Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
7298426 | Lingua | 2018 | 9 Pages |
Abstract
Theories that plantation creoles were all born as pidgins at West African coast slave castles, including that proposed in McWhorter (2000), have not fared well among creolists, amidst a preference for supposing that creoles are born, or not, according to factors local to a given context. In this paper I spell out why, especially in light of research since, the “Afrogenesis” paradigm is still worth serious consideration. A key fact is the following. Many creolists argue that a creole did not appear when there was extensive black-white contact and many slaves were locally-born, a scenario most often associated with the Spanish Caribbean and Reunion and now proposed for South American colonies by Sessarego (2014) and DÃaz-Campos and Clements (2008). However, conditions were of just this kind in early St. Kitts and Barbados, where most scholars now locate the birth of English-based and French-based plantation creoles. The disparity in outcomes between these locations means that after fifty years, there is no coherent theory of how or why creoles come to be. I argue that only Afrogenesis shows the way out of this conundrum. I further discuss why the idea that creoles result from individual blendings of “features” in each location (Mufwene, 2011, 2008) is incommensurate with creole linguistic data.
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Social Sciences and Humanities
Arts and Humanities
Language and Linguistics
Authors
John H. McWhorter,