Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
7298428 Lingua 2018 11 Pages PDF
Abstract
This paper claims that legal history has much to offer to the study of the Afro-European languages that developed in the Americas. In particular, it is suggested that a comparative analysis of colonial slave laws may help us better understand why certain colonies were more conducive to the formation/preservation of creole languages than others. This study builds on the recently-proposed Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (Sessarego, 2015, Sessarego, 2017) and, in so doing, it provides data that weaken the assumptions on which the Afrogenesis Hypothesis was based (McWhorter, 2000).
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Social Sciences and Humanities Arts and Humanities Language and Linguistics
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