J. Clancy Clements

A Creole origin for Barlovento Spanish? A linguistic and sociohistorical inquiry

McWhorter challenges the validity of the limited access model for creole formation, noting that “the mainland Spanish colonies put in question a model which is crucial to current creole genesis.” His thesis is that in the Spanish mainland colonies the disproportion between the Black and White populations was enough for the emergence of a creole language. This article focuses on one colony, Venezuela, and argues that Africans there had as much access to Spanish as they did in islands such as Cuba. Based on this fact, the relevant linguistic evidence is analyzed. The most important contribution of this study is the discussion of the Spanish crowns monopolization of the slave trade, which kept the Black/White ratio relatively low in certain Spanish colonies until the end of the 18th century. Until now, this part of the puzzle has been absent in the discussion of the missing Spanish creoles.

Deletion as an indicator of SVO → SOV shift

The Indo-Portuguese (IP) creoles display a well-known and uniform manner of marking the simple past and present continuous with the preposed particles ja ( ja ‘already’) and tE ( esta ‘is’), respectively. Moreover, n3 ( no ‘in the’) and d3 ( de ‘of, from’ or do ‘of, from the’) are typically used as prepositions to express goal or location. Those creoles with Neoaryan adstrat languages, of which Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) is one, theoretically possess the option of deleting these markers or prepositions if they are contextually or otherwise redundant. Using data from several sources spanning approximately 100 years, it is shown that ja, tE, n3 , and d3 in KP have undergone or are undergoing gradual deletion. It is argued that this development is part of a much larger SVO → SOV shift. The status of the typological shift indicators of verb-object/complement, adposition, and adjective-noun order are shown to corroborate the findings regarding deletion.

Portuguese Settlement of the Chaul/Korlai area and the Formation of Korlai Creole Portuguese

A perspective is offered on the social and historical developments surrounding the formation of Korlai Creole Portuguese (kcp), a creole language spoken in the village of Korlai, located around 150 kms south of Mumbai. I argue that lower-caste Hindus who were enslaved by the Portuguese in the Chaul-Korlai area were instrumental in the creation of kcp. I claim that kcp formed by 1530 and that it has been maintained up to the present day due in large part to the isolation of its speakers because of their religion, their caste and their occupation.

Salikoko Mufwene , The ecology of language evolution . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 255. Hb.

In this book, author Salikoko Mufwene offers a chronology of his views on language evolution as they have developed over the past 12 years. Mufwene understands the linguistic evolutionary process in terms of a languages external ecology – that is, its position relative to other languages with which it moves in and out of contact, the power relations among groups of different language varieties in the setting, and so on – as well as its internal ecology, or the coexistence in a given setting of the linguistic features, and their relative weight. Although Mufwene uses creole languages as a starting point, his purpose is to highlight general characteristics of language evolution; he argues that, in the essentials of language change, varieties such as pidgins and creoles differ little if at all from non-pidgins and non-creoles. To build his case, Mufwene draws from population genetics, seeing any given language not as an organism but rather as its own “species.”