Creolization

Creolization is a term used in linguistics to refer to the process of language creation in societies where speakers from widely different linguistic backgrounds have felt the need to communicate. Such a situation obviously prevailed in the Americas during the enslavement period when Africans, indigenous people, and Europeans found themselves forced to communicate although they spoke languages that varied greatly. The outcome of creolization is Creole languages.

Although creolization is a concept that has become quite widespread, it is nonetheless plagued by great ambiguity. In fact, there is no general consensus as to what exactly creolization entails. There have been three general, and at times not necessarily exclusive, approaches to creolization in the American context, be it North America or the Caribbean. The first approach, which is Eurocentric, has defined creolization as primarily a process of linguistic simplification in which Africans have adapted a European language, with the Creole language spoken seen as a dialect of that European language. The reasons given for this theorized simplification varied from the African ineptitude and gross physical traits that made learning a European language impossible to its use as a learning strategy. The racist baby talk theory illustrates such an approach, and so does the polygenetic theory. Such theories share the assumption that African languages played no role, or a very minimal one, in the creolization process.

This assumption also informs the second approach to the creolization process, namely, the universalist approach, which posits the activation of some innate language bioprogramme, rather than simplification, as the major force at work within creolization. The activation of the bioprogramme would have been made necessary by the situation of extreme linguistic deprivation in which Africans found themselves as a result of their (1) not being able to transmit their ancestral languages to their offspring and (2) not having access, for social reasons, to the European language spoken on the plantation. As a result, creolization is believed to shed light on universal language processes and structures, and these structures are believed to be reflected in Creole languages. Again, a major assumption of this approach is that African languages were socially irrelevant and, therefore, do not need to be considered when examining creolization.

It is precisely this assumption that is disputed by the proponents of the third approach, the substratist approach. The substratist approach presumes that creolization entails the modification not of European languages but of African languages. Indeed, African languages, this approach argues, continued to play a significant role in the lives of enslaved Africans and must therefore be taken into full consideration where creolization is concerned. This approach highlights and questions the arrogant bias of scholars who have dismissed, many times without much care, African languages and their possible contribution to Creole languages, although similarities between these languages and Creole languages are often obvious. What the substratist approach asserts most clearly is the need for thorough and careful examination of the sociohistorical context in which creolization occurred, rather than the a priori yet unjustifiable dismissal of African languages as irrelevant to creolization.

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