Re: Learning a language

From: John Atkinson (johnacko_at_bigpond.com)
Date: 06/13/04 

Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 06:41:09 GMT

"Eugene Holman" <holman@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote ...

> Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
> show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
> questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
> elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
> scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
> important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
> semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.
>
> There is nothing ignorant about pointing this out. In the elaboration of
> Afrikaans, for example, foremen giving orders to their workers in what was
> still regarded as "broken Dutch" were in a far better position to
> determine what the norms of emergent Afrikaans would be than the
mixed-race,
> often ***, children of Khoisan women and their broken-Dutch-speaking
> lovers/meal tickets.

I obviously don't know enough about what happened on South African farms to
question this, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't true for the plantation
pidgins developed by the slaves in the Americas or the contract workers in
the SW Pacific.

 The "broken English" used by the bosses was "foreigner language", a weak
attempt to imitate the plantation workers' speech. Few whites ever bothered
to learn to speak this grammatically, just because they thought of it as
"bad English". Freshly arriving workers learned the language from those
already there, not from the bosses. In the Carribean, the average time a
slave survived was about ten years, and female slaves were "discouraged"
from having children, since plantation owners found it cheaper to ship in
replacement workers from Africa rather than grow their own. (This wasn't
the case in the USA, which maybe has something to do with why US black
English deviates less from the standard than the Carribean or SW Pacific
creoles -- also, of course, most US plantations were smaller, with the
slaves interacting much more with their English-speaking owners.) In the
Pacific, the workers were all men.

Thus we have a language with a generation time of 5-10 years (instead of the
more usual 20 plus), where nearly all speakers learn it as adults, and where
the speakers have very restricted contact with the lexifying language.

Of course the first slaves did learn English from their owners or overseers,
and many of them would have come to speak a good approximation to the
standard language (or whatever dialect their owners spoke). It would be
only after having been passed on through several generations of speakers
(with, as I said, restricted exposure to the owners' language) that the
plantation languages deviated enough from English to become the pidgins we
know.

This mode of pidgin development seems unlikely to have ever been common
outside the colonial plantation system of the last few centuries, including
the cattle stations of N Australia, and, perhaps, the S African farms Eugene
is talking about. Though in S Africa, most workers on each farm would have
been wantoks, and so able to use their own language when interacting with
each other. Also, in S Africa, as in southern Australia, interbreeding may
have been more important -- and thus native peakers -- children -- may have
been involved from the start. That is, "creolization" (in Eugene's sense),
but no real pidgin.

"Trade pidgins" are a different animal altogether, of course, and have
developed many times all over the world.

Just my attempt at introducing some empirical (?) data ... (with a little
help from Salikoko Mufwene)

John.

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