Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics

39 3. Pidgin and creole languages formation of new varieties of language in Jamaica. The conditions for the rise of contact languages were comparable. The process of Caribbean colonization by the British, the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese, which started at the beginning of the 16th century, created particular circumstances that naturally enhanced the process of the cultural changes that triggered a rapid surge in linguistic variation of the region. In a unique fashion, European and non-European languages were drawn together in a remote geographical context detached from both their European and African sources. It was the Caribbean Islands which witnessed an unprecedented “linguistic experiment” which was actually just a by-product of the commercial slave trade, which is sometimes also euphemistically called the “European colonial expansion”: Creole languages arose as a direct result of European colonial expansion. Between 1500 and 1900, there came into existence, on tropical islands and in isolated sections of tropical littorals, small, autocratic, rigidly stratified societies, mostly engaged in monoculture (usually of sugar), which consisted of a ruling minority from some European nation and a large mass of (mainly non-European) laborers, drawn in most cases from many different language groups. (Bickerton 1981: 2) These newly arrived people, constituting an English colony, had to communicate with slaves from Western Africa, the slaves had to communicate among one another and they needed a platform on which they could express themselves – this is how they created what Bickerton calls an “auxiliary contact-language” (1981: 2). This new, emerging language was nobody’s native language, i.e. neither the slaves’ nor the English administrators.’ And at this early stage of language we can talk about a pidgin. When a pidgin expands and establishes its form and structure, it eventually becomes a creole. Moreover, for a language to become a creole there must be native speakers using that language. Many of the creoles resemble the language they had contact with (the dominant language), i.e. the language that was used by the colonizing administrators. However, Bickerton states that this resemblance is only superficial and exists mainly because most of the vocabulary was drawn from the European parent of the creole, although “there were extensive phonological and semantic shifts” (1981: 2). Creoles which share most features with English, such as Jamaican, are called English based creole or creolized English. However, DeCamp underlines that these terms are descriptive labels only which refer to similarities in vocabulary and not to basic structural similarities or genetic classification,

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