Phonological Restructuring In Creole The Development Of: Fill & Download for Free

I would only add that the jury is still out on the role of pidgins as progenitors of creole languages. That particular theory of creole genesis, known as the ‘life cycle’ theory, was first proposed by Robert Hall in 1962. It has since been the subject of a lot of critiques, many of which have resulted in alternative theories. For instance, Robert Chaudenson in his 1992 book argues that the French creoles of the Indian Ocean developed gradually as successive approximations to colonial French rather than from the nativization of erstwhile pidgins. According to Chaudenson’s theory, the socioeconomic history of insular colonial societies can roughly be divided into two phases, the homestead phase and the plantation phase. During the homestead phase there is a more or less equal number of white Europeans (who spoke different dialects of the colonial language) and enslaved non-Europeans. Enslaved non-Europeans typically lived in the same residence with their European owners and often worked alongside them in a subsistence-style domestic economy. These living conditions allowed sufficient enough contact with their French-speaking owners for them to be able to acquire the colonial French dialect to varying degrees of perfection. Contact between Europeans and non-Europeans in the homestead phase was not limited to the domain of trade; it was highly frequent and, we may assume, quite intimate. Clearly, this is not a situation where you would expect to find the creation of a pidgin.The transition to the second phase of development, the plantation phase, represents the crucial moment for the emergence of a creole language. This comes when a colonial society makes the switch to large-scale plantation agriculture and plantation owners begin to purchase large numbers of African slaves. At that point, the full access to the colonial vernacular spoken by the small European population which characterized the homestead phase becomes extremely limited to non-existent. New arrivals of slaves acquire the second-language varieties of the colonial language spoken by earlier, more ‘seasoned’ arrivals. The colonial language thus undergoes multiple rounds of restructuring by the new arrivals, and what you get are ‘approximations of approximations’. With each round of restructuring, what was originally a colonial vernacular (either of French, English, Dutch, whatever) increasingly diverges from its lexifier, and what you end up with is a creole.