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This study examines how Anglophone urban elites in 1960s metropolitan Cameroon negotiated local and global ideas about culturally constructed forms of “natural” black beauty. Formally-educated Christian urbanites, such as freelance female journalists, who often worked as civil servants, sought to discipline women’s bodily practices and emotional expressivity in order to regulate the boundaries of perceived feminine respectability and to define a woman’s “natural” beauty, a descriptor with both internal and external implications. The language they used included both local terms such asnyanga, a Cameroonian Pidgin English word for varied ideas about beauty and stylishness, and standard English terms. This specific use of language illustrates the hybridity of understandings of natural beauty and bodily comportment, painting a distinct African imagery denoting the social progression of black Cameroonian elite subcultures.

Early pidgins have been traditionally characterized as ‘fluid, structureless, and probably macaronic’ (Bickerton 1999: 54). According to this view, this unstructured code is only systematized when it is acquired by children during creolization. Presented here is a preliminary generative analysis of data from Tây Bồi/Vietnamese Pidgin French (VPF), a now-extinct pidgin which existed during the French colonization of Vietnam (Schuchardt 1888; Stageberg 1956; Reinecke 1968; Philips 1975; Nguyễn 1979; Love 2000). VPF was never acquired as an L1 nor fully elaborated; it therefore did not creolize, remaining unambiguously at the pidgin stage. Data from the 19th and 20th centuries suggest that, contrary to the predictions of the Bickertonian pidgin-to-creole model, VPF already exhibited a degree of grammatical systematicity. This poster explores the hypothesis that emergent systematicity in VPF grammar can be attributed to adult acquirers' overgeneralizations across the intake (Maximise Minimal Means; Biberauer 2019).

The choice of an official language in a linguistically pluralistic society often poses thorny problems, not least of which is that concerning perceived threats to the linguistic rights of minority language communities. This article discusses the importance of Cameroonian pidgin English (CPE) in relation to the two imperial languages inherited from colonial masters – English and French. I will contend that for the purpose of socio-political integration and national unity in Cameroon, it is incumbent upon policy-makers and language planners to choose pidgin English as one of the official languages in the country. CPE is a national lingua franca spoken by the rich and poor, men and women, educated and uneducated, young and old. Being one of the most widely spoken languages in the country, having met the communicative needs of Cameroonians for more than 500 years, and being a language that carries the identity and ecology of Cameroon, pidgin English has the potential to be promoted to the status of an official language and made to serve as a compromise medium for socio-political integration in an ethnically pluralistic nation such as Cameroon.

Dashin pidgin English means an ancillary gift to an exchange. What happened when thedashbecame attached to the indentured labour contracts that the Spanish Empire brought from Cuba to their last colony, Spanish Guinea? On the island of Fernando Pó, which came to be almost wholly populated by Nigerian labour migrants, the conditional gift in the form of a large wage advance produced a particularly intense contradiction. In the historiography of unfree labour, the excess wage advance is thought to create conditions for the perpetuation of bondage through debt. However, in imperial contexts, the wage advance did not generate compliance and immobility; exactly the opposite – it produced unprecedented waves of further escalation and dispersed flight. Thedashwas pushed up by workers themselves and relayed by informal recruiters. Together they turned this lynchpin of indentured labour and debt peonage into a counter-practice that almost led to the collapse of the plantations in the 1950s. The trajectories of thedashled to a more pointed version of the foundational thesis of global labour history: namely, that it was actually free labour, not unfree labour, that was incompatible with labour scarcity-ridden imperial capitalism.

The most widely accepted origin of the word ‘Pidgin’ is that it is a Chinese pronunciation of the English wordbusiness(etymonline.com). Pidgin English in mainland China has another popular localised nickname, i.e.yangjingbang洋泾浜 English, a trade jargon term often used in Shanghai. However, this popular Pidgin English has been played down in linguistic research in mainland China because of the assumption of colonial connotations (Jin, 2011). Although it did not thrive or even survive in mainland China, Pidgin English has influenced to no small degree both contemporary culture and language in Shanghai, as well as other Chinese varieties.

Kamtok, an English-based expanded pidgin/creole in Cameroon, has many of the grammatical structures of its lexifier language. However, there are certain grammatical structures in this contact language which are not so obvious in its lexifier, though they may exist sparingly in spoken forms of the production of some native speakers. One of these is the serial verb construction (SVC). SVCs are ‘a series of two (or more) verbs [that] have the same subject and are not joined by a conjunction … or a complementiser … as they would be in European languages (Holm, 1988: 183).

This paper seeks to rationalize the attitude-acquisition conundrum which is witnessed with Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), an English-based pidgin spoken in Cameroon. According to Baker (1992: 10), ‘attitude’ refers to a hypothetical construct used to explain the direction and persistence of human behavior. In second-language acquisition literature, the use of the term ‘attitude’ has very often conjured up associated notions such as behavior, motivation, prestige and importance, which are seen to be important determinants of levels of success in L2 learning/acquisition. A positive attitude is said to fortify the motivation to learn a language; to be a successful learner, a positive attitude towards the target language is necessary. However, as McKenzie (2008: 4) notes, the relationship between attitude and L2 learning/acquisition is a rather complex one, which varies according to social context. Among other things, a positive attitude towards an L2 is also driven by factors such as (1) the socioeconomic value of the L2, (2) the L2's status-raising potential and (3) its perceived instrumental value.

With global attention currently focused on the challenge of providing Education for All (UNESCO 2000), we must ensure that the language of teaching and learning remains a topic on the agenda towards making sure that the education being provided is effective. This is therefore a critical time to review medium of instruction debates, and to reassess what empirical evidence exists to guide policymaking that is both appropriate and achievable. Contributing to this endeavour, this paper argues for the approximate replication of two key studies. The first is Afolayan (1976), a widely-cited study conducted in Ife, Nigeria to test the effectiveness of teaching children in the mother tongue for six years of primary education. We argue that the frequency with which the success of this study is cited, without due attention paid to the details of its methodological procedure, may actually be detrimental to the success of other experiments, thus necessitating the careful replication of the original study. The second study is Siegel (1997b), one of the few studies that have been conducted to evaluate the impact of initial education in an English-based pidgin on the subsequent learning of English. We argue that there is an urgent need for replication of one of the few available studies of pidgins and creoles in education, given the prevalence of negative attitudes towards this category of languages.

The Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE), edited by Bernd Kortmann and Kerstin Lunkenheimer, is an impressive and significant achievement. Consisting of almost 1,000 pages of detailed accounts of morphosyntactic patterns in 55 varieties of English from around the world (with some analysis of a further 19) by an international range of experts (many of whom are native speakers of the varieties they describe), WAVE represents a major step forward in our understanding of dialect variation in English and illustrates in fine detail a vast array of linguistic systems that fall under the umbrella ‘English’ across the world today. Using a list of 235 morphosyntactic features, WAVE explores diatopic variation in L1, L2 and pidgin/creole varieties across the globe, illustrating the results in 96 full-colour maps, and investigates the deeper relationships between the varieties in 23 colour-coded phenetic networks. It is a veritable feast for the eyes, but there is so much detail in it that it is much more than that; it is, in fact, a huge database echoing in many ways The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) in its depth and breadth.

The emergence of Student Pidgin in Ghana is estimated to have started fairly recently: between 1965 and the early 1970s (Huber, 1999; Dako, 2002). Male students in high prestige senior secondary schools and universities have been credited with leading in the development of Student Pidgin. The use of Student Pidgin has since been spreading among some girls and is currently found in an increasing number of contexts, including the home. The fact that students use Student Pidgin seems unexpected, considering the fact that they are competent speakers of Standard English.2 In this context, the question to consider is what underlies this behavior? This has been the subject of recurrent debate. Educational authorities typically feel that Student Pidgin reflects the fact that the standard of English in Ghanaian senior secondary schools and universities has fallen. An example of this comes from a speech given by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, on 28 October 2002: [He] expressed concern about the standard of English among university students and advised them to desist from speaking Pidgin English, which he said would not help them. Speaking at this year's matriculation of 7,959 freshmen out of the 10,301 admitted into the University, Prof Asenso-Okyere said there was evidence of deterioration in English Language among students in their examinations and theses, which some employers had also complained about.

The Mirror System Hypothesis of Michael Arbib (2012), with respect to the cultural evolutionary origins of syntactic structure, allows to make a set of predictions about the neural mechanisms that govern the processing of modern human languages. Neuroimaging techniques may be employed to test these predictions and inform an evolutionary theory of language syntax. In this commentary, I will argue that future neuroimaging research needs in particular to: i) clarify whether linear sequential versus non-linear hierarchical structure differentially depend on mirror neurons as opposed to higher-order heteromodal cortices; ii) challenge current neuroscientific evidence on multilingualism: as it stands, syntactic processing appears to be mediated by the same neural mechanisms across languages, independently of cross-linguistic idiosyncrasies; iii) devise longitudinal studies of grammar acquisition in newborns and children; iv) recreate in the laboratory nearly-ecological conditions for the emergence of syntactic constructions through cultural and social interaction, and exploit the “experiment of nature” of pidgin and creole languages.

The aim of this illustrative paper is to show how words and expressions are coined or changed in Cameroonian speech in English and French in order to insult or stereotype other groups of people. Taken along official language lines, ethnic boundaries and social divides, these lexical elements reproduce some aspect of the addressee's history, social stance, academic achievement, professional background, linguistic and political belonging, and even gender. The expressions are from four major sources: French, English, Pidgin English and various indigenous languages. Some of them capture common social phenomena in the society. For example, Pidgin English supplies a descriptive name for a woman who moves in with a man to whom she is not married, i.e. come-we-stay. This appellation focuses more on the woman and the relationship rather than on the man. Such coinages are also common elsewhere in Africa. For instance, Nigerian Pidgin English supplies the appellation face-me-I-face-you for cramped up residential apartments in which rooms face each other on the corridor. Lexical strategies for naming and derogation are common in these two societies where groups compete with each other for their voices to be heard and respected.

It is now common knowledge that the English language has become part of Nigeria's linguistic family, albeit as a second language that has been ‘home-grown…adapted and tamed to suit the Nigerian environment’ (Adegbija, 2004: 19). Summarizing Alamin A. Mazrui (2004), Akere (2006: 9) describes this domestication as ‘the transformation of English as an alien medium, to make it respond to local imagery, figures of speech, sound patterns and the general cultural milieu of the region’. This has been the practice of many writers where English is the colonial masters' language and is now adopted as a second language, but with ‘local colour’, as noted by Emenyonu (2006: xi). This dynamic and creative variety has helped Nigerians express their world view in a more international medium. In addition, there are more ‘pragmatic’ sub-varieties, including what Omolewa (1979: 14–15) calls ‘working English’. This is, however, different from the widespread Pidgin English, which continues to serve as the linguistic bridge across the linguistic Babel of Nigeria. While Pidgin is greatly influenced by the immediate local languages, thus making uniformity difficult to achieve, the emerging Nigerian English (henceforth NE) is not as heavily dependent on indigenous local languages. According to Igboanusi (2002: 4), ‘NE has its origin in British English, and the lexicon of NE has therefore shown a strong British influence.’ In other words, while Pidgin is common among the uneducated and spoken by the educated when necessary, NE is spoken by the educated and the level of education determines the variety of NE used by individuals. NE should be seen as an autonomous variety, showing acceptable departures from the rules of standard diction, pronunciation and grammar. The contact of English with indigenous languages in Nigeria is bound to lead to greater deviation from the standard in the future. Since Nigeria has one of the largest populations of speakers of English as a second language in the world (Akere, 2009; Jowitt, 2009), this is bound to have implications for English as a global language.

Cameroon Pidgin English (abbreviated to CamP) is one of the languages of wider communication in Cameroon, a country second only to Papua New Guinea in terms of its multiplicity of languages for a relatively small population. CamP is used alongside other languages like English and French (official languages), Fulfulde, Arab Choa, Ewondo and Duala (lingua francas), and over 250 indigenous languages. What is, however, peculiar about CamP is that it is not restricted to a particular class of people or to people from a particular region. A language which arose as a result of the desperate need for a link language between people who spoke mutually unintelligible languages has now established itself as a major force to reckon with in the linguistic landscape of the country. One of the main preoccupations among researchers on CamP has been its relationship with Cameroon English (CamE), which has higher status. While CamE is an official language in the country's constitution, CamP enjoys covert prestige bestowed on it by Cameroonians as a language of wider communication, social interaction, intimacy, etc. However, Cameroonians have been given to understand that the coexistence of CamP and CamE is responsible for the falling standard of English in the country, as a result of which CamP should be eradicated at all costs. This attitude has led to the stigmatisation and intimidation of CamP speakers as educational authorities all over the country attempt to ban the language, and refer to it in such pejorative terms as bad English, poor English, bush English, join join English etc. Such hostility has tended to drive the language underground so that speakers rarely express their liking for the language overtly. They are suspicious of language authorities and thus have developed an ambivalent attitude towards anything that has to do with CamP. Thus if those speakers who use CamP daily as the main medium of communication were to be asked what they think about its status, functions and prospects, the results would be largely negative (Schröder, 2003), not because they do not like the language but simply because they have been intimidated and stigmatised. This ambivalence has caused serious methodological difficulties for researchers, which have marred most results of studies on the functions, status and prospects of CamP. The inability to adopt an appropriate methodology to research the topic has given rise to conflicting findings and statements on the relationship between CamP and CamE, some of which are sometimes truly baffling (see Ngefac & Sala, 2006; Ayafor, 2005; Kouega, 2001; Chia, 2009). Researchers insensitive to the situation carry out research on CamP and obtain results that paint a completely distorted picture of the situation on the ground. In this light, certain basic questions about this relationship remain to be settled: What is actually the relationship between CamP and CamE? Is CamP really facing death? Is CamP losing ground to CamE? Is CamP soon going to lose its identity and idiosyncrasies to CamE or is CamP going to supplant CamE? This paper will consider how various researchers have grappled with these questions. By analysing their statements, it will attempt to explain the controversies that have characterised research on the relationship between CamP and CamE thus far.

Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is increasingly becoming an important language in the country, judging from its use in the media (both private and public), in literary texts, the Bible and other religious materials. The soaring of writing in CPE has been hailed by many as a positive signal for the spread and survival of the language, but this begs the question of how it should be written. Formal statements made so far on how CPE should be written are divergent (see Todd, 1986; Mbangwana, 1983; Ayafor, 1996 and Schr¨der, 2003) and in practice the present situation of CPE writing is marred by inconsistency, where the English- and the phonetically-based options compete (see Schneider, 1960 and Awah, 1981). For a full-blown literature (which standardises a language in many respects) to flourish, there is need for an agreed writing system that can make its literature better accessible to the public. We need to know what makes the one option superior to the other and why. Showcasing the literature in CPE as guarantee of viability, as Ayafor (2005) does, is not helpful if we do not pause to ask ourselves how it is, and should be, written. The purpose of this paper is to assess the controversies involved in talking about and conceiving a writing system for CPE. It is also to propose a writing system for CPE, based on linguistic and extra-linguistic parameters.

Darrell T. Tryon & Jean-Michel Charpentier , Pacific pidgins and creoles: Origins, growth and development . (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 132). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xix, 559. Hb $123.20. The authors of this substantial volume each have more than 30 years of research experience in the Pacific region, primarily in Melanesia – especially Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides). This focus is reflected in the content. Despite the title, the book deals only with Pacific pidgins and creoles that are lexified by English, thus leaving out, for example, Tayo (a French-lexified creole of New Caledonia). Furthermore, it concentrates almost entirely on the three dialects of Melanesian Pidgin: Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), Pijin (Solomon Islands), and Bislama (Vanuatu), with an emphasis on the latter.

IN RECENT years, a married couple in the United States developed a pidgin-like patois (for their own use) out of three languages that one or the other knew well but both did not share. The following account, while telling something of their story, looks at how such a private ‘language’ can impact negatively on second-language acquisition. The study seeks also to gauge the effect of this personal ‘pidgin’ on Pierre, a native speaker of Wolof, and on his acquisition of English, a language he needs to know. In one sense their private language is a success, but in another it is a problem, because Pierre needs to become fluent in the language of his new home. He and Mary have created a language style that suits their daily needs, but their very success and originality may be preventing Pierre from moving on into conventional English.

At every level, the functioning of African colonial societies depended on the availability and mediation of useful information and knowledge. The majority of the existing literature on “colonial knowledge” focuses on one area of this broad field: the various forms of knowledge about their subjects on which colonial states depended. Most of our attempts to understand such knowledge have tended to analyze colonial knowledge as a system: we have tried to identify which were the sets of shared basic assumptions and rules that governed the creation and presentation of knowledge. In analyzing the processes through which colonial knowledge was produced, we have looked at the role of “Orientalism” and other forms of “Othering.” We have examined various investigative modalities. Finally, we have seen how such knowledge may be compared to a pidgin language that allows for communication between colonizers and representatives of the colonized. We have also examined the opportunities for Africans to manipulate the outcomes of colonial knowledge creation, as well as such basic but essential factors as the realities of government support and funding.

Necrolinguisticsrefers tolinguistic-death-in-life, a situation in which languages are incarcerated, leaving folk in linguistic limbo. It names the process by which people come to lack the ability to use at least one language well, and includes those who are tongue-locked because their languages are incarcerated in one or more ways. In illustrating how and why the linguistic experience of Black folk inspires the termnecrolinguistics, examples from slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, and neocolonialism are provided to document the reality oflinguistic-death-in-life. The main assumption of this study is that we can investigate the humanism of institutions belonging to any epoch, regime, or society through its linguistic posture and practice. It is noted that many sub-Saharan African languages are on death row, with many of its speakers stranded in semilingualism (or plummeting linguistic competence), peculiar kinds of monolingualism, or a kind of unilateral bilingualism,asymmetrical bilingualism. Each of these states is elaborated using examples: a native American, “White Thunder” (semilingualism); Jacques Derrida, a Franco-Maghrebian Jew (discordant monolingualism); and the august personality of Léopold Sédar Senghor (unilateral bilingualism). But the paper ends on a bright note, recognizing that, though the linguistic muzzle muffles Black culture and humanity, the resilience of Black folk is evident through their development of patois, pidgins, and creoles.

We report two studies about shifting practices of quantification in tradestores in Oksapmin communities (Papua New Guinea). In Study 1, we enlisted 7 local tradestore clerks to collect information about customers' language practices of quantification, age cohort, schooling level, and cost of purchase. Analyses of 305 exchanges revealed that older cohorts tended to use indigenous practices and extensions of the indigenous language. Younger cohorts – particularly those with some schooling -- tended to use practices that involved Melanesian Pidgin. In Study 2, we analyze interviews with 9 tradestore clerks who described typical purchase transactions with customers from different age cohorts/schooling levels. Analyses of interviews revealed that elders tended to structure multi-item purchases into sequential transactions and use extensions of indigenous approaches to quantification. Schooled adults tended to purchase multiple items in a single transaction and use Pidgin quantifiers. We argue that tradestores today sustain multiple practices of quantification but also support change towards the exclusive use of Melanesian Pidgin.

THIS paper examines English language policy in Africa from colonial times to the present day. Colonial policy was marked by a linguistic apartheid which consisted in driving Africans away from the language, first by limiting access to formal education, then by not showing much enthusiasm for teaching them the language, then at times preferring to encourage Pidgin English, and finally by encouraging deviant features. Linguistic apartheid continues today through such institutions as the BBC, whose African Network Service openly promotes deviant African features through their jingles, the employment of African correspondents with deeply local English features, and the reading of unedited letters from listeners that contain substandard features. More subtle ways of promoting such apartheid include the negligible weight of the English language in school curricula.

SINCE ITS introduction in the 18th century, English in China has gone through three stages: partial colonization and Chinese Pidgin English (CPE); a Chinese-influenced variety often called Chinglish; and a more recent indigenization that has resulted in a variety known as both Chinese English and, more recently (with a subtle change of emphasis), China English. This paper discusses these stages and calls for more attention to be paid to the nativization of English in China in the 21st century.

The advantages and disadvantages of wider or narrower definitions of pidginization and pidgin are reviewed to determine the differences between pidgins and naturalistically learned second languages (L2s). It is argued that a wider definition is preferred because it avoids problematic counterexamples and captures generalizations that allow us to view the difference between naturalistic L2 varieties and pidgins as one of degree, not of type. In first language (L1) acquisition, Bates and Goodman (1999) showed the link between the development of vocabulary and grammar and argued that this may be explained by, among other things, logical and perceptual bootstrapping. It is suggested that these types of bootstrapping are also relevant for explaining the pace of grammar development in pidgins and naturalistic L2 varieties. The tense-aspect system of a Spanish variety spoken by a Chinese immigrant in Spain is examined in detail. The data, taken from a 90-minute interview that yielded 602 tokens, reveal several clear traits of the informant's verbal system: (a) All nonfinite, imperfective verb forms (gerunds) correspond exclusively to Vendlerian activities; (b) all but three of the perfective nonfinite forms (past participles) correspond to telic verbs or predicates; and (c) 81% of the stative verbs appear in the third-person-singular present form. The sensitivity to aspectual distinctions in the informant's variety of Spanish is not addressed by logical and perceptual bootstrapping. Furthermore, although this sensitivity can be partially explained by language-specific considerations (i.e., transfer from Mandarin), such an explanation does not speak to precise form–function mappings found, which are best accounted for by appealing to the Primacy of Aspect and Distributional Bias hypotheses (Andersen, 1993; Andersen & Shirai, 1996).

This article discusses how research on language transfer in the field of SLA can help to explain the origins of substrate influence in creoles and provide answers to more difficult questions concerning the distribution and verification of substrate features. First, it argues against the view that both SLA and transfer are not involved in the genesis of pidgin and creole languages. Then the view is presented that, as described in the SLA literature, transfer is not just a consequence of second language learning but also of second language use, and it serves as a communication strategy when the need arises. Such a strategy may be used by speakers of either a prepidgin or an already established pidgin when its functional use is being rapidly extended. Sociolinguistic perspectives on transfer in SLA, described next, throw some light onto the question of why substrate features remain in pidgins and creoles. Research on transfer in SLA also provides important insights into the specific factors that may have affected substrate influence in creoles. Evidence is presented that some transfer constraints discovered in SLA research—rather than other proposed factors such as so-called functional expendability—still provide the best explanation for the absence of particular substrate features in creoles. Finally, it is shown that tests proposed for verifying instances of L1 influence in interlanguage could be adapted for verifying instances of substrate influence in creoles.

This article explores the interactions and tensions arising from a vibrant Canto-pop industry exported from Hong Kong to an interventionist nation-state of Singapore bent on discouraging the use of dialects by its ethnic Chinese population. Aside from highlighting the roles of technological and commercial factors behind the regional music networks, it seeks further to position this contemporary relationship within the larger historical and cultural context. The cultural politics involved here is not just an isolated phenomenon between two different cities. More importantly, the language policies of the Singapore government represent a haunting replication of the perennial attempts by central authorities in China to impose a more standardised linguistic and cultural identity on its dialect speaking peripheries. This identity is based on not just the court language of Mandarin, but notions of ‘Chineseness’. This article goes on to question the extent to which Canto-pop could help foster a more hybridised identity transcending both the current dictates of the modern Singaporean state and the imagined cultural boundaries of a more historically entrenched Sino-centric realm. Published version

Camfranglais is a newly created language, a composite slang used by secondary school pupils in Cameroon, West Africa. It draws its lexicon from French, English, West African Pidgin, various Cameroonian indigenous languages, Latin, and Spanish. Secondary school pupils use it among themselves to exclude outsiders while talking about such matters of adolescent interest as food, drinks, money, sex, and physical looks. There are four sections: language in the Cameroon educational system; Camfranglais defined; an analysis of a sample Camfranglais text; and the semantic domains of Camfranglais. There is a glossary of the terms cited.

This book, it must be said from the outset, is a remarkable addition to the literature on pidgin and creole languages. It is particularly important because it investigates the diachrony and synchrony of an English-lexicon contact language on which very little has been previously published, and whose very existence has been called into question by some.

A provisional typological comparison demonstrates that Khoekhoe, Dutch, and Afrikaans are highly similar with respect to a couple of minor features. Therefore, Cape Dutch Pidgin (CDP), which came about as a relexified and pidginized version of Khoekhoe, could often develop compromises between Dutch and Khoekhoe syntax. Exceptions were the use of SOV without V2 and (possibly) the use of certain postpositions. Furthermore, there is evidence showing that CDP and Orange River Afrikaans (ORA) are diachronically related. An investigation of the sentential structure of Khoekhoe, however, shows that the second position (P2) phenomenon differs considerably from V2 in Dutch: P2 is symmetric and is applied in all clause types. Yet, except for a temporary pro-drop phenomenon in wh-clauses, P2 did not really affect the pidgin. Once finite verbs were acquired, the picture changed, and new (optional) subordinate V2 and V1 patterns could be introduced into Cape Dutch and Afrikaans under the influence of Khoekhoe Dutch/Afrikaans.

This paper discusses pidgin English, and far from calling it a corrupt and decayed form of the English language (as has been the case in many well-meaning literary circles), shows that pidgin has poetic resources capable of expressing a wide range of mentalities, tastes, customs, and even fashion itself. Because of this flexibility, pidgin reveals a high degree of closeness to the original speech patterns, notably in an attempt to preserve syntactical equivalents. Thus, if pidgin is adopted as a lingua franca throughout the sub-Saharan African region, it will enable Africans to take new pride in their artistic traditions and non-Africans to share in the joy and excitement of Africa's art.

This paper deals with a secret language (kalamo) spoken by the Anakara clan of the Antaimoro tribe in the south-east of Madagascar. According to their own tradition, they migrated to the island between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, from the Arabian peninsula. Their sacred writings (sorabe) are written in Arabic script in a mixture of Malagasy and Arabic. The secret language kalamo contains a large number of Arabic loanwords, as well as Malagasy words that have been coded by various phonological processes. The analysis of the loanwords helps to elucidate the origin of the kalamo, which may contain elements of a pre-existing Arabic pidgin. Their phonetic form shows that the Islamic migrants in Madagascar may indeed have come originally from the Arabian peninsula.

A report on a pilot project recently conducted on a disputed variety of English in India

This slender, neatly typeset volume contains a selection of the papers presented at an international three-day workshop on creole languages and language acquisition, held at the University of Leiden in 1990. Entitled “The logical problem of language acquisition,” the workshop set out to investigate the acquisition of parts of the grammar by children and adults. The purpose of the Leiden gathering was to bring together linguists from essentially two fields (language acquisition theory and pidgin/creole studies) in order to “solve the ‘logical problem of language acquisition’ from as many perspectives as possible” (p. 6).1 The central issue examined during the workshop was whether the specific circumstances of the genesis of a creole language have implications for theories of language acquisition in general. Conversely, the organizers and participants hoped that their discussions would shed new light on the early history of existing creole languages.

This paper investigates the influence of Dutch, Swedish, and English on the syntax of Pidgin Delaware, a contact language used in the Middle Atlantic region in the seventeenth century. Arguments are presented against Thomason's (1980) view that the pidgin predated European contact; instead, the structures of the pidgin are viewed from the perspective of Dutch speakers attempting to learn the Delaware language. The theoretical framework of Van Coetsem 1988 is used to explain which Algonquian features were successfully acquired by the Dutch and where the Dutch imposed features from their native language in the early, formational stage of the pidgin. In addition, subsequent changes in Pidgin Delaware are attributed to its use by Swedish and English speakers.

An overview of language status in Cameroon which calls for the integration of Pidgin English into national life

In a combination of ethnohistorical records and longitudinal data gathered over a period of 30 years, the development of Solomon Islands Pijin is documented and analyzed in light of the current debate surrounding creolization theory. Using a pragmatic definition of a Creole (Jourdan 1991), the authors argue that pidgins can be very elaborate codes even before they become the mother tongue of children, and that this elaboration is the result of the linguistic creativity of adults. It is further shown that, in sociolinguistic niches where adults and children use the pidgin as their main language, the impact of the latter on the evolution of the language is of a different nature. (Creolization theory, pidgin languages, substrate influences, urbanization, Solomon Islands Pijin)

A report on a distinguishing feature of the disputed but nonetheless vigorous Pidgin English of India

Jose C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery. New York: Humanity Books, 2004. 323 pp. Bibliography. Index. $32.00. Cloth. Enslaving Connections brings together essays originating in a symposium held at York University in Toronto in 2000. It is a valuable contribution to the study of the networks that tied Brazil to several regions of Africa. We must thank Jose Curto and Paul Lovejoy, the organizers of the conference and editors of this volume, for calling our attention to the innovative perspectives presented here. The book is divided into three parts, each with four chapters. The first part deals with the Luso-Brazilian slave trade and is opened by Alberto da Costa e Suva, today Brazil's most knowledgeable historian of precolonial Africa. He underscores that the history of Brazil "cannot be written without considering what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic, in each of the regions from which Brazil was receiving slaves to develop and settle its vast territory" (24). The two following chapters adopt an economic point of view. Ivana Elbl writes about the early years of the trade, from about 1450 to 1530, underscoring the risks of such commerce, tighdy controlled as it was by the Portuguese crown. Elbl views the trade as much from its European side as from the African side, while Manolo Florentino provides a panorama of the workings of the commerce in slaves in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This first part ends with an inspired chapter by Joseph Miller in which he turns his eye to the steps by which slaves taken to Brazil constructed New World identities. Following a tradition that recalls Melville Herskovits, Sidney Mintz, and Richard Price, Miller proposes to ground such concepts as "Africanisms" and "creolization" in their historical contexts, using the particular case of Brazil. Spanning the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, he touches on important questions and proposes new approaches for understanding the presence of Africans in Brazil. He sees Brazilian society in simplified terms, however, revealing his lack of familiarity with Brazilian historiography. The second part of the book, for which Miller's chapter serves as a bridge, takes up questions tied to the presence of Africans in Brazilian slave society. Gregory Guy, examining the pidgin languages and dialects created from the languages of origin of colonizers and enslaved Africans, shows us the influence of African languages on spoken Portuguese in Brazil. Focusing on spiritual life, James Sweet studies cases of central African ritual and divination in seventeenth-century Brazil. He argues that in central Africa diviners performed the role of reestablishing the social equilibrium when it was disturbed. These agents were important within communities of enslaved Africans, where the instances of adversity were numerous. Nevertheless, I think he overstates his case when he argues that by turning to African rites of divination (which happened at particular and rare moments), white slave owners conceded some degree of juridical power to Africans, generally slaves. Linda Wimmer considers the ways slave families were organized, from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, in a tobacco producing region. …

This study continues an investigation of lexical acculturation in Native American languages using a sample of 292 language cases distributed from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego (Brown 1994). Focus is on the areal diffusion of native language words for imported European Objects and concepts. Approximately 80% of all sharing of such terms is found to occur among closely genetically related languages. Amerindian languages only distantly related, or not related at all, tend to share native labels for acculturated itemsonlywhen these have diffused to them from a lingua franca, such as Chinook Jargon (a pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest Coast) or Peruvian Quechua (the language of the Inca empire). Lingua francas also facilitate diffusion of terms through genetically related languages; but sometimes, as in the case of Algonquian languages, these are neither familiar American pidgins nor languages associated with influential nation states. An explanatory framework is constructed around the proposal that degree of bilingualism positively influences extent of lexical borrowing. (Amerindian languages, bilingualism, language contact, lexical acculturation, lexical diffusion, lingua francas)