Out of Many Voices, One Language

Pidgin and Creole languages typically emerge in multilingual settings and result from the multiple, complex social factors and linguistic processes (substratal transfer (Siegel, 2008), restructuring (Neumann-Holzschuh & Schneider, 2000) and feature recombinations (DeGraff, 1999; Mufwene, 2001; Aboh, 2015), among others) that participate in language emergence, development and change. The original creolophones' diverse linguistic backgrounds accounts for the unavoidable variability in the input to Pidgins and Creoles and make it necessary to consider variation as one of their inherent attributes (Meyerhoff, 2021).

In this presentation, I focus on a set of Creoles in particular, and examine the nature and origins of their grammatical properties, comparing them to their diverse source languages on both the African and European sides. More specifically, I investigate the precise connections between the selected Creoles' source languages and the properties that these Creoles instantiate, to what extent their grammatical properties overlap or converge with those of their source languages and to what extent they diverge and innovate.

This presentation will showcase how the original creolophones' multiple voices (Kihm, 1990; Baptista, 2009a, 2020; Faraclas et al. 2014) interact in the linguistic ecology in which Creoles emerge and how some of the linguistic features observable in the Creoles under study can be best explained when analyzing them through the diverse lenses of speakers of both the African and European languages (Faraclas et al., 2014).

In the first part of the presentation, I provide comparative diachronic and synchronic analyses of two domains -anteriority and pronominal systems- in the selected Creoles and examine the variation in the expression of anteriority and pronouns across the Creoles under study and their source languages. I will show which variants can reasonably be traced back to specific sources and which ones are genuinely innovative.

The second part of the talk introduces the theoretical model and combination of methods used to examine the sites of convergence and divergence between the selected Creoles and their source languages. I demonstrate the complex social factors and linguistic processes that account for the observable variation across the selected Creoles in the two domains under study (anteriority and pronouns). Furthermore, by using multiple measures of complexity (not just morphological complexity), I show the complex processes underlying the emergence of Pidgin and Creole languages (Aboh and Smith, 2009; Baptista, 2009b).

Based on the complex picture of Creole emergence drawn by this presentation, in the third part, I make a call for drastic changes in the way that Creoles are discussed and introduced to students of Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology and other fields (Bancu et al., in preparation). I discuss preconceived notions about Creoles that are inherited from the colonial times in which they emerged, perpetuated by current neo-colonial distorted narratives (DeGraff, 2003) and make a set of recommendations for their study, based on Bancu et al. (in prep.).

References

• Aboh, Enoch and Norval Smith. 2009. Complex Processes in New Languages. The Creole Language Library. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

• Aboh, Enoch. 2015. The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Bancu, Ariana, Joy Peltier, Felicia Bisnath, Danielle Burgess, Sophie Eakins, Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales, Moira Saltzman, Yourdanis Sedarous, Alicia Stevers and Marlyse Baptista. In preparation. "On 'revitalizing' attitudes towards Creole languages". To be submitted to Decolonizing Linguistics, A. Charity-Hudley, C. Mallinson and Mary Bucholtz (eds.), Oxford University Press.

• Gonzales, Joy Peltier, Moira Saltzman, Yourdanis Sedarous and Alicia Stevers. In preparation. Revitalizing attitudes towards Pidgins, Creoles, multiethnolects and Sign languages." To be submitted to Decolonizing Linguistics, A. Charity-Hudley, C. Mallison and M. Bucholtz (eds.), Oxford University Press.

• Baptista, Marlyse. 2006. When substrates meet superstrate: The case of Cape Verdean Creole. In Cabo Verde - Origens da sua Sociedade e do seu Crioulo, Jürgen Lang, John Holm, Jean-Louis Rougé and Maria João Soares (eds.), Tübingen: Narr. 91–116.

• Baptista, Marlyse. 2009a. Selection and competition in creole formation: A case study. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (Selected papers from NWAV 35), 13(2). 38–50.

• Baptista, Marlyse. 2009b. Economy, innovation and degrees of complexity in creole formation. In Complex Processes in New Languages, Enoch Aboh and Norval Smith (eds.). The Creole Language Library. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 293-315.

• Baptista, Marlyse. 2020. Competition, selection, and the role of congruence in Creole genesis and development. Language 96 (1)160–199.

• DeGraff, Michel. 2003. Against Creole exceptionalism. Language 79.2. 391-410.

• DeGraff, Michel. 1999. Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Faraclas, Nicholas, Lourdes González Cotto, Micah Corum, Marisol Joseph Haynes, Diana Ursulin, Aida Vergne, Petra Avillán León, Sonia Crescioni, Damarys Crespo Valedón, Brenda Domínguez Rosado, Pier Angeli LeCompte Zambrana , Jean Ourdy Pierre, Hannia Lao Meléndez, Vanessa Austin, Hazel Ann Gibbs DePeza, Ange Jessurun. 2014. Creoles and acts of identity: convergence and multiple voicing in the Atlantic Creoles. PAPIA, São Paulo, 24(1), p. 173-198.

• Kihm, Alain. 1990. Conflation as a directive process in creolization. Bochum Essener Kolloquium, 111–37. Bochum: Brockmeyer.

• Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2021. Variation in Pidgin and Creole languages. In The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Umberto Ansaldo and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds). London/New York: Routledge, 348-362.

• Mufwene, Salikoko. 2001. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Neumann-Holzschuh, Ingrid and Edgar Schneider. 2000. Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

• Siegel, Jeff. 2008. The emergence of pidgin and Creole languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Middle Class African American English and Why It Matters

Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, most studies of African American English (AAE), have focused on working-class speech communities, largely at the exclusion of middle-class speakers. As a result, little consideration has been given to the linguistic dexterity of middle-class speakers and the extent to which they also draw on vernacular varieties in the construction of their racial and ethnic identities. And little attention has been paid to the more standard end of the AAE continuum and the ways in which less socially stigmatized features have also been used to reflect African American identity and culture. In this talk, I draw on a variety of methodological approaches to explore the contemporary use and perception of middle-class AAE. From public performance to autoethnographic reflection, I explore the ways in which middle class speakers make use of vernacular structural features, as well as camouflaged features, and lexical and rhetorical expression, to strategically construct both race-based and class-based identities. I also discuss opportunities for future research on middle-class AAE and call on researchers to help fill this gap in the sociolinguistic literature by giving voice to this relatively neglected segment of the African American speech community.

A Raciomultilingual Perspective on Sociolinguistic Variation

Sociolinguistic variation has had a long-standing interest in questions of language, race, and ethnicity, and social justice since the inception of the field. Nevertheless, much remains to be done. In this talk, I propose a raciomultilingual perspective that comprehensively addresses the multilingual repertoire through a raciolinguistic lens and argue that this perspective is essential to understanding the language beliefs and behavior of minoritized groups such as U.S. Latinxs. I demonstrate that a raciomultilingual perspective which 1) normalizes and centers multilingual repertoires, and 2) critically situates the co-naturalization of language and race in historical and contemporary sociopolitical contexts (Rosa and Flores, 2017), provides a principled framework for unpacking the social semiotics of linguistic diversity. This approach emphasizes multiscalar language ideologies that circulate from the local to transnational and relate to particularities of identity construction as well as commonalities of broader systems of colonialist thought. As part of this, I examine how a raciomultilingual perspective can enhance key approaches to variation summarized by Eckert’s (2012) “three waves” framework. I conclude with a reflection on directions in the field in relationship to foundational questions of language as part of society and social change.

Lifespan Change and Style-Shifting: Macroscopic and Microscopic Approaches in Historical Sociolinguistics

In the application of theoretical tenets and conclusions of current variationist research to the analysis and interpretation of linguistic data from the past, intra-individual variation has not been given the same relevance as inter-individual variation. However, style constitutes an essential component for the non-referential indexicality of the users’ sociolinguistic behaviour in interpersonal communication. The current prolific research output in Historical Sociolinguistics is reflecting the growth of interest in style and register, highlighting the role of ego-documents as materials worth studying for both inter- and intra-writer variation. As a result, the treatment of language variation and change privileging the observation of the individuals’ microcosm is now complementarily enriching traditional macroscopic research through within-speaker designs both at theoretical and methodological levels. This represents a shift in focus from the collectivity of the speech community to the individuality of specific users through the exploration of their communicative interaction in historical corpora of private correspondence. In addition to tracing sociolinguistic patterns and tendencies of language development longitudinally across the lifespan of individuals in past speech communities, informants are put under the lens of the microscope atomistically to observe their sociolinguistic behaviour on the basis of the social (a)symmetries between themselves (addressers) and addressees as well as context types. Stylistically, letters provide a rich source of information on less carefully monitored styles in contexts of communicative immediacy/distance.

The present talk illustrates this approach through the investigation of apparent life-span changes and style-shifting processes in late medieval England by applying contemporary responsive and initiative models of style to variation from historical corpora of epistolary documents. The corpus used as linguistic material for this study is the Paston Letters, a collection of 422 authored documents written from 1425 to 1503 by different generations of this minor gentry Norfolk family. The study is carried out through the analysis of the use of the orthographic variable (th) by male members of the family when addressing recipients from different social ranks. This variable behaved as a sociolinguistic marker and its situation of variability was the result of the progressive adoption of the new orthographic variant <th> at the expense of the old runic symbol <þ>, as in þing (>thing), broþer (>brother) or comeþ (>cometh). The reconstruction of the sociolinguistic diffusion of change over time, as well as of the individual (microscopic) and community (macroscopic) behaviours through the observation of their intra-writer variation may shed light onto the resources and driving forces for sociolinguistic variability and stylistic choice by individuals, where addressivity, recipiency and relationality are essential constituents. Consequently, when the sociolinguistic behaviour of informants is atomistically analysed in communicative interaction to see how they were experiencing a given change, tendencies and irregularities present in the slope of the graph representing their life-span patterns may be easily explained. Rather than life-span change, age-grading or generational change, the microscopic data analysis may often show reactive and initiative-based accommodation patterns of style-shifting in communicative interaction.

References

• Auer, Anita, Daniel Schreier & Richard J. Watts (eds.)(2015). Letter Writing and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133-155.

• Elspaß, Stephan. 2007. A twofold view ‘from below’: New perspectives on language histories and language historiographies. In: Stephan Elspaß, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth & Wim Vandenbussche (eds.), Germanic language histories ‘from below’ (1700–2000). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 2007, 3-9.

• Elspaß, Stephan (2007). Everyday language in emigrant letters and its implications on language historiography – the German case. In: Wim Vandenbussche & Stephan Elspaß (eds.), Lower Class Language Use in the 19th Century. Special issue of Multilingua 26-2/3 (2007): 151-165.

• Hernández-Campoy, Juan M. 2016. Sociolinguistic styles. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

• Hernández-Campoy, Juan M. & Tamara García-Vidal. 2018a. Style-shifting and accommodative competence in late Middle English written correspondence: Putting audience design to the test of time. Folia Linguistica Historica 39(2): 383-420.

• Hernández-Campoy, Juan M. & Tamara García-Vidal. 2018b. Persona Management and Identity Projection in English Medieval Society: Evidence from John Paston II. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 4(1): 1-31.

• Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003/2017. Historical sociolinguistics. Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman Pearson Education / London: Routledge (2nd edn.).

• Palander-Collin, Minna, Minna Nevala & Arja Nurmi. 2009. The Language of Daily Life in the History of English. Studying how Macro Meets Micro. In Arja Nurmi, Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), The Language of Daily Life in England (1400-1800), 1-23. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

• Schiegg, Markus. 2016. Code-switching in lower-class writing: Autobiographies by patients from southern German psychiatric hospitals (1852–1931). Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 2(1): 47-81.

• Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2006. Eighteenth-century English letters: In search of the vernacular. Linguistica e Filologia 21: 113–146.

• Voeste, Anja. 2018. The self as a source. A peasant farmer’s letters from prison (1848–1852). Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 4(1): 97-118.

• Werth, Alexander, Lars Bülow, Simone E. Pfenninger & Markus Schiegg. (eds.)(2021). Intra-individual Variation in Language. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.