From Pidgin to Creole

I think his explanation is exaggerated and revives Chomsky's notion that we inherit language structure genetically in our brain. Other scholars who have done research on the creolization of pidgins have shown that the first-generation native speakers enrich the structure of the pidgin with linguistically necessary things but never claim that they actually create a new language. Pidgins are not bereft of structure. They have a simple structure to be sure, but the children don't have to start from scratch.

Thank you Ron for this very important caveat and qualification. I must add that this video is going to be part of a series on Creole and Bible Translation which I would like to build up in the coming month with a video of yours trully where I refer to this material. So the intention woudl be for the reader to be able to quickly see some versions of Creole genesis theories or elaboration. Personally I believe in a more gradualist and polygenetic approach to Creole laguage origin. However, the universalists should not be totally be excluded from the table. I hope to explain this in a personal video contribution and would love your critique Ron. But I totally agree that this video is overly "optimistic":-) By the way, do I would love to have some of your excellent stuff on Creole and Bible Translation as part of this series I a hope to build, I am particulary thinking of your article on the Jamiekan translation of some years ago.

Yes, this 2 min does come off as rather 'this is how it is' without nuances--it is slightly shocking to hear 'these children are born with no real language'. He didn't need to say that...I have usually considered this issue from the socio-linguistic viewpoint, ie. a speech form IS a creole once it is spoken by any community (I would guess 2 people? ). When I taught at U of Ilorin in Nigeria, a sociolinguist friend Anna Shnukal and I got a grant to determine if Nigerian pidgin had creolized. So we packed up and went to Benin City for one week where we discovered households where pidgin was the only language spoken by children, thus creolized. We went to schools as well and found that the children were being punished physically for speaking pidgin (which was in fact a creole). Today this creole is still called pidgin. I was delighted/humbled/kind of blown away last August when I went to the U of Ilorin West African Linguistic Society 30 years later!!!! to hear Shnukal and Marchese quoted in every single paper on pidgin, since ours was the seminal paper giving creole status to Nig pidgin (I forced her to put my name second because I was the syntactician and she the socio-ling). Anyway, I do believe (contra Ross? hi!) this man's last statement that we humans are in fact hard wired for some kind of 'full lang structures/capacity'. I agree however that it is odd to say children create langs. I would guess they reanalyze strings into more complex grammatical categories and syntactic relations than exist in pidgins. I have a very close friend who I think would be willing to compose/contribute a video for your workshop: John Singler, NYU, who has done a lot of work on Liberian pidgin (and he does Kru langs like me). Let me know if you want his contact. I think he would do a good job on syntax/modality, etc. I also am friends with a man working on Hawaiian Pidgin BT, Joe Grimes, SIL, let me know. (see you in SD in Nov?)

Thanks for opening up this discussion, Marlon, not just for the sake of Creole languages, but for wider issues of marginalized peoples and language communities. I think of being told awhile back by Ph.D.s in linguistics that there were certain speech communities that neither spoke the national language yet nor their own indigenous language anymore, and thus were caught in some sort of linguistic and communicative limbo. I did not buy it then, and even less now. I think now (based mostly on neuroscience) that language and communication is something humans (and only humans) do on the basis of powerful pattern-recognition and simulation/emulation wetware along with a powerful social urge we share with some higher mammals. So if you are human, and in contact with other communicating humans for any reasonable length of time, you will unfailingly rapidly learn to communicate with them, and that communication should probably pretty quickly be called language. Some other Ph.D.s used to talk about LUTS (languages of universal translation), and how many "impoverished" indigenous language could not be expected to really translate fully the breath and depth of the biblical message. But they used as examples of LUTS languages like English and Chinese, which (by now anyway) they boasted could talk of anything from pigs to protons. But of course neither anyone from OT or NT times could really carry on much of a conversation about protons any more than can any number of isolated linguistic groups today. The real mistake here is that there are things many indigenous and biblical languages can talk about better than we LUT-speakers: the holy and the unclean, the spirit world, tabu, animal sacrifice and so on. So again, thanks for stimulating my thinking about Creoles and beyond.