MANY DAUGHTER LANGUAGES OF ENGLISH

[Rev. 9/8/96]

© 1996 by Orchid Land Publications

This brief mention for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the daughter languages of English will make no attempt to cover the ground; it will try to suggest what the situation is.

These languages are found chiefly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Ocean. They were once found on the coast of China. The best known African example, found in Sierra Leone, is Krio. (A New Testament exists in this language; it can be ordered from the Bible Society.) In the Caribbean, a number of related varieties--some related as dialects, some as languages--include Bajin (on Barbados and Trinidad), Jamaican, Sranan (which has parts of the New Testament translated) in Surinam, and Guyanan in Guyana. (Note that many Irish-English-speaking Protestants were expelled from Northern Ireland in the seventeenth century and sent to Barbados and to Jamaica; likewise, these islands formed staging areas for training slaves for more profitable sale in the New World.) In the Pacific are found Tok Pisin on the huge island of New Guinea; Bislama in Vanuatu; Kriol in Australia; etc. These are clearly related. New Testaments exist in these languages, a number of them already in their second printed editions.

Hawaiian Creole is rather different in some ways, doubtless because of the Portugese coming (from islands off the coast of Africa like Cape Verde Island) to Hawai'i early on to serve as plantation overseers (lunas). This creole has affinities with African and therefore Caribbean daughter languages of English. Indeed, the first European-based creoles outside of the Mediterranean (the Mediterranean lingua franca was doubtless formed on Genovese in Crusader days) were Portugese-related. Some creoles related to English went their own ways and never became daughter languages of English; e.g. Ndyuka in Surinam.

But as D. Bickerton has shown, all creole languages--those developing out of pidgins in contact situations when pidgins get "nativized," i.e. get spoken by native-speakers acquiring them in infancy--exhibit similar grammars. Vestiges of the Portugese inheritance lingered on in the daughter languages of English long after the Portugese had disappeared from the scene, having been replaced by English-speaking sailors and planters. Thus, "there is" is generally derived from Portugese tem as get or have. (The parallel for "there be" has been calqued from French in French creoles in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean.) Portugese esta appears as "stay" (formerly the locative copula in the creole, also used in progressive modalities; now also replacing the default zero copula) in Hawaii; traces of this exist in Bislama and other Pacific daughter languages of English. With the coming of English traders and settlers to replace the Portugese, new pidgins were formed with English-derived words. Some unexpected lexical similarities are widespread in daughter languages of English around the world; e.g. broke for break, los' for lose, etc. "Be able" is fit in West Africa, but also can both there and in the Pacific. Kaba in the Caribbean and pinis "finish" in the Pacific reflect the Portugese expression equivalent to "have [done]" in English. (Cf. "done" in vernacular African American English and ja [from deja "already"] in French creoles.) Note also the parallelism between the past marker in many daughter languages of English, bin, with te (from etais/t "was") in daughter languages of French.

Bickerton has shown that children "create" creole grammars when native-speakers emerge--something that happens sooner when their parents speak different native languages and communicate through a pidgin. (On plantations around the world, slaves of different languages were mixed as much as possible to forestall complots and rebellious conspiracies.) P. Muehlhaeusler has shown that morphology begins to develop in late pidgins, even before they become creoles. The postpositioned ol "all" that became a pluralizer in the Caribbean and North American Black English (from which it entered Southern States English with much else and has now spread throughout the USA in y'all [or you-all]) became a pre-positioned definite article in the Pacific. As in Middle English, one becomes the indefinite article.

Though pidgins focus on communication and perception (that's why they're spoken slowly), as Traugott and others have emphasized, creoles focus on structure and ease of production, and hence exhibit tempo and stylistic differences--doubtless created by socially aware adolescent native-speakers. The extraclausal operators of pidgins--preclausal no and, for posteriority, bai(mbae) "bye 'n bye" as well as postclausal operators for anteriority like pinis "finish"--migrate into the verb phrase in creoles; in fact, the negator attaches itself to subject or object as well as verb and conjunction or adverbial (multiple negation).

Some of these daughter languages of English will soon adapt to English sufficiently to become dialects of English, as has happened in Singapore and as seems to being going to happen in Hawai'i. (As pointed out in Variation in the data, Swahili lects mixed with local Bantu languages, becoming in some instances dialects of those languages but later being so influenced by Swahili--itself a creole--that they have eventually become Swahili dialects.) Just as Irish English was the most influential kind of English early on in the Caribbean, the USA, and Australia, so it was dominant for the older daughter languages. The Australian influence has since prevailed in the Pacific and Indian Ocean. Irish-English underlies the "consuetudinary-be" of North American vernacular African American English. (It takes do-support, as in "Do she be sick all da time?") But even the educated say, "I always be myself whenever they come over." The speaker of any other kind of English who travels to South Africa, Canada, the contiguous states of the Southern, Northern, and Western USA--not to speak of Hawaii and Alaska--, Australia, or New Zealand--as well as Scotland, Wales, and Ireland--will constantly find in the newspapers words (taken from local aboriginal or other usages) that one does not understand.

There is no credible evidence to suggest why/how new languages begin--i.e. replace languages on the ground--other than as creoles in contact situations like southern Africa. Without contact, no new languages develop. At the time of Captain Cook's voyages of "discovery," his Marquesan interpreter could speak with Polynesians across thousands of miles; but with contact, as we know from the journals of a French naval officer, it only took one generation in Tahiti for some young people to have difficulty understanding their grandparents. In his journal, Columbus noted the influence of contact on mutual intelligibility in the Caribbean. This context was obviously found in many islands around the world when European languages arrived in their midst.

The daughter languages developed from English in pretty much the same way that English developed out of Old French. Both of the latter (and most daughter languages of English) have got "(be) gonna" posterior modalities. Both have progressives. (Hawai'ian Creole reverses "go" to marker the past, i.e. with wen; wen go creates a conditional.)

Just as the Romance languages differentiate the sense of frequently used forepositioned and postpositioned adjectives, English differentiates the attributive or predicative use of adjectives according to their placement before or after their nouns: "An irresponsible person is responsible for that" is not contradictory in English; nor is "The space available is less than the available space" any more contradictory than is saying in Modern English, "She speaks Spanish but she's speaking English" or (at night when a factory is shut) "This factory makes watches." (The relation of the exochronous modality in current English to the Romance subjunctive is discussed in chap. 10 of Essays on time-based linguistic analysis.)

Note how early Middle English calqued many French function words with Anglo-Saxon lexical items: (1) case-form-less who? from case-form-less qui?, the which from laquelle, whereof from dont (*de unde), later whose from de qui; (2) many phrasal prepositions like "in front of" and "because of" as well as conjunctions formed (as in French) from a preposition plus that (for que); and (3) English -like/-ly for French adverbial -ment (omitted from most intensifiers like passing, exceeding, and many in use today like pretty, awful, clear, etc.) What our language has done with the modal verbs is neither Romance nor Germanic but sui generis.

Indeed, a development like that of Middle English into modern times in Scotland, which led to two sister languages--Scottish English in the cities and Scots in rural areas that were no longer Gaelic-speaking--is reflected in Papua-New Guinea, where rural and urban developments have taken their own separate courses. As in Scotland, so in Papua-New Guinea: English influenced the cities in a way that it did not influence rural areas.