Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics

14 Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics [t]he prototypical creole shares important social and linguistic features with prototypical pidgins. Like pidgins, prototypical creoles develop in a contact situation involving more than two groups of speakers; like pidgins, creoles develop when no group has the need, the desire, and/or the opportunity to learn any of the other groups’ languages. Creoles too, typically draw their lexicon primarily from one language whose speakers are in some sense dominant, and the grammars of creole languages may be accounted for in large parts as cross-language compromises among the grammars of their creators’ native languages. (Thomason 1997b: 78) An early creole shares the majority of features with its preceding pidgin, however there are some other significant differences. The differences lie in the functions that both of these languages share, i.e. “a prototypical creole is the main language of a speech community and is learned as a native language, while a prototypical pidgin […] serves limited communicative functions and is learned only as a second (third, or nth) language” (Thomason 1997b: 79). As a result of this difference, prototypical creoles have all the linguistic resources that an ordinary non-pidgin language has (ibidem). The most often marked distinction between pidgins and creoles is that pidgins do not have native speakers, whereas for creoles there is a formed group of people whose children speak a creole as their first language. Another type of language arising from contact are bilingual mixed languages. These differ from pidgins and creoles “[…] in that they evolve or are created, in two-language contact situations” and “[…] unlike pidgin/creole genesis situations, those in which bilingual mixtures arise involve widespread bilingualism on the part of at least one of the two speaker groups” (Thomason 1997b: 80). In bilingual mixed languages, only two speaker groups (with one native language each) are involved in its genesis: at least one speaker group is bilingual to a significant degree in the other group’s language; and in the resulting mixture the linguistic material is easily separated according to the language of origin. (Thomason 1997b: 80) The structural characteristic of most creole languages is the notion of simplicity; with bilingual mixed languages there is no simplification whatsoever. Examples of mixed languages are Copper Island Aleut, Mbugu, Media Lengua and Michif.5 5 For a discussion of this issue, see Sebba (1997: xii).

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