enah

Once a creole has been established, there are several stages it can reach (Bell, 1976:160-161):
1. Virtual stability in relationship to other languages
2. Change taking place in the form of
(i) Extinction of the creole by the standard superposed language (e.g. Gullah by English in Georgia or Negerhollands by Dutch in the Netherlands West Indies).
(ii) Evolution of the creole to a standard language (e.g. Bahasa Indonesia, Afrikaans, Maltese, or the Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire).
(iii) Merging of the creole with the superordinate language to form a postcreole continuum, e.g. Jamaican Creole with standard English.
The low social status of pidgins and creoles (popularly regarded as corruptions of the standard rather than “real” languages) derives from the low social and ethnic status of its non-white speakers, as contrasted with the largely European speakers 0f the corresponding standard language. When opportunities for upward mobility for creole speakers become available, the situation may change fundamentally. If the creole is based on the standard language in use in the same community, and further when acculturation takes place between creole and standard speakers, a postcreole continuum is likely to emerge, replacing the original diglossia (see section 7.3) of pidgin and early creole. In other words, the creole is changing in the direction of the standard language but not at the same rate for all speakers. This decreolization process has been most closely observed in the case of English-based creoles in the Caribbean, for example, in Guyana.
Bickerton (1975:24) uses the term basilect to refer to that variety of Guyanese Creole most distinct from English, acrolect to refer to educated Guyanese English (a variety that differs from other standard varieties of the language only in a few phonological details and a handful of lexical items), and mesolect to refer to all intermediate varieties. At times he refers to upper mesolect, mid-mesolect, and lower mesolect. All of these are sections, or, a continuum, not discrete varieties, and each blends into the next.
Creoles are characterized by much internal variation and style, switching and mixture, but the following set of possible realizations of the sentence I told him is a useful approximation to the correlation of linguistic form with social stratification in Guyanese:
1. /ai tO uld hIm/ 6. /ai tI i/
2. /ai to:ld hIm/ 7. /a tI i/
3. /ai to:l Im/ 8. /mi tI i/
4. /ai tI Im/ 9. /mi tI am/
5. /a tI Im/
According to Allsopp (1958, cited by Bickerton 1975) varieties 1-3 were characteristic of middle-class usage; 4-7 of the lower-middle and urban working classes; 8 of the bulk of the rural working class; 9 of old and illiterate (and predominantly Indian) rural laborers. The scale is from nearest to English to farthest from English.
A speech community can reach postcreole status if two conditions are met. First, the dominant official language and the creole must have the same vocabulary base. Otherwise, the creole either remains as a separate language (for example, Spanish-based Papiamento separate from Dutch in Curacao) or becomes extinct. In addition, the society must provide for sufficient upward social mobility for the standard language to exert real influence on creole speakers; otherwise, the creole and the standard will not form a continuum but will remain sharply separated, as in the case of French-based creoles, e.g. in Haiti. Influence of the standard does not operate uniformly on all speakers, of course, for if it did, the creole would merge with the standard rather than form a continuum with it.
Creoles are spoken today by more than six million persons around the Caribbean and in West Africa. The largest group is that of the French-based creole speakers, who comprise perhaps four and a half million speakers in French Guiana, Louisiana (in the United States), and the Lesser Antilles; all are mutually intelligible. English-based creole speakers include a million and a half speakers in Jamaica, plus speakers in other parts of the Caribbean, Camerouns, Liberia, Hawaii, and Pitcaim Island. In the United States, an English-based creole called Gullah was once spoken widely in Georgia, South Carolina, and the nearby Sea Islands. It is still spoken to some extent on the islands but is almost extinct on the mainland.
Spanish and Portuguese-based creoles are widely used in Asia and in three islands off the West African coast. In the Caribbean, Papiamento is spoken by about 200,000 people in the Dutch colonies of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao (De Camp 1971:17-18).
At one time, it was thought that pidgins originated when European language speakers used a simplified form of their language, a sort of baby talk, to speak to slaves or customers which was quickly picked up and modified in the direction of the local language in Africa, South America, the Caribbean, or the Pacific area, as the case may be. It seems rather more likely that pidgins derived from nonnative speakers’ theorizing differently about the language of their colonial masters. Furthermore, all the early accounts report that the white planters were learning the creole from the slaves. Even more importantly, it became necessary to explain the fact that all dialects of Creole French, for example, including those in the Indian Ocean, are mutually intelligible. As De Camp (1971:19) indicates, the typological similarities shared by the Portuguese, French, English, and Spanish Creoles are too great for coincidence. These creoles, furthermore, share much common vocabulary, including syntactic function words.
The most widely accepted hypothesis among creolists as to the origins of the European-language based pidgins and creoles is that they originated in a single proto-pidgin, probably based on the famous Sabir of the Mediterranean area in the Middle Ages, which gave rise first to Portuguese Pidgin in the fifteenth century, then to the various other pidgins through the process of relexification. This is a wholesale shift of vocabulary, with the structure remaining basically the same.
The relexification hypothesis is supported by the fact that some of the words in English creoles are derived from Portuguese, such as pickaninny from pequenino, or savuy from sabe, and many from West African languages, such as njam. “to eat.” In addition, there are grammatical similarities among the different creoles which suggest a West African rather than a European origin, such as aspect and tense being indicated by proposed particles. Furthermore, Saramakkan, a creole spoken in Surinam, appears to be about halfway through the relexification process from Portuguese to English. The process stopped when the slave ancestors of present-day Saramakkan speakers escaped into the jungle (Trudgill 1974b:179-180).
Alleyne (1971:182) argues against the monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles, and supports an explanation based on their similarities with West Africa languages, as well as on the similar social conditions throughout the Caribbean, principally the fact that the creoles became crystallized within the group of field slaves.
The various studies of pidginization and creolization are particularly important for the light they may shed on the question of the origins of some of the distinctive features of black speech in the United States. The slave traders generally dealt with the African dealers along the coast through interpreters, usually of mixed ancestry, who had learned French, English, Dutch, or Portuguese in the ports well enough to be able to work as interpreters and nothing more. About that time and under these conditions, Europeans rarely learned any African language. Thus, probably the slaves brought to the Americas from West Africa spoke, in addition to their own languages, originally a Portuguese-based, later an English-based pidgin. Because of diverse tribal origins and the policy of the slavers to separate slaves speaking the same language, the blacks came eventually to use the pidgin exclusively among themselves in the New World, with the result that it became creolized. The social isolation of the blacks, especially of the field slaves, from white society helped perpetuate this language, although the isolation was never complete. The house slaves spoke a language very close to that of their masters, so that a diglossic situation developed. With the constant impact of the standard language on the creole, decreolization affected all black speech, but to a lesser degree in the case of Gullah, which seems to have survived the decreolization process. Gullah still manifests thousands of words from two dozen different African languages, as well as some syntactic and phonological influence from West African languages. Elsewhere the process has gone so far that what is known as Black English is different only in minor details from other varieties of English. Some of the features of these varieties supposedly constitute evidence for its creole origins.
The similarities of seventeenth and eighteenth century black speech to present-day English-based creoles in the West Indies and West Africa from the basis of the hypothesis. Evidence is largely from literary and comparative work and is fragmentary and inconclusive, but it fits the facts better than the allegation that Black English is either merely a variant of Southern White English or a “corrupted” or “incorrect” form. It is, furthermore, in accordance with the frequently noted observation that oppressed, submerged people tend to be culturally very creative. Thus, we have evidence, indirect as it is, that Blacks in the past created their own language, an intellectual achievement of no mean proportions.
A special form of language planning involves the artificial creation of new languages for International communication to avoid giving any existing language an unfair advantage. Such an international auxiliary language is intended to supplement, not supplant, existing languages. There would seem to be a greater need for such a language, as the world has in some senses become less international. For example, at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, French was the sole official language; at Versailles at the end of World War I, French and English were the official languages; while currently at the United Nations, five languages are officially used, namely English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. As a result of this, each year hundreds of translators are busy translating millions of pages from the original language of the document to the other four languages. Such a situation derives, of course, not from linguistic practicality but from political considerations.
Descartes was the first person to construct an artificial language. Since then, there have been at least a thousand other attempts. Linguists have criticized these attempts, saying that existing constructed interlanguages and projects are all more or less deficient since we really do not know which is the most efficient structure of a language. Such critics assume we must first build a theory of language planning and then Interlinguistics. On the other hand, McQuown (1964) believes that the major difficulty in adoption of an international auxiliary language is not the problem of deficiencies in the proposed languages them-selves but, rather, political and social issues. Mainly, the world is not ready. Imperialist powers are also not about to willingly give up the prerogatives that have come from the world-wide use of their languages. When the time is ripe, any constructed language will do, as long as it can develop large technical vocabularies, internationally agreed upon. The only existing international language which comes close to these criteria is Esperanto. Although large technical vocabularies are not available it has had wide practical use. There are even native speakers of Esperanto, who are called denaska (“from birth”) Esperantists who have been brought up by Esperantist parents and have used Esperanto as the normal family language from their earliest childhood (Elgin 1972:78). But for the most part, speakers of Esperanto are native speakers of some other language and use Esperanto only by intention and with conscious effort. There are not enough native speakers of Esperanto to serve as a standard for usage, although presumably such a standard could be developed.
Zamenhof explained his motivation for devising an international language in a letter in 1895 :
“This place where I was born and spent my childhood gave the direction to all my future endeavors. In Bialystok the population consisted of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews: each spoke a different language, and was hostile to the other elements. In this town, more than anywhere else, an impressionable nature feels the heavy burden of linguistic differences and is convinced, at every step, that the diversity of language is the only, or at least the main cause that separates the human family and divides it into conflicting groups. I was brought up an idealist; I was taught that all men were brothers, and meanwhile in the street, in the square everything at every step made me feel that men did not exist, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile al such an ‘anguish for the world’ in a child. Since at that time it seemed to me that the grown-ups were omnipotent, I kept telling myself that when I was grown up, I would certainly destroy this evil” (quoted by Boulton 1960:6-7).

As late as 1910, he naively noted that “What makes humanity unhappy is not the existence of the groups, but their Interference—so far unavoidable—with one another. Every time I wish to deal with a member of another group, either I have to force on him my language and customs, or he has to force his on me. When this regrettable necessity of forcing disappears, inter-racial hatreds will disappear” (quoted by Boulton 1960:156).
Although Zamenhof’s views were unrealistic and simplistic in nature the language he created has indeed promoted international understanding and become a social force in its own right. Thus, the Nazis opposed Esperanto because it had been created by a Jew and was internationalist and humanitarian in orientation, with a new culture of its own. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had said that the Jews would try to establish a universal language in order to rule the rest of the world. In Nazi Germany, the teaching and use of Esperanto were prohibited, Esperanto organizations were liquidated, and some Esperanto speakers were actually sent to concentration camps and eventually murdered for no other reason. Almost the entire Zamenhof family perished. During the Spanish Civil War, local fascists executed the whole local Esperanto group in Cordoba. The teaching of Esperanto was prohibited in Fascist Portugal in 1948. Until after Stalin, Soviet Esperantists were classified as bourgeois, international, and cosmopolitan “anti-Soviet elements” and, during the great purge, deported from the Baltic republics to distant regions of the Soviet Union. In postwar Eastern Europe, Esperanto activities were suspended in East Germany (until 1961) and in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (until 1969).
At present however, the Esperanto movement is flourishing in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and especially Yugoslavia, and is permitted in Czecho-slavakia, Romania, and even in the Soviet Union. The 1959 World Esperanto Congress was in Warsaw and the 1978 Congress in Vama, Bulgaria.
In their study of repression of the Esperanto movement, Sadler and Lins (1972:215) conclude: “Curious indeed that a language ‘lacking scientific or cultural foundation’ and having ’neither a lexical basis nor a grammar of its own’ variously described as an ‘expression of cosmopolitanism,’ the ‘reactionary ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie’ as an ‘international anarchist language’ as ‘a bridge to the rule of the international’ and as ‘Jewish poison’ should have proved so effective a medium of communication across frontiers as to necessitate massive intervention by the security forces of numerous totalitarian regimes. And, should outlive them all one by one.”
It should be noted that people are often attracted to the Esperanto movement for ideological rather than practical reasons but leave for the same reason; they conclude that an international language is not attainable. As Broadrib (1970:4) notes, “It is a striking fact that although within the past 25 years well over a million persons have formally studied Esperanto in school classes and in clubs, the actual number of Esperantists known to be active seems not to have risen at all. The number of active Esperantiststaking this to mean actual speakers of the language who are members of Esperanto groups or regularly purchase literature and take part in the movementis in the neighborhood of 50,000, a figure which has remained fairly constant for nearly fifty years now.”