Creole

The term Creole originally referred to any person, black or white, born in Caribbean or South American colonies during the European colonization of those areas. These Creole people were believed to form unique Creole societies, with a distinct culture in terms of food, language, values, and so on. Most often now, [Page 203]however, the term refers to languages created as a result of contact between two or more peoples, as happened between Africans and Europeans on American soil. Creole languages, however, are not exclusive to the Americas. Creole languages emerged in Africa, as well as in other parts of the non-African world.

While the social and historical circumstances leading to the development of a Creole language are rather clear, the process through which such a language emerges remains rather mysterious. Several theories have been put forth to account for the development of Creole languages in the Americas. One of the first theories, the baby talk theory, was quite racist. It argued that Africans, because of their alleged intellectual inferiority, had to be taught an impoverished form of a European language that resulted in a Creole language (which in this context was perceived as a pathological form of the European language).

Some later scholars have argued that enslaved Africans developed a pidgin as a language of convenience that they used to communicate with Europeans and with one another, because captives were linguistically diverse. When they arrived in their new homes, Africans who were enslaved were bilingual and in many cases multilingual. However, they were then denied the opportunity to speak their African languages, and thus prevented from reinforcing these languages, and as more Africans arrived, African languages were used less and less frequently, while the pidgin was increasingly relied on. Over generations, then, the pidgin gradually developed into a Creole language. This evolution involved the substitution of West African words with European words (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and others). However, this substitution of vocabulary took place within the structures that characterized West African languages. Thus a so-called Creole can develop from a pidgin when the pidgin is the result of its speakers being unable communicate by using their native language or being in a multilingual area where another language is essential for progress and survival.

Four main phases in the expansion process from a pidgin to a pan-African language have often been posited. The first phase involves casual and unsustained contact between European language speakers and the local people. From this contact, a marginal pidgin evolves that is capable, with the help of gestures, of communicating needs, numbers, trading arrangements, and so on. The second phase begins as soon as the pidgin English, for example, is used by and between local people. At this stage, it expands in only one way, from the user's mother tongues. This phase helps to account for the indigenous lexical items and the numerous direct translations found in all Creole languages where English was the language spoken by the Europeans. As interracial contact increases, the third phase occurs. During this phase, borrowing lexical items from the European language extends vocabularies. The fourth phase is limited to areas where the European language continues to be the official national language. When the contact between the European language and the Creole language is sustained, and as education in the so-called standard European language becomes more widespread, a process called decreolization occurs. The European language's influence on the Creole language then increases considerably.

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