorizes in addition that perhaps the difficulty young children
face in learning the proper word order for asking questions (“Do
you like John?” as opposed to “You like John?”) stems
from the fact that the former sentence goes against a pre-programmed
creole-like subject-verb-object order.
Finally, what is the future of creoles? That of creoles used by the
majority of a population (such as in Haiti or Cape Verde) seems secure.
Others’ future is more uncertain, especially when surrounded
by speakers of other languages. For example, a Portuguese creole in
Portugal’s former colony of Damão and Diu in India is
near extinction. Likewise, Palenquero is now mainly spoken by older
people and is losing ground to Spanish. However, whether dead or alive,
creoles have much to teach us about language, history and the relationships
between different peoples.
* Remember that many native languages are spoken in the Philippines;
Tagalog is the official one but not the mother tongue of all Filipinos.
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Emily
Monroy is a professional translator and is of Irish, Italian and
Norwegian descent. Born in Windsor, Ontario, she now resides in
Toronto. Her articles have appeared in several publications, including
Interracial Voice, Cats Canada, and Urban Mozaik. She welcomes
feedback on her articles.You can contact Emily at emonroy@beachestoronto.com
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