Presentation on "Creole"

1. Altaf Ahmad
Khan

2. Creole
• Creole is a Pidgin which has acquired native
speakers.
• a language that has its origin in extended
contact between two language communities,
one of which is dominant. It incorporates
features from each and constitutes the
mother tongue of a community.

3. Creoles are of more interest than
Pidgins from the social point of
view
I. One of the main sources of information
about the origin and identity of its speakers.
e.g. Descendants of African slaves in America
o
A similar interest is shown by the people who speak
varieties whose origins are in creole but later
moved towards the dominant variety.
e.g. English of Black people in United States

4. Creoles are of more interest than
Pidgins from the social point of
view
II. Minority groups, who speak some form of
Creole.
e.g. West Indian immigrants in Britain.
- In this case, serious educational problems may
arise if both teacher and learner are not sure
whether this Creole is different from majority one
or a dialect of it.

5. Creoles are of less interests from the point
of view of what they tell us about
language
I. Except their origin, Creoles are just
ordinary languages, as any other.
o
o
Unlike ordinary languages, they arise through a
process called Creolisation.
They are likely to gradually lose their identity by
Decreolisation.
- between these two stages, Creoles are ordinary
languages.

6. Decreolisation
(Definition)
• Over time, a Creole language re-converges
with one of the standard languages from
which it originally derived. (Wikipedia)
• The loss of creole features in an original creole
language as the result of contact with a major
international language that was one of its
ancestors. (the free online dictionary)

7. Decreolisation
(Process)
• It happens when Creole is spoken in a country where
other people speak the Creole`s lexical source
language (the dominant language).
• Because of the more prestige of dominant language,
Creole`s speakers tend to shift towards it.
• Decreolisation is caused by social, political or
economic factors.

8. Imp. terminologies in Decreolisation
• Basilect: A variety of Creole which is most remote from
prestige language.
- The common and low variety.
• Acrolect: The variety which is closest to the standard prestige
language.
- The Super and high variety.
• Mesolect: A variety of speech that is midway between the
acrolect and the basilect.
• Post Creole continuum: The range of varieties (mixture of all
Mesolects) spanning the gape between Basilect and Acrolect.

9. Creolisation
• The process by which a Pidgin is developed to
Creole is called Creolisation.
• Generations of Pidgin speaking communities
adopt Pidgin as their first language which in
turns become Creole.

10. Example
• A baby is born to a Pidgin (Tok Pisin) speaking
parents (both having some other but different
languages as their native languages) in Papua New
Guinea.
• This child starts to speak Tok Pisin (pidgin variety), as
his/her First Language.
• The difference between parents and child is that the
baby is learning this Pidgin variety as first language
while when parents learned it, they already knew
another language.

11. Followers of Chomsky on Creolisation
(One view)
• Linguists who follow Noam Chomsky believe that
- a child is genetically prepared or programmed to
learn a human language.
OR
- Our ability to learn language is innate.
 When children are born into families where the only
language they hear is mere PIDGIN, there genes push them to
up-grade it to a full language by enriching it with relative
clauses and other complexities not needed in mere pidgins

12. Enriched pidgin and creole
(Another view)
• Pidgin can become richer (in vocabulary and
constructions) to the extent of being similar to
ordinary languages.
• The speakers of a Pidgin continue to develop it using
all the available resources, in a process that does not
depend on Creolisation. (Gillan Sankoff and Penelope
Brown 1976)
• The only difference is that
- Creole has native speakers while enriched Pidgin
does not.

13. Difference b/w Pidgin & Creole
• There is no difference between both except
that of native speakers.
• If it is said that:

Creole is ordinary language and Pidgin is
rather peculiar??
BUT
I- The distinction between ‘normal’ and
‘peculiar’ is unclear and is a fact of continuum
rather than a qualitative difference.

14. Difference b/w Pidgin & Creole
II- It is clear that a Pidgin does not come into
existence suddenly, at one moment, but it is
gradually built up out of nothing- a process of
variety creation.