Rethinking decreolization : language contact and change in Louisiana Creole
All languages change. Creoles are no exception. However, do creoles change in the same ways as other languages? Research on language change in creoles has hinged on the notion of decreolization: apparently a 'special case' of contact-induced change whereby the creole adverges to the lexifier (Bickerton 1980). Decreolization has been characterized as 'an insecure notion: insufficiently distinguished from ordinary change processes, possibly conceptually incoherent, and certainly not adequately supported by diachronic investigations to date' (Patrick 1999:19, see also Aceto 1999, Russell 2015, Siegel 2010). This study tests whether decreolization can truly be distinguished from 'ordinary' change processes in non-creole languages and, crucially, brings diachronic corpus data to bear on this major gap in our understanding of language contact, change and creoles. These data are drawn from Louisiana Creole, a critically endangered and under-researched French-lexifier creole. Louisiana Creole is particularly well-suited to a study of decreolization: over the course of its life, it has been in contact with its lexifier (French) and a more distantly related language (English). This allows a comparative study of the
Mayeux, Oliver
language contact ; language change ; creole languages ; decreolization ; Louisiana Creole ; sociolinguistics ; endangered languages ; language revitalization ; linguistic ecology ; Louisiana ; historical sociolinguistics ; corpus linguistics
Rethinking decreolization : language contact and change in Louisiana Creole. All languages change. Creoles are no exception. However, do creoles change in the same ways as other languages? Research on language change in creoles has hinged on the notion of decreolization: apparently a 'special case' of contact-induced change whereby the creole adverges to the lexifier (Bickerton 1980). Decreolization has been characterized as 'an insecure notion: insufficiently distinguished from ordinary change processes, possibly conceptually incoherent, and certainly not adequately supported by diachronic investigations to date' (Patrick 1999:19, see also Aceto 1999, Russell 2015, Siegel 2010). This study tests whether decreolization can truly be distinguished from 'ordinary' change processes in non-creole languages and, crucially, brings diachronic corpus data to bear on this major gap in our understanding of language contact, change and creoles. These data are drawn from Louisiana Creole, a critically endangered and under-researched French-lexifier creole. Louisiana Creole is particularly well-suited to a study of decreolization: over the course of its life, it has been in contact with its lexifier (French) and a more distantly related language (English). This allows a comparative study of the
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