Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Founder Principle in the development of creoles
- 3 The development of American Englishes: factoring contact in and the social bias out
- 4 The legitimate and illegitimate offspring of English
- 5 What research on the development of creoles can contribute to genetic linguistics
- 6 Language contact, evolution, and death: how ecology rolls the dice
- 7 Past and recent population movements in Africa: their impact on its linguistic landscape
- 8 Conclusions: the big picture
- Notes
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Founder Principle in the development of creoles
- 3 The development of American Englishes: factoring contact in and the social bias out
- 4 The legitimate and illegitimate offspring of English
- 5 What research on the development of creoles can contribute to genetic linguistics
- 6 Language contact, evolution, and death: how ecology rolls the dice
- 7 Past and recent population movements in Africa: their impact on its linguistic landscape
- 8 Conclusions: the big picture
- Notes
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
This book presents some of my positions over the past decade regarding the development of creole vernaculars in relation to language evolution in general. The latter notion is used here to cover long-term changes observable in the structures and pragmatics of a language, as well as the not-sounusual cases where a language speciates into daughter varieties identified at times as new dialects and at others as new languages. It also covers questions of language endangerment and death.
Together, these writings reflect the growth of my scholarship on, among other things, subjects conventionally identified as “creole genesis,” secondlanguage acquisition, and genetic linguistics. They are responses to some colleagues' invitations that I propose a cogent alternative to hypotheses which I have disputed. Those responses boil down to the position that creoles are epistemologically special only by an accident of the way we have been doing linguistics, not because they have developed by any evolutionary processes that have not occurred in the developments of other languages, nor because their geneses are embedded in sociohistorical ecologies that are drastically different in kind from those in which noncreole languages have evolved, nor even because they represent any global structural type of linguistic systems. They are as natural as noncreole languages. As a matter of fact, the better we understand them, the more we should be prompted to re-examine a number of things we thought we understood well about Language.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Ecology of Language Evolution , pp. xi - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001