Showing posts with label creole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creole. Show all posts

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Singlish: Creole, creoloid, creolized language?

Today's post is brought to you by "ongoing problems with terminology in linguistics".

As my newsfeed this week has filled up with reblogged and retweeted articles about Singlish, often the first thing that gets mentioned is that Singlish is an English-based "creole". But what exactly does the term creole mean?

In many introductory linguistics textbooks, dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry (at the time of writing), the term creole (or creole language) is mostly commonly defined as a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin, while pidgin is typically defined as a simplified contact language developed to enable speakers of different languages to communicate.

In other words, a pidgin is said to become a creole when children learn it as their first language and the new language develops its own set of rules and conventions - its own grammar. That means that languages which have "Pidgin" in their names, such as Hawaiian Pidgin, are by this definition actually creoles.


Pidgin on the street?

The issue with this particular definition of creole, when applied to Singlish, is that there is no attested "pidgin" state for Singlish. I've seen a few sources (including the Wikipedia article) that claim that Singlish arose from a pidgin-like English as non-English speakers started to "pick up" the English that was filtering out "into the streets" from English-medium schools established by the British.

This story is problematic because, as most Singaporeans of my parents' generation will recall, prior to the implementation of post-independence language policies, the main lingua franca used between speakers of different languages was not English, but a simplified form of Malay known as Bazaar Malay. In a 1975 article (behind a paywall), John Platt, who was an Associate Professor at Monash University, noted that even at the time of the paper's writing, people with little education would speak a pidgin English only when communicating with tourists, and that outside of areas frequented by tourists, many older people spoke no English at all. Rather, he suggested that:
[Singapore Colloquiul English's] existence can be traced to the transference of certain features from the languages of local ethnic groups to the English acquired by school children in primary and secondary schools. These transferred features were then reinforced by the use of this variety (particularly its basilect, SCE) in informal situations at school and at home among siblings. 
Consequently, Platt used the term creoloid1 to describe a language variety that has not developed from a pidgin, but nevertheless shares a number of grammatical features with known creoles, such as fewer verbal inflections (or more generally, a loss of morphology). Specifically, he was applying this term to the basilectal form, or the most colloquial / informal register of Singapore English. For instance, in this form of Singlish, you don't need to have 3rd person agreement with most verbs: he say 'he says'.


Simplifying or making things more complicated?

Although the term creoloid hasn't gained a lot of currency in creole studies, it is worth noting that this may be because the term creole itself has expanded in meaning beyond "a language that comes from a pidgin". There is much more recognition that all languages are mixed to some extent, and that what we have been previously identified as creoles, may have been the result of speakers of a language shifting rapidly to another one. For instance, in their 1980 book Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics, Thomason and Kaufman, distinguish creolized pidgins (creoles that have developed from pidgins), from languages that have undergone changes to their grammar and vocabulary as a result of different degrees of intensity in language contact. They use the term abrupt creolization to describe the outcome of one extreme of the continuum, where there has been intense contact that results in very rapid language shift.

(This leads to the potentially confusing situation where one might use the term creolization to either refer to: the process of a language gaining structure and complexity as it transitions from a pidgin to a creole; or the process of a language losing structure and complexity, when compared to the target language, as adult speakers rapidly shift to the language.)


In any case, we note the inclusion of Singlish in the online Atlas and Survey of Pidgin and Creole language structures (APiCS). However, the editors explicitly state in that in the absence of clear criteria to define pidgins and creoles, their approach was to try and include as many languages as they could which represented the kinds of contact languages that linguists were interested in.

So yes, Singlish is a creole, creoloid and creolized language. But that depends on how you define the terms creole and creolized. It is no longer fair to assume that a creole only refers to a language that came from a pidgin. And maybe that's something that needs to be addressed in textbooks and other sources of linguistic information.

Also, this is the tip of the terminological iceberg - there are other terms around like post-creoles and mixed languages that I don't have the time, energy or qualifications to talk about!


1Although the Platt article appears to be the first published use of the term creoloid, Loreto Todd presented a paper titled "Pidgins and creoles: The case for the creoloid" at the International Conference on Pidgins and Creole in Honolulu that same year.

References
Michaelis, Susanne Maria & Maurer, Philippe & Haspelmath, Martin & Huber, Magnus (eds.) 2013. Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://apics-online.info.)

Platt, John T. 1975. The Singapore English speech continuum and its basilect 'Singlish' as a 'creoloid'. Anthropological Linguistics 17(7): 363-374.