The Structure of Creole Words: Segmental, Syllabic and Morphological Aspects [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110891683, 9783484305052

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Linguistische Arbeiten

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Herausgegeben von Peter Blumenthal, Gereon Müller, Ingo Plag, Beatrice Primus, Klaus von Heusinger und Richard Wiese

The Structure of Creole Words Segmental, Syllabic and Morphological Aspects Edited by Parth Bhatt and Ingo Plag

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2006

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. ISBN 13 978-3-484-30505-2 ISBN 10 3-484-30505-3

ISSN 0344-6727

© Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2006 Ein Unternehmen der K. G. Saur Verlag GmbH, München http://www.niemeyer.de Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: Laupp & Goebel G m b H , Nehren Einband: Industriebuchbinderei Nädele, Nehren

Table of contents

Preface Dedication Introduction

VII VIII IX

Section 1: Segmental aspects Thomas Klein Creole phonology typology: Phoneme inventory size, vowel quality distinctions and stop consonant series

3

Jean-Louis Rouge and Emmanuel Schang The origin of the liquid consonant in Saotomense Creole

23

Eric Russell- Webb Toward a phonology of obstruent voicing in Negerhollands

39

Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

59

Section 2: Syllabic aspects Parth Bhatt and Emmanuel Nikiema Empty Positions in Haitian Creole Syllable Structure

85

Alain Kihm The phonological origin of language: Creole languages as a testing ground

107

Ingo Plag and Mareile Schramm Early Creole syllable structure: A cross-linguistic survey of the earliest attested varieties of Saramaccan, Sranan, St. Kitts and Jamaican

131

Section 3: Morphological aspects Marina Pucciarelli Logophoricity in Nigerian Pidgin English: An empirical study of variable third person singular subject marking

153

VI Shobha Satyanath English in the New World: Continuity and change, the case of personal pronouns in Guyanese English

179

Tonjes Veenstra Head ordering in synthetic compounding: Acquisition processes and Creole genesis

201

Jacques Arends, Josje Verhagen, Eva van Lier, Suzanne Dikker and Hugo Cardoso On the presence versus absence of morphological marking in four Romance-based Creoles

223

Preface

This volume contains a collection of 11 papers originally presented at the 'Second International Workshop on the Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages' held at the University of Siegen in October 2003. Other papers from the workshop are being published by the same editors in Stress, tone and intonation in Creoles and contact languages, a special issue of Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung/Language Typology and Universals. All papers in this volume have been anonymously reviewed by co-contributors or by outside reviewers. The editors are very grateful to the contributors and the outside reviewers for offering generously their time and expertise. The quality of the papers has benefited from the constructive peer criticism and the cross-fertilization of ideas. We would also like to extend our deepest gratitude to the people who have helped in various ways in the preparation of this volume: Mareile Schramm, who coordinated and supervised the final production stages of the camera-ready copy, Linda Zirkel for being her invaluable assistant, and Maria Braun, Christina Kellenter, Sabine Lappe, Taivi Rimberg and Gisela Schwung for always being there when help was needed. Finally, we thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Universität Siegen and the Fachbereich Sprach-, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaften for their financial support. While preparing this book for publication, we learned of the untimely death of one of our contributors, Jacques Arends. Jacques was one of the pioneers in the diachronic study of Creole languages and his work on the Surinamese Creoles is well-known and has been very influential in our field. It is with great sadness that we dedicate this volume to his memory. Jacques was a great scholar, and a wonderful colleague and friend.

Toronto and Siegen, September 2005

to the memory of Jacques Arends

Introduction

In the past few years phonology and morphology have developed from rather marginal fields within Creole studies to areas on which central debates about the nature and emergence of Creole languages have focused (e.g. Plag 2003a, Plag 2003b, Siegel 2004a, 2004b, Braun 2005). This volume brings together articles from the Second International Workshop on the Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages held at the University of Siegen in October 2003 that are focused on segmental, syllabic and morphological aspects of Creole words, thus contributing to the ongoing debates about the role and nature of phonology and morphology in the grammar and the development of these languages. The papers cover a wide range of languages and linguistic phenomena and address empirical, historical and theoretical issues. Starting the section on segmental aspects, Thomas Klein presents a typological study of the segmental inventories of twenty-three Creole languages. Comparing the data obtained in his survey to the data in Maddieson (1984) drawn from 317 non-Creole languages, the author studies Creoles found in four zones: Atlantic, the Indian Ocean/ Pacific, Africa and Asia. It is shown that the overall phonemic inventory of the twenty-three Creoles varies in size from 19 to 37 segments. The mean number of segments is 27 segments and the median is 26 segments. These numbers are slightly below those reported by Maddieson (1984) who found a mean of over 31 and a median between 27 and 28. Turning to vowel qualities, the author compares the vowel inventory of the Creoles to those of the languages reported by Maddieson. In his survey, Maddieson found a range of 3 to 15 vowel qualities, while Klein found a range of 5 to 9 vowel qualities. 78% of the Creole languages in Klein's sample have between five and seven distinctive vowel qualities, while Maddieson found that 64.6% of the languages surveyed fell within this range. The author interprets these results as indicating that Creole languages fall within the general size and distribution of the world's languages. The results of the analysis for stop consonants once again show that Creole languages resemble non Creole languages since 67.3% of the languages in Maddieson's survey had one or two stop series and 78% of the Creole languages in the author's survey had two stop series. The author concludes that Creole languages in fact have typical rather than reduced segment inventories. Jean-Louis Rouge and Emmanuel Schang examine the behaviour of the liquid Μ in Saotomense, a Portuguese lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Sao Tome located in the Gulf of Guinea. The authors observe that the liquid consonant DJ has a particularly high frequency in the vocabulary of this language. They argue that [\/ in Saotomense can be associated to three segments in the Portuguese etymon: the liquid D l , the simple vibrant /r/ or the multiple vibrant /R/. Saotomense DJ is thus best understood as the result of the reanalysis of a number of liquid-like segments Based on 1,767 words taken from Rouge's (2004) dictionary of Saotomense, the authors found 868 occurrences of Dl with 660 of these being related to words of Portuguese origin. The authors show that the frequency of deletion of the three liquid segments D I , I r l and /R/ is roughly similar and is not related to their contrastive status (18.9% for /r/ and M l and 13.38% for H I ) . Furthermore, neither the stress pattern of the word, nor the tonal pattern of the word is a reliable predictor of the

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Parth Bhatt and Ingo Plag

preservation or deletion of these segments. The authors argue instead for a historically based explanation in which forms such as the Portuguese coragäo were first changed to *korson, then to *koson. In Saotomense, an /l/ was subsequently inserted giving the form kloson. Rouge and Schang argue that this appearance of the liquid is in fact caused by the coexistence of the Portuguese coragäo, with the Saotomense *koson produced by the renewed influx of Portuguese setters in the mid-19 th century. The paper thus nicely shows that the sometimes curious facts of present-day creole languages may call for complex historical explanations, in which the contributions of substrate, superstate and universale at different times of development are often hard, if not impossible to tease neatly apart. Eric Russell-Webb examines the voicing patterns of obstruents in Negerhollands, a Dutch-lexifier Creole once spoken in the US Virgin Islands. The author investigates obstruent voicing in two periods, Early Negerhollands (approximately the middle and second half of the eighteenth century, i.e. the period after the Creole initially stabilized) and Late Negerhollands (approximately the early twentieth century, the period which preceded the disappearance of the language). After studying two written sources for Early Negerhollands (a letter from a Moravian missionary, Löhans, and two secular texts from J. M. Magens' 1770 grammar) the author concludes that the following processes are found: word-final devoicing of voiced obstruents, the voicing of labials (including all fricatives) and the general devoicing of fricatives. The author then examines two written sources for Late Negerhollands. Despite some similarities with Early Negerhollands (word-final devoicing of voiced obstruents and devoicing of voiced fricatives) the processes found in Late Negerhollands are slightly different: the voiced labial segment [v] which appears word-initially in Early Negerhollands is absent in Late Negerhollands, and single non-labial voiced segments are prohibited between two vowels. The voicing patterns in Early and Late Negerhollands are then accounted for using a gestural model of voicing in terms of the functional optimality-theoretic framework developed in Kirchner (1998). Russell-Webb explains the differences found in Late Negerhollands as resulting from the introduction of a faithfulness constraint which maintains voicing in syllable onset position. The author concludes that this analysis shows that markedness constraints played a primary role in the early stages of the Creole, while faithfulness constraints became increasingly important in later stages of Negerhollands. The paper by Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate deals with the question of the origin of the two different types of vowel system that can be found in the English-based Caribbean Creole languages. It starts from the observation that the Surinamese Creoles as well as the obsolescent Creole of the Eastern Maroons of Jamaica lack a length distinction in their vowel system, while other languages such as Jamaican Creole, Bajan, Guyanese Creole and Gullah have preserved the length contrast from Early Modern English. They conclude that the Surinam-type vowel systems represent an older type of vowel system and argue that the length distinctions of the Standard English vowel system were presumably adopted under the continuing influence of the colonial English koine. Furthermore, the paper wants to answer the question why a number of Creoles, like Jamaican and Kittitian, have lowering diphthongs, like /ie, ia/ and /uo, ua/, and some do not (such as Bajan). Based on sociohistorical and linguistic evidence the authors claim that the adoption of lowering diphthongs was triggered in Jamaican Creole and St. Kitts-Nevis Creole by the arrival of a relatively small, but influential group of English South-Western dialect speakers, the Monmouth rebels. It is suggested that together with speakers of similar background that

Introduction

XI

were already present in these colonies this might have provided the critical mass necessary for the adoption of lowering diphthongs by these Creoles. Parth Bhatt and Emmanuel Nikiema open the section on syllabic aspects of Creole word structure with their article on empty positions in Haitian. They argue that the syllable structure of this French lexifier Creole must contain empty syllabic positions in order to account for paradoxical morphophonological patterns. Set within the framework of Government Phonology (Kaye, Lowenstamm and Vergnaud 1990) the authors account for the alternation between single consonants in word-fmal position (as in senp [sep], "simply") and the appearance of consonant clusters in word-internal position (as in senpleman [sgplema] "simply") by appealing to the presence of a final empty nucleus which leads to ill formed syllabic relations. Furthermore, they explain the frequent violations of the Syllable Contact Law (Murray and Vennemann 1983, Vennemann 1988) found in Haitian forms such as patisri [patisRi] "pastry" and maladla [maladla] "the sick (person)", by proposing that the syllables are not in fact adjacent and are separated by an empty nucleus. Finally they show that the paradoxical patterning of the definite determiner in Haitian is the direct result of the presence of a word final empty nucleus in forms such as chatla [JatlaJ "the cat". In sum, the authors claim that these apparently unusual morphophonological phenomena can be explained in a principled manner by referring to abstract underlying syllabic representations containing empty positions. The paper by Alain Kihm combines current research into two controversial areas of linguistic investigation: models of the origin of human language and theories concerning the origins of pidgin and Creole languages. More specifically, Kihm compares Bickerton's bioprogram hypothesis to Carstairs-McCarthy's (1999) hypothesis of the phonological origin of language. After presenting in detail Carstairs-McCarthy's theory, the author applies this proposal to a variety of Creole languages. In particular, the author examines the nature of consonant positions and vowel positions within the syllable and proposes a number of analogies with noun positions and verb position within the sentence. Human language can thus be understood as the product of a process of exaptation (Gould 1991) whereby the ability to pronounce consonant-like or vowel-like sounds (related to the lowering of the human larynx) is transposed at a later time in evolution into the syntactic domain. The author proposes that the parallels between CV syllable structure and N-V syntactic structure explain the attested form of both Creole and non-Creole languages. Ingo Plag and Mareile Schramm investigate the syllable structure of four early varieties of Caribbean English Creole (Sranan, Saramaccan, St. Kitts, Jamaican). The article provides a systematic comparative description of the phonotactic patterns and syllable structures of the earliest attested varieties of these languages. The early varieties show remarkable similarity in their phonotactic restructuring of the superstate lexical items. Certain types of marked structures are repaired by epenthesis or deletion to arrive at less marked syllable types. However, contra to claims found in the literature, even the earliest attested varieties do not have only CV syllables. Complex onsets observing sonority and certain types of coda are allowed. Creole languages may therefore be regarded not as especially simple, but as rather average languages, as regards their sound structure (cf. Klein, this volume for the same point). Differences between varieties are also found, and these differences in structure correlate with differences in the availability of the superstate. Those varieties that had more intensive and prolonged contact with their European lexifiers show a more faithful preservation of the syllabic structure of the words taken from them.

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Parth Bhatt and Ingo Plag

These findings are interpreted as support for a second language acquisition scenario of creolization. Less marked structures in the Creole emerge due to transfer from the less marked grammars of the substrate speakers. In the first paper of the morphology section of this volume Marina Puciarelli presents an empirical study of the variable third person singular subject marking in Nigerian Pidgin English as evidenced in different written sources. In particular, the study tests certain claims about potential coreference effects on this variability. The analysis of the distribution of e and im in four plays and a periodical editorial demonstrates that earlier claims need to be refined. It is shown that im is not only sensitive to coreferentiality but also to subordinate clause types. In the four plays, im is allowed exclusively as a coreferential subject in subordinate clauses representing reported speech; in the editorials, it preferentially encodes coreferentiality in reported speech as well. In contrast, subordinate clauses not representing reported speech show a different pattern. In the four plays, im never appears in non-reported speech clauses, where only e is allowed, whereas in the editorials, im is much less frequent than e and does not pay attention to coreferentiality in that same syntactic context. Thus, in non-reported speech clauses coreferentiality is not encoded. Puciarelli concludes that in non-reported speech clauses, when both e and im occur, they are two variants of the same pronoun, since their semantic-syntactic context of occurrence overlaps. In reported speech clauses, however, e and im encode noncoreferentiality and coreferentiality, respectively. This strongly suggests a novel reading of im as a logophoric pronoun. Another investigation of personal pronoun variability is presented by Shobha Satyanath in her article on Guayanese English Creole, in which she studies changes and continuities in pronoun distribution in both real and apparent time. Her findings suggest that the widespread tendency in Guyanese to use oblique and nominative forms in the nominative (lsg and 3pl), and to extend the forms used in the nominative to the oblique and the genitive is widely attested in the history of English itself from 1400 to 1900, and cannot be attributed to the processes of creolization. The differentiation both within and across early Guyanese texts and individuals does not support the hypothesis of a minimum and invariant system of pronoun morphology operating either at the early stages or at the time of the arrival of large number of indentured workers during 1938-1921. This provides evidence against the proposed existence of a drastic simplification of morphology caused by the processes of learning or creolization. Tonjes Veenstra's paper focuses on the structure and emergence of synthetic compounds in the Surinamese Creoles. These constructions are of particular theoretical interest, since the affix is not attached to the head of the construction but rather seems to take a maximal projection of the head as the base to which it attaches and thus constitute a case of phrasal affixation, challenging some morphological theories (e.g. Sadock 1991 or Ackema and Neeleman 2002). It is first shown that the structure of the synthetic compounds in the Surinamese Creoles is radically different from those that are found in the languages that were present in the original contact situation. Veenstra discusses the emergence of such compounds from different perspectives and argues that the emergence of these structures in Creole is best accounted for by assuming processes of first language acquisition. The analysis thus argues against the claim that the adults in the creolization process are the sole innovators, whereas the children are the regulators. Finally, a diachronic scenario for the development of the synthetic compounds in the Surinamese Creoles is proposed.

Introduction

XIII

The paper by Jacques Arends, Josje Verhagen, Eva van Lier, Suzanne Dikker and Hugo Cardoso examines morphological marking in four Romance-based Creole languages: Angolar, Palenquero, Papiamentu, and Seychellois, seeking to evaluate the validity of the Creole Prototype Hypothesis proposed by McWhorter (e.g. 2001). Based on a review of secondary sources for the four above-mentioned Creole languages, the authors find that, with respect to inflectional morphology, Angolar has two features expressed by an affix, while Palenquero and Seychellois each have four features expressed by an affix and Papiamentu has six features expressed by an affix. As for tone, none of the four languages makes use of tone for lexical contrast. Finally, with regard to the third property, i.e. the semantically transparent nature of derivation, the authors find that three of the four languages follow this pattern, while Papiamentu appears to be an exception with two types of non transparent derivation. Overall, these findings are somewhat inconclusive because they can be interpreted as both generally supporting the Creole Prototype hypothesis, as well as supporting counterclaims to this hypothesis: all the languages have productive inflectional processes and at least one, Papiamentu, shows non-transparent derivation and tone. The authors thus prefer to interpret their findings in light of the distinction between inherent and contextual morphology as proposed by Booij (1993) and Kihm (2003): prototypical Creole languages seem to have little or no contextual inflection. To summarize, the articles in this volume open up new perspectives for the study of phonology and morphology of Creole languages, drawing our attention to hitherto unknown phenomena or offering interesting new analyses of established facts.

References Ackema, Peter and Ad Neeleman (2002): Morphological selection and representational modularity. In: Geert Booij and Jaap van Marie (eds.): Yearbook of Morphology 2001, 1-51. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Booij, Geert (1993): Against split morphology. - In: Geert Booij and Jaap van Marie (eds.): Yearbook of Morphology 1993, 27-50. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Braun, Maria (2005): Word-formation and creolisation: The case of Early Sranan. Ph.D. dissertation. Universität Siegen. Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew (1999): The origins of complex language: An inquiry into the evolutionary beginnings of sentences, syllables, and truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gould, Stephen Jay (1991): Exaptation. - In: Journal of Social Issues 47, 43-65. Kaye, Jonathan, Jean Lowenstamm and Jean-Roger Vergnaud (1990): Constituent structure and government in phonology. - In: Phonology Yearbook 7, 193-231. Kihm, Alain (2003): Les pluriels internes de l'arabe: systeme et consequences pour l'architecture de la grammaire. - In: Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes 32, 109-155. Klein, Thomas B. (this volume): Creole phonology typology: Phoneme inventory size, vowel quality distinctions and stop consonant series, 3-21. Kirchner, Robert (1998): An effort-based approach to consonant lenition. Ph.D. dissertation. UCLA. Maddieson, Ian (1984): Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McWhorter, John (2001): The world's simplest grammars are Creole grammars. - In: Linguistic Typology 5, 125-166.

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Magens, Joachim Melchior (1770): Grammatica over det Creolske sprog. Copenhagen: Danish Lutheran mission. Murray, Robert and Theo Vennemann (1983): Sound change and syllable structure [: Problems] in Germanic phonology. - In: Language 59, 514-528. Plag, Ingo (ed.) (2003a): Phonology and morphology of Creole languages. Tübingen: Niemeyer. - (2003b): The morphology of creole languages. Special section of Yearbook of morphology 2002. Dordrecht: Foris. Rouge, Jean-Louis (2004): Dictionnaire etymologique des Creoles Portugals d'Afrique. Paris: Karthala. Sadock, Jerrold (1991): Autolexical syntax: A theory of parallel grammatical representations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Siegel, Jeff (2004a): Morphological simplicity in pidgins and Creoles. - In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 19 (1), 139-162. - (2004b): Morphological elaboration. - In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 19 (2), 333362. Vennemann, Theo (1988): Preference laws for syllable structure: With special reference to German, Germanic, Italian, and Latin. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Section 1: Segmental aspects

Thomas Β. Klein Creole phonology typology: Phoneme inventory size, vowel quality distinctions and stop consonant series

1. Introduction1 Most practitioners in the field of linguistics would agree that the phonology of Creole languages is considerably understudied (see for example Singh and Muysken 1995), notwithstanding the favorable attention it has received in recent years (see in particular the contributions in Plag 2003). Most of the existing work centers on a small number of themes. One of the core concerns is the comparison of Creoles with their European lexifiers and their non-European substrates. Another focus is on the phonological development from pidgin to Creole stages or within the history of a given Creole or a small group of Creoles. Synchronic work on Creole phonology tends to be couched in variationist frameworks or is part of structural descriptions where it is often given fairly short shrift. The geographical focus of surveys discussing the structures of Creole languages tends to be on either the Atlantic (see, e.g., Holm 2000, Parkvall 2000) or the Pacific Creoles (see, e.g., Mühlhäusler 1997). Furthermore, only Creoles with certain Indo-European lexifiers are usually considered. Generalizations concerning the phonology of Creole languages are invoked quite frequently, but they tend to be based on a fairly narrow sample of languages and are not grounded in a typological analysis. For instance, Bender (1987) suggests a list of probable phonological universale based on "overall impression", but acknowledges that a comparative study of Creole phonologies is "obviously one of the most pressing needs in Creole studies" (Bender 1987: 42). The present study is designed in part to address this need. It has been claimed that the linguistic structure of Creole languages is more alike or simpler than that of non-Creole languages. Influential concepts such as Bickerton's bioprogram (see Bickerton 1981 et seq.) are based on the seeming surface similarity of Creole languages. 2 Substratist and superstratist thinking relies to a good degree on the idea that a given set of structures is more or less iterated across Creole languages, thus making them 1

Earlier versions of parts of this material have been presented at the University of Edinburgh, at the University of Essex, at the 2003 SPCL meeting in Atlanta and at the Second International Workshop on the Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages in Siegen. Thanks to the audiences there and in particular to Jacques Arends, Parth Bhatt, Robert Clark IV, Stuart Davis, Shelome Gooden, Mya A. Green, Meta Y. Harris, Winford James, Bob Ladd, Miriam Meyerhoff, Mits Ota, Peter Patrick, Ingo Plag, Norval Smith and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments, discussion and encouragement. This research has been supported in part through a Faculty Research Grant at Georgia Southern University in the summer of 2003, which is hereby gratefully acknowledged. All responsibility for errors lies with the author. Note, however, that the evidence in support of the bioprogram hypothesis was drawn from morphosyntax, not phonology.

4

Thomas Β. Klein

appear more similar than the linguistic diversity in the formative contact situation would suggest. The idea that Creole languages are grammatically simplified in relation to their source languages, especially the superstates, is considered a truism by many, professional linguists and laypersons alike. Others have argued that the linguistic structure of Creole languages is simple in some absolute sense, not just as compared to the languages in the contact situation, but also in comparison to non-Creole languages in general. This idea of absolute simplicity has been advocated prominently in recent work. In particular, it has been claimed that the world's simplest grammars are Creole grammars (McWhorter 2001a, b), henceforth referred to as the Creole simplicity hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, Creoles display significantly less complexity as a group than the rest of the world's natural grammars. This entails that there would be no significant set of nonCreole languages with simpler grammars than Creole languages. McWhorter (2001a) invokes markedness in the sense of a Greenbergian implicational metric and inventory size in his discussion of phonology. To a significant degree, the phonemic and tonal inventories of Creole languages would employ fewer distinctions and would contain less marked elements by this measure. Markedness and inventory size are to a good degree interdependent, but they are also distinct parameters. The implicational relationship between unmarked and marked segments affects the quantity dimension because marked segments usually occur in relatively large inventories that already possess the unmarked segments. However, this is not necessarily the case. For instance, Rotokas, the language with the smallest inventory of eleven phonemes in Maddieson's (1984) typological analysis, includes two highly marked segments, the alveolar tap and the voiced bilabial fricative, as part of its inventory of six consonantal phonemes (see Maddieson 1984: 367). In other words, the Rotokas case demonstrates the potential distinctness of markedness and inventory size because its very small set of phonemic consonants contains marked segments nonetheless. Meaningful discussions and interpretations of the sound structure of Creole languages are hampered by the lack of comprehensive approaches to segmental and suprasegmental markedness and the absence of wide-ranging typological analyses of Creole phonology. Detailed treatment of markedness is beyond the scope of the present work. Instead, the focus of this paper is on the size of phonemic inventories, the number of vowel quality contrasts and the number of contrastive stop series. A quantitative typological investigation is undertaken to illuminate these parameters in a systematic sample of Creole languages. The results from this investigation are compared to the typology of non-Creole languages as laid out in Maddieson (1984). No comparison of Creoles to their lexifier languages is made. Instead, Creoles are compared to the entire typological sample of non-Creole languages. Creole sound systems are not primarily compared to non-Creole sound systems with regard to what kinds of phonemes they include but how many phonemes Creoles employ in comparison to non-Creoles along a given parameter. The present analysis focuses on Creole phoneme inventories and the question if the phonological inventories of Creoles are quantitatively simpler or more alike than those of non-Creoles. The aims of the paper are to construct and analyze a typological sample of phoneme inventories from the range of Creoles around the world and to launch a systematic quantitative study of the phonemes of Creole languages with those of non-Creole languages. Maddieson's (1984) ternary scale, simple - typical - complex, to measure the phonological complexity of non-Creole languages is of particular importance in this regard.

Creole phonology

typology

5

Based on this scale, the results of this paper support the idea that Creole sound systems are quantitatively very typical sound systems, referred to henceforth as the Creole typicality hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, Creole languages exhibit typical phonological systems that center on typological middle ground. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. I show next how the present typological sample is constructed. The analyses of phoneme inventory size, vowel quality distinctions and stop phoneme series are presented in turn. The implications of the typological findings are discussed in each section with particular reference to the question of simplicity versus middle ground in Creole phonology before some conclusions are offered.

2. A typological sample of Creole languages

Maddieson's (1984) erudite and influential work on the typology of phonemic systems is the empirical and methodological backdrop for the current study. Maddieson's research is based on the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID). This database contains 317 languages, none of which is a Creole. Maddieson employs a quota sample to enable sampling efficiency and to ensure maximal genetic diversity in the database. He allows no more than one language from any small family grouping; for instance, West Germanic and North Germanic languages are represented through one language each. The present sample is constructed to represent the range of Creole languages around the world. Care is taken to balance Creoles from diverse locations and with European and nonEuropean lexifiers. If Maddieson's quota of one language per small sub-grouping were to be applied, the number of Creole languages in the resulting sample would be too small for the database to be truly meaningful. For instance, only one French-lexified Creole from the Atlantic area could have been included according to this logic. Thus, to ensure balance, diversity and sampling effectiveness, two Creoles with the same lexifier are considered from a given geographical area wherever possible. Acrolectal Creoles or varieties are generally excluded. The reason is that they are closest to and, hence, least distinct from the corresponding lexifier languages. The focus is on mesolectal and, in particular, basilectal varieties. One consequence regarding Atlantic English-lexified Creoles is the inclusion of Suriname Creoles at the expense of Caribbean island Creoles, given that the latter tend to be closer to the lexifier. For analogous reasons, Gulf of Guinea Portuguese-lexified Creoles have been included, whereas Cape Verdean Creole varieties are not considered. This move is not meant to impart judgment on the ultimate degree of 'Creoleness' of these languages, however. Recent additions to the phoneme inventory of a given Creole through loans from European lexifiers have been avoided wherever they are obvious or the sources identify them. For example, front rounded vowels from Dutch loans in Papiamentu have been disregarded to focus on the core rather than the periphery of the phoneme system. There is also a bias towards the quality of the available descriptions. Creole languages are chosen in part based on how detailed the information on the phoneme system is in the sources and how reliable this information seems.

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Thomas Β. Klein

The current sample contains twenty-three (23) Creole languages. Table 1 lays out how they are classified according to geographic area and lexifier language and which sources have been used to gather the phonological information. Note that the sample includes varieties that have only recently become nativized as Creoles such as Tok Pisin and Sango. Table 1: Creoles in sample Area Atlantic

IE-Lexifier Dutch

Creole Berbice

English

Negerhollands Ndyuka Saramaccan

St Lucian

Aceto 1996, Bakker et al. 1995, Rountree 1972 Corne 1999, Lefebvre 1998, Tinelli 1981 Carrington 1984

Portuguese

Angolar

Lorenzino 1998, Maurer 1995 Ivens Ferraz 1979

Spanish

Säo Tomense Papiamentu

French

Haitian

German

Unserdeutsch

Kouwenberg and Murray 1994, Kouwenberg and Muysken 1995, Maurer 1998, Munteanu 1996 Bickerton and Escalante 1970, Lewis 1970, Megenney 1986, Patifio Rosselli 1983, 1999 Volker 1982

English

Bislama

Meyerhoff 2003, Tryon 1987

Tok Pisin

Laycock 1984, Mühlhäusler 1984, Smith 2002, Verhaar 1995 Baker 1972

Palenquero

Indian Ocean/ Pacific

Sources Kouwenberg 1994 Sabino 1990, Stolz 1986 Huttar and Huttar 1994

French

Mauritian Tayo

Corne 1999, Ehrhart 1993

Portuguese

Kristang

Baxter 1988

Spanish

Sri Lankan Smith 1977 Zamboangueno Forman 1972, Whinnom 1956

Creole phonology typology

Table 1 cont.: Area Africa

Non-IE-Lexifler Bantu

Creole

Sources

Kituba

Fehderau 1962, 1966, Institut National 1982, Mufwene 1997, Nida 1956, Swift and Zola 1963 Pasch 1997, Walker and Samarin 1997 Kaye and Tosco 2001, Owens 1997 Pasch and Thelwall 1987, Owens 1997 Lim 1981, Pakir 1986

Sango Arabic

Juba Arabic Nubi

Asia

Malay

Baba Malay

The lexifier languages are assigned the central role in classifying the Creoles in the sample linguistically. The basic geographical division for Creoles with Indo-European lexifiers is between Atlantic Creoles and the parts of the world delineated by the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The five European lexifier languages Dutch, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are easily matched with two Creoles each in the Atlantic area. This is less straightforward for the Pacific Rim/Indian Ocean Creoles. There is no Dutch-lexified Creole in this area, so Rabaul Creole German (Unserdeutsch) takes its place given that the lexifier languages are very closely related. As far as I am aware, there is no source comparable to Forman's (1972) dissertation on Zamboangueno that would discuss a second Pacific Spanish-lexified Creole in enough detail to extract the necessary phonological information. Creoles with non-Indo-European lexifiers are considered equally important for the comprehensive understanding of Creole languages. They are classified geographically according to the continent on which they are found. There is only one Malay-lexified Creole represented because of a lack of descriptive resources to extract reliable phonological information on another language of this type.

3. The size of Creole phoneme inventories

This section serves to compare the results of Maddieson's (1984) investigation of phoneme inventory sizes with the current database of Creoles. Maddieson's practice of representing each segment considered as phonemic by its most characteristic allophone has been followed throughout the present study. One problematic area in determining the segment inventories involves choosing between a unit or a sequence interpretation of elements such as affricates, prenasalized stops, and diphthongs. Maddieson examined the available evidence "with some prejudice in favor of treating complex phonetic events as sequences (i.e. as combinations of more elementary units)" (p. 6). Maddieson's (1984) survey has uncovered a great range in the size of the phoneme inventories of non-Creole languages. The smallest inventories of 11 phonemes are found in

Thomas Β. Klein Rotokas and Mura, whereas the largest inventory of 141 phonemes is found in the Khoisan language !Xu. However, the typical phoneme inventory size is between 20 and 37 segments. According to Maddieson, 70% of the UPSID languages, that is 222 out of 317 languages, fall into this category. Inventories are classed as simple by Maddieson when they are smaller than 20 phonemes, whereas inventories with more than 37 phonemes are classed as complex. Thus, this metric employs the tripartite distinction of simple typical and complex. This measure of complexity is applied analogously to the Creoles to enable a straightforward comparison with non-Creole languages. When variations of the size of the phoneme inventory of a given Creole are found in the descriptions, certain general guidelines have been applied. Whenever there appear to exist marginal phonemes with limited distribution in a Creole language, these are excluded from the present database. The idea is to represent the core of a given inventory and to abstract away from its periphery. The issue of the interpretation of consonants as units versus sequences has been treated as follows. Affricates, labiovelar stops and homorganic prenasalized stops are always treated as units; non-homorganic nasals plus obstruents are treated as sequences and, hence, are not part of the inventory count unless the descriptive literature on the Creole in question makes a case for the treatment as units. Diphthongs are treated as sequences, given that diphthongs in Creole languages generally exhibit vocoid qualities that are also found in the monophthongs. For example, a diphthong aj is treated as a sequence of the vowel phonemes a and i. Nasal vowels are counted as distinct from oral vowel phonemes in determining the inventory size. If the status of certain phonemes such as nasals is doubtful given the information in the descriptive literature, they are not included in the inventory count. The overall idea is to employ a conservative count of the size of Creole inventories. Nonetheless, the emphasis is on what Creoles have, not what they may lack in comparison to other types of languages. The number of the phonemes in the Creoles surveyed is displayed in Table 2 below The table is evidence that Creoles display a narrow range in the size of their phonemic inventories. The smallest inventory has 19 phonemes, whereas the largest one has 37. Recall that the range for non-Creole languages is much wider, from 11 to 141. The vast majority of Creole languages exhibits the typical non-Creole inventory size of 20 to 37 phonemes following Maddieson's measure. Only one simple inventory is found; 96% (22 of 23) of Creoles show the typical size, whereas no Creole inventories are complex by Maddieson's measure. Given these figures, the frequency of typical inventory sizes in Creole versus nonCreole languages may be calculated statistically. Given that the numbers at issue are quite small, the Fisher's exact probability test (Langsrud 2004, Lowry 2000) or the chi-square test with Yates' correction for continuity (Preacher 2003) may be used to calculate statistical (non-) significance. The Fisher's exact test shows that the frequency of Creole languages with the typical inventory size is significantly higher than in the UPSID languages (p < 0.007; two-tailed). This result is duplicated using Yates' chi-square (5 86* ρ < 0 02) This means that significantly more Creole languages have phoneme inventories of typical size than non-Creole languages. In other words, Creole phoneme inventories are quantitatively more middle-of-the-road than the UPSID inventories.

Creole phonology typology

9 Table 2: Creole phoneme inventory size

Creole Ndyuka Kituba Tok Pisin Berbice, Juba Arabic, Tayo Palenquero Bislama Baba Malay Mauritian, Nubi, Sri Lankan

No. of phonemes 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Negerhollands, Unserdeutsch, Kristang, Zamboangueno

27

Papiamentu Säo Tomense Haitian, Saramaccan 3 St Lucian

30 31

Sango Angolar

35 37

32 33

The inventory sizes of Creoles are also very evenly distributed within their range. The mean number of segments in a Creole phoneme inventory is just under 27, whereas the median is 26 segments. The small differential in mean versus median points up the even distribution. Maddieson reports that the mean number of phonemes per language in the UPSID database is a little over 31; the median falls between 28 and 29. These numbers are an outcome of the greater range in diversity in the size of non-Creole inventories. The model number of consonants in an UPSID inventory is 21 (Maddieson 1984: 12), whereas a system of 5 vowel qualities is most frequent (see also below). Interestingly, the mean and the median in the Creole languages correspond very closely to the sum of the most frequent number of vowel qualities (i.e., 5) and the number of the most frequently occurring individual consonant segment types in the UPSID database (i.e., 21). The numerical results presented in this section may be discussed in light of the predictions of the competing hypotheses concerning simplicity versus middle ground in Creole grammars. Notwithstanding potential interaction with markedness, the Creole simplicity hypothesis predicts a substantial number of Creoles with small inventories of fewer than 20 phonemes. The present investigation shows that such simple inventories are very scarce. The rarity of such inventories is unexpected and surprising under the simplicity hypothesis. Given the present measure, it emerges that Creoles do not have the simplest inventories, but the most typical ones. Nearly all Creoles fall within the range typical of non-Creole 3

According to McWhorter, there are twenty-five (25) phonemes in the inventory of Saramaccan (2001a: 139). However, descriptive sources on Saramaccan present evidence for thirty-two (32) phonemes instead (Aceto 1996, Bakker et al. 1995, Rountree 1972). It seems that the seven vowel phonemes of Saramaccan have been omitted from McWhorter's count.

10

Thomas Β. Klein

languages clustering around an inventory size of 27. This distribution is expected under the Creole typicality hypothesis. The fact that no Creoles show inventory sizes that are complex under the current measure supports the idea that Creole sound systems may be the world's most typical sound systems. The predictions of the typicality hypothesis are also met by the findings of the investigation of the number of distinctive vowel qualities.

4. Distinctive vowel qualities in Creole languages

This section compares the results of Maddieson's (1984) study of the number of vowel qualities in phoneme inventories with the corresponding results from the Creole languages and interprets them in light of the competing hypotheses of Creole structure. Many languages have more than one series of vowels such as long and short vowels or oral and nasal vowels. The vowels in one series can often be matched in quality with another series, so that the number of vowel phonemes is greater than the number of different vowels qualities in the languages concerned. In other languages there may be qualities in one series which do not occur outside that series, so that the total number of vowel qualities may be larger than the number found in a given series (see Maddieson 1984: 127). This issue arises in Creole languages typically for oral versus nasal vowels. Consider Creole Sango as an instance of oral and nasal vowels matching in quality. It seems clear that Sango has the seven oral vowel phonemes / i, u, e, ε, ο, ο, a/ and the five nasal vowel phonemes / I , 0, ε, 5, ä/ (see Pasch 1997, Walker and Samarin 1997). Given that the qualities of all nasal vowels are found in the oral vowels, Sango has seven distinctive vowel qualities. On the other hand, given that nasality is contrastive for five vowels, Sango has twelve phonemes of oral and nasal vowels. The reverse pattern of asymmetry is attested for Mauritian Creole, which, according to Baker (1972), has the five oral vowel phonemes /i, u, e, o, a/ and the three nasal phonemes /•&, 5, ä/. All nasal vowels in this case have qualities distinct from the oral vowels, so that Mauritian Creole has eight vowel phonemes and eight distinctive vowel qualities. We follow Maddieson's (1984: 128) practice to record vowel length contrasts as phonemic only if they are linked to vowel quality differences. In the present database this is applicable to Sri Lanka Creole Portuguese. This language has six vowels that occur as short and long, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/, /o/ and /as/. In addition, /a/ appears only short, whereas /a:/ occurs only as a long vowel. Thus, in the present system Sri Lankan has eight vowel phonemes and eight distinctive vowel qualities. According to Maddieson, it is often unclear in the description of the UP SID languages if the mid vowels, typically in five-vowel systems, are tense or lax. Consequently, he uses "e" and "o " to symbolize vowels in the mid range in such cases. Following this abstraction, I display mid vowels in Creole five-vowel systems as "e" and "o ", even though the actual vowels may be tense or lax.

Creole phonology

typology

11

The UPSID vowel quality inventories range in size from three to fifteen. Five-vowel systems are most frequent. The tripartite measure invoked for inventory size is carried over to the vowel qualities. Systems with three and four vowel qualities are classed as simple, inventories of five to seven qualities are classed as typical, whereas inventories of eight to fifteen vowel qualities are considered to be complex (see Maddieson 1984: 128). Table 3: Number of non-Creole vowel qualities (Maddieson 1984: 127) No. of vowel qualities 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

No. of languages 17 27 98 60 47 17 25 15 2 5 2 0 2

% of languages 5.4% 8.5% 30.9% 18.9% 14.8% 5.4% 7.9% 4.7% 0.6% 1.6% 0.6% 0.0% 0.6%

Table 3 shows that around one-third of the UPSID languages exhibit inventories of five vowel qualities. Almost two thirds lie in the typical range of five to seven vowel qualities. Only slightly more than 20% show complex inventories of eight or more vowel qualities. The following displays show the vowel quality inventories of the Creoles in the sample. (1)

Five-vowel inventory Bislama, Juba Arabic, Nubi, Kituba, Ndyuka, Palenquero, Tayo, Tok Pisin, Zamboangueno i

u "o"

"e" a (2)

Six-vowel inventory (a) Baba Malay

(b) Berbice

i

i

u e

ο

u e

ο ε

a

a

12

Thomas Β. Klein

(3)

Seven-vowel inventory (a) Angolar, Haitian, Papiamento, Sango, Säo Tomense, Saramaccan i

(b) Negerhollands

u e

i

ο ε

u e

ο

ο ε

a a

a (4)

Eight-vowel inventory (a) St. Lucian (b) Kristang i

u e

o ε

i

u

e ο

a α (5)

(c) Mauritian

o ε

a a

ο

i e

(d) Sri Lankan u

o a e ö a α

i

u e

o s o

ae a

Nine-vowel inventory Unserdeutsch

Perhaps most remarkable from the qualitative perspective are the six- and eight-vowel systems. Note that these systems mostly come about by the addition of one vowel to the five- or seven-vowel system, respectively. Baba Malay and Kristang have phonemic schwa in addition to the standard five and seven vowels, respectively. St. Lucian, Mauritian and Sri Lankan exhibit two vowels in the low range instead of one. A number of variations in the mid range of the vowel space may be observed. Berbice does not have a lax mid back vowel matching /ε/, whereas Sri Lankan has a schwa instead of /ε/. Similarly, the place of /o/ is taken up by schwa in Negerhollands. 4

4

The Negerhollands vowel inventory is taken from Sabino's (1990) discussion of the vowel system of the last speaker of the language.

Creole phonology typology

\3

Table 4 summarizes the number of Creoles that show a given vowel quality system. Table 4: Number of Creole vowel qualities No. of vowel qualities 5 6 7 8 9

No. of Creoles 9 2 7 4 1

% of Creoles 39% 8.5% 30.5% 17.5% 4.5%

The displays in (1) through (5) and Table 4 show that Creole languages are fairly narrow in the quantitative range of their vowel quality inventories. Creole languages span from five to nine vowels, unlike the three to fifteen distinct vowel qualities found in non-Creole languages. Five-vowel systems are most frequent in Creole languages, with seven-vowel systems running second. The great majority of Creole languages shows vowel quality inventories in the typical range of 5, 6 or 7 vowels, namely, 18 out of 23, that is 78%. The frequency of these systems in the Creoles is not significantly higher than that in the nonCreoles (205/317 = 65%) (Yates' chi-square (Preacher 2003): 1.205; ρ < 0.28). 5 There are five complex systems of eight or more vowels, but no simple three- or four-vowel systems. The percentage of complex vowel systems is nearly identical for Creole (5/23 = 22%) and non-Creole languages (68/317 = 21%). The only difference approaching statistical significance is the robust presence of simple vowel inventories in the non-Creoles (44/317 = 14%) versus their absence in the Creoles (Fisher's exact: ρ < 0.056; two-tailed). The Creole simplicity hypothesis predicts that there should be a substantial number of small and unmarked vowel quality inventories in Creole languages analogous to maximally unmarked /i, u, a/ in non-Creole languages like Classical Arabic, Miskitu or Australian Aboriginal languages. However, such inventories are absent from the Creoles in the sample. This lack of simple Creole vowel inventories is a significant problem for the Creole simplicity hypothesis. One might ask if there are any reports o f / i , u, a/ vowel inventories in Creole languages at all. In fact, I am aware of two systems that should be mentioned in this regard. Ehrhart (1993: 94) describes /i, u, a/ as the only vowels in a variety of Tayo she calls 'system A'. However, it is important to note that this system is described as moribund and in competition with the typical five-vowel system. The second report of an /i, u, a/ system comes from the Ngukurr dialect of Australian Kriol (Sandefur and Harris 1986: 180f.). However, it is significant that this system exists in variation with the standard five-vowel system, analogous to Tayo. The Creole simplicity hypothesis predicts that three-vowel systems should be common and stable in the Creole languages of the world. Instead, we find that such systems are exceedingly rare and unstable.

5

An anonymous reviewer has pointed out that the number of six-vowel systems in Creoles seems significantly smaller than that in non-Creoles. It is the task of future research to find an explanation for this discrepancy.

14

Thomas Β. Klein

There is a good fit between the hypothesis that Creole phonologies are typical sound systems and the results of the present investigation of vowel quality inventories. Under this hypothesis, we expect to find a good majority of Creole languages with vowel quality inventory systems of five to seven members. By the same token, simple or complex vowel quality systems are not excluded a priori, but they are expected to play a subordinate role with respect to the middle-of-the-road systems. It is also expected under the Creole typicality hypothesis that the low and high ends of the range of the number of vowel qualities in non-Creole languages are not attested in Creole languages. In short, the numbers for vowel quality systems cluster around the center, not the simplicity end, in the Creole languages of the world. The investigation of stop consonants in the next section confirms this result.

5. Stop p h o n e m e s in Creoles

Stop consonants in the languages of the world appear in series in the sense that stops with different points of articulation such as labial, alveolar and velar appear as plain voiceless (/p, t, k/), plain voiced (/b, d, g/), aspirated voiceless (/p\ th, k h /) and so on. The number of stop series found in non-Creole languages ranges from one to six, as shown in Table 5. Table 5: Number of UPSID stop series (Maddieson 1984: 26) No. of stop series 1 2 3 4 5 6

No. of languages 50 162 76 25 2 2

% of languages 15.8% 51.1% 24.0% 7.9% 0.6% 0.6%

Table 5 shows that more than half of non-Creole languages exhibit two series of stops and roughly a quarter display three stop series. Table 6 shows all fourteen (14) stop series attested in the UPSID database and their frequencies with respect to the overall sample.

Creole phonology typology

15

Table 6: Range and frequency of UP SID stop series (Maddieson 1984: 27) Stop series Plain voiceless

No. of languages

% of languages

291

91.8%

212

66.9% 28.7% 16.4%

Plain voiced Aspirated voiceless Voiceless ejective Voiced implosive Prenasalised voiced Breathy voiced

91 52 35 18

11.0% 5.6% 2.2%

Laryngealised voiced

7 6

Laryngealised voiceless

3

0.9%

Preaspirated voiceless Voiceless with breathy release

2

0.6%

2

0.6%

Postnasalised voiced Prevoiced ejective

1 1

Voiceless implosive

1

0.3% 0.3% 0.3%

1.9%

Given the range, the number, and the frequency of stop series found in the UPSID languages, the complexity metric is as follows. A single stop series is considered simple. A language with one stop series almost invariably has plain voiceless plosives (49 out of 50 UPSID languages). Typical non-Creole languages have two or three series of stops. Plain voiceless stops are more frequent than plain voiced stops in languages with two series. Non-Creole languages with a third series typically add aspirated voiceless stops. Nearly three quarters of the UPSID languages have two or three series of stops. Languages with four, five, or six series of stops are complex. Less than 10% of non-Creole languages exhibit such complexity (see Maddieson 1984: 2 7 f f ) . The series of stops found in the present sample of Creole languages are displayed in (6) through (10). (6)

Plain voiceless Plain voiced

/p, t, k/ /b, d, g/

Baba Malay, Berbice, Bislama, Haitian, Juba Arabic, Nubi, Kituba, Mauritian, Ndyuka, Negerhollands, Palenquero, Kristang, Papiamento, St. Lucian, Sri Lankan, Tok Pisin, Unserdeutsch, Zamboangueno

(7)

Plain voiceless Prenasalized voiced

/p, t, k/ /"b, nd, ''g/

Tayo

(8)

Plain voiceless Plain voiced Prenasalized voiced

/p, t, k/ /b, d, g/ Λb, n d, Dg/

Sango, Saramaccan

16 (9)

Thomas Β. Klein Plain voiceless Plain voiced Voiced implosive

(10) Plain voiceless Plain voiced Voiced implosive Prenasalized voiced

/p, t, k/

Säo Tomense

/g/ /ß, tf/ /p, t, k/

Angolar

/g/ /B/ / >

n

d,

V

All the languages in the right column of (6) have the two series named in the left column with the sounds listed in the center column; the meaning of the displays in (7) through (10) is analogous. Note that I take the presence of one or two stops in a series to be sufficient evidence to fully include it in the series count. Table 7 summarizes the number of Creoles having a given number of stop series. Table 7: Number of Creole stop series No. of stop series 2 3 4

No. of Creoles 18 4 1

% of Creoles 78% 17.5% 4.5%

Table 8 displays which stop series are attested in the present sample and their frequency in the Creoles. Table 8: Range and frequency of Creole stop series

Plain voiceless Plain voiced Prenasalized voiced Voiced implosive

No. of Creoles 23 22 4 2

% of Creoles 100% 95.5% 17.5% 9%

The comparison of Tables 7 and 8 with Tables 5 and 6 shows that Creoles utilize a much narrower number and range of stop series than non-Creoles. No Creole language has been found to have a simple single stop series. The great majority of Creole languages (18 out of 23) have a prototypical dual series of plain voiceless and plain voiced stops. The remaining Creoles show substrate influence by exhibiting some of the distinct phonology of indigenous languages contributing to the language contact. Tayo does not have a plain voiced series, but boasts a prenasalized stop series instead. The Creoles with African substrates in (8) through (10) exhibit prenasalized voiced stops, voiced implosives, or both, an obvious African heritage. 6 The occurrence of dual stops series is significantly higher in An anonymous reviewer points out that Creoles with three stop series add either prenasalized voiced stops or voiced implosive stops to the most common series of plain voiceless and plain voiced stops. Phonemic aspirated voiceless stops, on the other hand, do not occur at all in the

Creole phonology typology

17

the Creoles than in the non-Creoles (Yates' chi-square (Preacher 2003): 5.305; ρ < 0.022). Only one Creole in the sample, Angolar, may be considered complex as far as the number and range of stop series found in it is concerned. The Creole simplicity hypothesis predicts that there should be a substantial number of Creoles with a single, plain voiceless (/p, t, k/) stop series. However, none of the Creoles in the present database exhibits these stops as the only series. Instead, all Creoles in the sample have at least one more stop series. The absence of Creoles employing just a single stop series is unexpected and surprising under the Creole simplicity hypothesis and, hence, constitutes a significant problem for it. This begs the question if there are any reports of Creoles employing just a single /p, t, k/ stop series. In fact, Tryon (1987) describes Bislama as not having plain voiced stops. However, the minimal pairs in (11) obtained by Meyerhoff in her field work show that Bislama contrasts voiceless and voiced stops (personal communication 2001; see also Meyerhoff 2003). (11) Dual stop series in Bislama Pig big

'pig' 'big'

pen ben

'pen' 'bend'

traem draem

'try' 'dry'

taon 'town' daon 'down'

kol gol

'cold' 'goal, gold'

kad gad

'card' 'guard'

Given the data in (11), Bislama has the two standard series of stops. 7 There appears to be no Creole with just one stop series. Under the Creole typicality hypothesis, we expect to find a good majority of Creole languages with two and three stop series. Furthermore, it is expected that the great majority should have series of plain voiceless and plain voiced stops. Notwithstanding a small number of distinct systems, this is exactly what we find in the present database. Thus, the Creole typicality hypothesis makes the right quantitative predictions, whereas the Creole simplicity hypothesis does not.

present sample even though non-Creole languages with a third stop series typically add them. Given a possible connection to substrate inventories, the search for an explanation of this interesting discrepancy between Creoles and non-Creoles is beyond the scope of the present paper. Unfortunately, the author did not have access to Crowley's (2004) new grammar of Bislama before finishing this chapter.

18

Thomas Β. Klein

6. Conclusion

In this contribution I have measured Creole languages by what sounds they possess, not by which sounds may be absent. The typological approach taken is strictly synchronic and is based on a database of Creole languages from around the world. The present paper has focused on quantitative aspects of phonemic systems; segmental quality or markedness could not be treated in great detail. From this perspective, it must be concluded that the Creole simplicity hypothesis makes the wrong predictions. The segmental inventories of Creole languages are not simple, notwithstanding a very small number of exceptions. On the other hand, they do not tend to be very complex either. Instead, Creole inventories have a strong affinity to the typological middle. When we look beyond segment numbers, it appears to be true that certain non-Creole languages may exhibit degrees of phonological complexity unmatched in Creoles. However, it is also the case that parts of the phonology or morphophonology of Creoles may show considerable complexity. Examples of complex morphophonological patterns in Creoles have been discussed in recent work (Gooden 2003, James 2003, Klein 2003). Results from my typological investigation of Creole syllable structure (Klein 2004) show that the most frequent Creole syllable template is not just simple CV, as has been frequently claimed in the literature, but instead (C) (C) V (C). Furthermore, some Creoles exhibit significant syllabic complexity in that they allow complex codas (see also Plag and Schramm, this volume). The results of the present study allow us to flesh out the idea that Creole languages are more alike than non-Creoles from the point of view of phonological segment inventories. In particular, Creole phoneme systems seem more alike because they occupy a typologically narrower range than non-Creole languages. Perhaps the most significant empirical result emerging from the current investigation is that the phoneme systems of Creoles are in the typical range compared to non-Creole languages when a consistent metric inspired by leading typological research is applied. Based on these results, I advance the Creole typicality hypothesis that Creole sound systems are of typical complexity and center on typological middle ground. This hypothesis can and should be tested in future research through typological investigations of markedness, additional segmental parameters, syllable structure and suprasegmentals.

References

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Bakker, Peter, Nerval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra (1995). Saramaccan. - In: Jacques Arends Pieter Muysken and Norval Smith (eds.): Pidgins and Creoles. An introduction, 165-178. AmsterdamBenjamins. Baxter, Alan (1988): A grammar of Kristang (Malacca Creole Portuguese). - In: Pacific Linguistics Series B-95. Canberra: Australian National University. Bender, M. Lionel (1987): Some possible African Creoles: A pilot study. - In: Glenn Gilbert (ed V Pidgin and Creole languages. Essays in memory of John E. Reinecke, 37-60. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. Bickerton, Derek (1981): Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma. Bickerton, Derek and Aquilas Escalante (1970): Palenquero: A Spanish-based Creole of Northern Colombia. - In: Lingua 24, 254-267. Carrington, Lawrence D. (1984): St. Lucian morpho-syntax. Hamburg: Buske.

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Kouwenberg, Silvia (1994): A grammar ofBerbice Dutch Creole. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Kouwenberg, Silvia and Eric Murray (1994): Papiamentu. München: Lincom Europa Kouwenberg, Silvia and Pieter Muysken (1995): Papiamento. - In: Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken and Norval Smith (eds.): Pidgins and Creoles. An introduction, 205-218. Amsterdam· Benjamins Langsrud, 0 y y i n d (2004): Fisher's exact test, Available from http://www.matforsk.no/oIa/fisherhtm (last visited August 25, 2004). Laycock Don (1984): Substratum elements in Tok Pisin phonology. - In: Stephen A. Wurm and Peter Muhlhausler (eds.): Handbook of Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin), 295-307 CanberraAustralian National University.

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Lefebvre, Claire (1998): Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar. The case of Haitian Creole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Anthony (1970): A descriptive analysis of the Palenquero dialect. M.A. thesis. Mona/ University of the West Indies. Lim, Sonny (1981): Baba Malay: The language of the 'straits-born' Chinese. M.A. thesis. Monash University. Lorenzino, Gerardo (1998): The Angolar Creole Portuguese of Säo Tome. Its grammar and sociolinguistic history. München: Lincom Europa. Lowry, Richard (2000): Fisher's exact probability test, Available from http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/fisher.html (last visited August 23, 2004). Maddieson, Ian (1984): Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maurer, Philippe (1995): L 'angolar: Un Creole afro-portugais parle ά Säo Tome. Hamburg: Buske. - (1998): El papiamentu de Curazao. - In: Matthias Perl and Armin Schwegler (eds.): America negra, 139-218. Frankfurt: Vervuert. McWhorter, John (2001a): The world's simplest grammars are Creole grammars. - In: Linguistic Typology 5, 125-166. - (2001b): What people ask David Gil and why: Rejoinder to the replies. - In: Linguistic Typology 5,388-412. Megenney, William (1986): El Palenquero: Un lenguaje post-criollo de Colombia. Bogota: Institute Caro y Cuervo. Meyerhoff, Miriam (2003): Reduplication in Bislama: An overview of phonological and semantic factors. - In: Silvia Kouwenberg (ed.): Twice as meaningful: Reduplication in pidgins, Creoles and other contact languages, 231-238. London: Battlebridge. Mufwene, Salikoko (1997): Kiliiba. - In: Sarah Thomason (ed.): Contact languages. A wider perspective, 173-208. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Mühlhäusler, Peter (1984): Internal development of Tok Pisin. - In: Stephen A. Wurm and Peter Mühlhäusler (eds.): Handbook of Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin), 75-166. Canberra: Australian National University. - (1997): Pidgin and Creole linguistics (2nd ed.). London: University of Westminster Press. Munteanu, Dan (1996): El papiamento, lengua criolla hispänica. Madrid: Gredos. Nida, Eugene (1956): Kituba grammar. Typescript. American Mennonite Brethren Mission. Owens, Jonathan (1997): Arabic-based pidgins and Creoles. - In: Sarah Thomason (ed.): Contact languages. A wider perspective, 125-172. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Pakir, Anne Geok-In Sim (1986): A linguistic investigation of Baba Malay. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Hawai'i. Parkvall, Mikael (2000): Out of Africa. African influences in Atlantic Creoles. London: Battlebridge. Pasch, Helma (1997): Sango. - In: Sarah Thomason (ed.): Contact languages. A wider perspective, 209-270. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Pasch, Helma and Robin Thelwall (1987): Losses and innovations in Nubi. - In: Philippe Maurer and Thomas Stolz (eds.): Varia Creolica, 91-165. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Patino Rosselli, Carlos (1983): El habla en el Palenque de San Basilio. - In: Nina S. de Friedemann and Carlos Patino Rosselli (eds.): Lengua y sociedad en el Palenque de San Basilio. Bogota: Institute Caro y Cuervo. - (1999): Aspectos de la estructura del criollo palenquero. - In: Klaus Zimmermann (ed.): Lenguas criollas de base lexical espanoly portuguesa, 205-230. Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert. Plag, Ingo (ed.) (2003): Phonology and morphology of Creole languages. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Plag, Ingo and Mareile Schramm (this volume): Early Creole syllable structure: A cross-linguistic survey o f t h e earliest attested varieties of Saramaccan, Sranan, St. Kitts and Jamaican, 131-150. Preacher, Kristopher (2003): Interactive chi-square tests, Available from http://www.unc.edu/~preacher/chisq/ chisq.htm (last visited August 25, 2004).

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typology

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Rountree, S. Catherine (1972): The phonological structure of stems in Saramaccan. - In: Joseph Grimes (ed.): Languages of the Guianas, 22-27. Norman: SIL. Sabino, Robin (1990): Towards a phonology of Negerhollands: An analysis of phonological variation. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. Sandefor, John and John Harris (1986): Variation in Australian Kriol. - In: Joshua A. Fishman et al. (eds.): The Fergusonian impact. Vol. 2: Sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, 179-190. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Singh, Rajendra and Pieter Muysken (1995): Wanted: A debate in pidgin/creole phonology. - In: Journal of pidgin and Creole languages 10, 157-169. Smith, Geoff (2002): Growing up with TokPisin. London: Battlebridge. Smith, Ian Russell (1977): Sri Lanka Creole Portuguese phonology. Ph.D. dissertation. Cornell University. Stolz, Thomas (1986): Gibt es das kreolische Sprachwandelmodell? Frankfurt: Lang. Swift, Lloyd B. and Emile W. A. Zola (1963): Kituba basic course. Washington, D.C.: Foreign Service Institute. Thomason, Sarah (ed.) (1997): Contact languages. Α wider perspective. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Tinelli, Henri (1981): Creole phonology. The Hague: Mouton. Tryon, Darrell (1987): Bislama. An introduction to the national language of Vanuatu. - In: Pacific Linguistics, Series D-72. Canberra: Australian National University. Verhaar, John (1995): Toward a reference grammar of TokPisin. An experiment in corpus linguistics. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. Volker, Craig (1982): An introduction to Rabaul Creole German (Unserdeutsch). M.A. thesis. University of Queensland. Walker, James and William Samarin (1997): Sango phonology. - In: Alan Kaye (ed.): Phonologies of Asia and Africa (including the Caucasus), Vol.2, 861-880. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Whinnom, Keith (1956): Spanish contact vernaculars in the Philippine Islands. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Wurm, Stephen A. and Peter Mühlhäusler (eds.) (1984): Handbook of Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin). - In: Pacific Linguistics, Series C-70. Canberra: Australian National University.

Thomas B. Klein, Georgia Southern University, Department of Writing and Linguistics, P.O. Box 8026, Statesboro, GA 30460, USA, Email: [email protected]

Jean-Louis Rouge and Emmanuel Schang The origin of the liquid consonant in Saotomense Creole

1. Introduction1

The present study examines the origin of the liquid consonant /l/ in Saotomense, a Portuguese Creole language spoken in the Gulf of Guinea, also called Forro. 2 Our work will attempt to explain the difference in behaviour found between Saotomense and the other Portuguese Creoles in the area (the Angolar, spoken in the coastal villages of Sao Tome, the Ling'Ie spoken in Principe and the Fa d'Ambö in Ano Bom) To this end, we shall present a study of the relations between the words containing /I/ in Saotomense and their respective etymons. Our study follows along the lines of Ferraz's (1987) analysis of the liquid consonants in the Gulf of Guinea Creoles. The primary difference between the two studies is that our analysis is quantitative in character and provides a systematic listing of the pairs . The paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents a historical survey of the formation of the different Gulf of Guinea Creoles; section 3 deals with the problem of liquids in Saotomense from the perspective of language contact; section 4, provides an explanation of our methodology. In section 5, we present the results of our quantitative analysis and in section 6 we discuss our results in more detail. In section 7, we shall plead for an approach to the formation and evolution of the Creoles which is more detailed and thorough in nature.

2. A historical overview

It is absolutely certain that despite its kinship with the other Portuguese Creoles in the area, the Ling'Ie, spoken on the island of Principe does not share the same origin. The genetic links between the other Creoles are far more complex and require a brief overview of the history of the archipelago. The Portuguese discovered the Säo Tome and Principe islands in 1470. The first groups to populate these islands beginning in 1491 were (mostly) relegated Europeans (criminals, 1

2

The authors would like to thank Antonia Cristinoi for translating this article from French into English. The term Forro refers historically to the Creole spoken by the freed descendants of the first inhabitants (Aforrados) of the island. The term Saotomense is somehow a denial of the fact that the Angolars, also inhabitants of Säo Tome, speak another Creole (different from Forro) called Lungwa Ngola or Angolar. However, in this paper we shall use the term Saotomense (abbreviated as ST) to refer to Forro, according to the usage recommended by SIL.

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prostitutes, etc.) and African people from the continental territories of the Gulf of Guinea, speaking Kwa languages (see Caldeira (1999) and Tenreiro (1961) for a historical survey of the settlement of these islands). The two groups of people created cities and cleared the lands for the future plantations. It is in this climate of free interaction between Africans and Europeans that the first forms of the Säo Tome and Principe Creoles came to life, as a result of the contact between Kwa languages and Portuguese. Soon after, the Saotomense landowners began to organize a semi-clandestine human trade and bought their slaves not in the Bight of Benin, but in the Kongo Kingdom and in Angola. These slaves, who were destined either to work on the sugar cane plantations or to be sent to America, had by that time been captive on the continent for years. This flood of Bantu-speaking populations substantially modified the development of the Creole. From the mid-16 th century a large number of slave mutinies occurred on Säo Tome plantations. Many slaves fled the plantations and found refuge inland, where they constituted the nucleus of a people known as the Angolars. Given these historical facts (see Rouge and Schang forthcoming) and the comparison between the two languages, our assumption is that the ancestors of these Angolars were still speaking Kimbundu, but were also starting to speak the newly born Creole. The contact between the two systems created a new language, the Lungwa Ngola. The island of Ano Bom, on the other hand, was discovered in 1501 and populated by people from Säo Tome. The Creole originally spoken in that area was imported from Säo Tome. Even though the language has undergone new developments, especially due to its contact with Castilian, this particular Creole remains, in many respects, a conservative variant of Saotomense.

3. Liquid consonants in the Gulf of Guinea Creoles

One of the most striking features of the Saotomense phonemic inventory is the massive presence of the consonantal phoneme /l/, which is not found to the same extent in the other Portuguese Creoles in the area. At the same time, unlike Ling'ie or Angolar, /r/ is not found in Saotomense. Portuguese has two phonological vibrants: /R/ produced as an alveolar trill [r] and /r/ produced as an alveolar tap [r]. The vibrant /R/ is velarized in Brazil and this tendency is also becoming more and more frequent in Portugal. In intervocalic position, these segments have contrastive status and produce differences in meaning: Port, carro 'car' [" karu] vs. caro 'expensive' [ v karu]. In all other positions, the two segments are in complementary distribution: [rl occurs at the beginning of words; [r] after any consonant except [s, n, 1], At the end of a word or in coda position, we find /r/ in Portugal and /R/ in Brazil. 3 Consequently, in Saotomense words of Portuguese origin, the liquid HI can have as its origin an /I/, a simple vibrant Irl or a multiple one /R/. If the confusion between HI and Irl ever existed in Portuguese, /r/ seems to have been the dominant segment. Moreover, it seems that at the time Creole languages emerge, this 3

We adopt here the convention in use for the phonology of Portuguese for the trill and the tap: /R/ and /r/.

The liquid consonant in Saotomense

Creole

25

situation had become stable. In 1536, Fernando de Oliveira writes as follows using the past tense: "/ e letra liquida, saberemos que a forma e a melodia da nossa lingua foi mais amiga de pör sempre r onde agora escrevemos äs vezes I e äs vezes r, como gloria e flores onde diziam grorea e froles, e tambem outras partes com'estas." (De Oliveira, 2000:100) It is also important to note, with respect to Portuguese, that in this language HI can appear in coda position, in which case it is velarized in Portugal and vocalised in Brazil. In Saotomense, and in the other Creoles in the area, no liquid ever appears in this position. Among the African languages in contact, it is undoubtedly to the Kikongo group4 that we owe the explanation for the fusion of the three phonemes HI, /r/ and /R/ into the single phoneme M. These languages do not have /r/, but do have a single phoneme /l/. Furthermore, Angolar in all likelihood owes its [r]/[d] alternation to Kimbundu (see Lorenzino 1998:78 for numerous examples). But the influence of Kikongo on the /r/ and the /R/ from Portuguese does not explain everything, far from it. We need to explain the mechanism that allows Saotomense to create non-etymological /l/ consonants as in: (1)

navlega klonvesa klisenge igligu

< < <
C [- voice] 'fricatives are voiceless' e. nasal cluster voice harmony: for all [nasal] + C clusters, C [+ voice] 'all nasal-consonant clusters agree in voicing, i.e. the consonant must be voiced' f. nasal + velar voice heterogeneity: * [nasal] + C [dorsal, + voice]9 'nasal-voiced velar clusters are not allowed' Of particular note are differences between E-NGH and L-NGH phonological rules. On the surface, it would seem that some rules are similar, e.g. fricative voicelessness (lO.d and 14.d, respectively). The output of these rules is, however, quite different when concatenated with others, this with the exception of final devoicing (10.a and 14.a). In E-NGH, [v] is a permissible initial segment, by virtue of (lO.c), labial voicing; this rule is absent in L-NGH. Additionally, numerous systemic changes seem to have been made by the L-NGH period; these include the prohibition of non-labial voiced segments in simplex VCV environments and the peculiarities of coronal plosive distribution.

4. Phonological analysis of voicing in Negerhollands

In this section, I propose a broadly functionalist analysis of voicing in E-NGH and L-NGH. Although the present work does not pretend to exhaustively discuss all issues surrounding voicing from either phonetic or phonological perspectives, a brief overview of obstruent voicing is provided in section 4.1; readers familiar with the phonetics of voicing may ignore this section.

4.1. The naturalness of voicing Westbury and Keating (1986) look closely at voicing in stop or plosive consonants, making a number of important generalizations regarding the phonetic naturalness of glottal states. Hayes and Stivers note that, in the sequence nasal-obstruent, voiced obstruents are preferred; this is especially true of clusters involving velars (2000:11-18). Although not treated in the present work, this is an area that clearly warrants more research, both in Negerhollands and in general.

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All other things being equal and assuming an underlying voiced-voiceless distinction, they note that this contrast is most likely to be maintained in initial position. Neutralization is likely in both intervocalic and final positions, although the outcome of this process is likely to differ in each environment. In the former, neutralization favors the continuation of voicing between two inherently voiced segments (e.g. vowels); in the latter, neutralization favors devoicing. Distinction is also made between different places and lengths of occlusion. Posterior occlusives (e.g. velar stops) and longer occlusions (e.g. geminates) are more likely to inhibit voicing; at the same time, anterior - especially labial - and shorter occlusions are more likely to promote voicing, as these provide less impedance to the continued and/or anticipatory activation of vocal cords. The articulatory nature of fricatives implies a different phonetic naturalness compared to that of plosives. Ruhlen (1976) observes that voicing is less common in fricatives, noting that there is more than twice the probability of voicing being absent on fricatives than on stops. He accounts for this based on the articulatory requirements for fricative voicing, specifically the precision required of articulators in order for the gestural profile of fricatives to obtain. Essentially, a good fricative is a poor candidate for voicing, except in conditions where the vocal cords are already prepared for voicing, such as intervocalic positions (cf. also Ohala 1983). Of course, the above observations concern only what is phonetically natural, that is to say configurations that are most likely to obtain in environments where no specific control is exerted on the glottis. Obstruents in any position may be produced with or without voicing, contrary to phonetic naturalness, this by the activation of specific muscle groups in order to counteract the above described tendencies (Hirose 1997, Russell Webb 2004). This activation comes at a cost however, specifically increased gestural effort.

4.2. Markedness in E-NGH and L-NGH In section 3, observations regarding differences and similarities between are E-NGH and LNGH obstruent voicing are made. One commonality between the two data sets is final devoicing; the few apparent exceptions to this can be accounted for by viewing the larger phonotactic context. More numerous are the divergences between the two grammars. With the exception of final devoicing, E-NGH rules involve only restrictions on the type of segment that may be voiced or voiceless, i.e. place and manner, whereas L-NGH rules involve both type restrictions and positional restrictions. The patterns described above may be construed as markedness, where output patterns following natural tendencies are considered less marked than are those which are contrary to them. From this perspective, E-NGH rules derive from the avoidance of more marked forms; given the observations relative to the naturalness of voicing according to both position (word-final voicelessness) and segment type (labial voicing and fricative voicelessness), it would seem that E-NGH has a stronger preference for avoiding marked structures than do either L-NGH or the primary lexifier, Dutch. While some L-NGH rules reflect markedness considerations (e.g. fricative voicelessness), others clearly do not (e.g. coronal plosive distribution and intervocalic voice restriction). It follows from this that - at least with regard to obstruent voicing - initial creolization in Negerhollands involved a systematic reduction in marked structures, i.e. the avoidance of output forms that were

Toward a phonology of obstruent voicing in Negerhollands

51

phonetically less natural. Such a strong statement cannot be made with regard to L-NGH, which shows patterns deriving from both markedness avoidance and structural preservation or faithfulness. A secondary goal of the present work is the phonological analysis of the above considerations. This analysis construes phonological markedness as increased gestural effort, i.e. the positive expenditure of energy for the purpose of attaining a specific configuration. With regard to voicing, this involves the activation of muscle groups in order to counteract an otherwise phonetically natural outcome, e.g. to promote final voicing. In order to provide a phonetically grounded phonology, attention must be first paid to markedness qua effort categorization according to the type of segment (fricative vs. occlusive, long vs. short) and to phonotactic environments (initial, intervocalic, final). These are conceived of as formal categorizations and refer to more and less gestural effort; both considerations may be general or context specific. (15) Effort categorizations (< = less marked/less effortful; Τ = voiceless obstruent, D = voiced obstruent, C = any obstruent V = vowel) a. Τ < D if C [+ cont]: a voiceless fricative is less effortful than a voiced fricative b. Τ [back] < D [front] and D [front] < i y [back]: a voiceless back obstruent is less effortful than a voiced front obstruent; a voiced front obstruent is less effortful than a voiced back obstruent c. T1 < D]: a word final voiceless obstruent is less effortful than a voiced obstruent d. VDV < VTV if C [- cont]: a short voiced, intervocalic stop is less effortful than a short voiceless stop e. VTTV < VDDV if C [- cont]: a long voiceless, intervocalic stop is less effortful than a long voiced stop It should be noted that these statements are not phonetic but phonological, as they reflect categorized oppositions within the context of a productive system. Following from Hayes (1996), these statements are inductively grounded, i.e. they reflect learned patterns of phonetic goodness. The phonological analyses contained in the following sections employ phonetically grounded constraints, i.e. violable, universal imperatives based upon learned patterns of phonetic goodness. Readers unfamiliar with the theories discussed herein are referred to Hayes (1996) and Kirchner (1998) for more complete discussion of these and of the justification for phonetically-driven phonology.

4.3. E-NGH and gestural effort Traditional phonological models imply input or underlying representations to which an output form may or may not correspond, in part or in whole, and upon which markedness acts. Determination of a specific input form is, in the case of E-NGH, problematic, as the selection of a particular Dutch form is ad hoc at best. The present analysis of E-NGH does not include specific input representation and purposefully omits faithfulness constraints. This approach is advocated in Kirchner (1997 and forthcoming) as a means of treating output having variable or uncertain input. It bears specific mention that the present analysis

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does not claim that no input - whether that of the lexifier or one unique to Negerhollands was available to speakers of E-NGH; rather, the approach taken here attempts to deduce an output while specifically avoiding the problematic selection of such input. The formal approach to markedness taken in this paper is adopted from Kirchner (1998). Here, markedness is formalized as LAZINESS, the minimization or reduction of articulatory force, understood as a positive biomechanical effort involving force as a measure of active displacement over time (Kirchner 1998:42, 51-52). A global markedness constraint is provided in (16). (16) Markedness as Laziness (Kirchner 1998:38, his 2-1) LAZY: Minimize articulatory effort LAZY further implies that, given a range of possible outputs, the system should select the least costly gesture and/or gestural configuration. This is captured in the binarization of effort minimization, as in (17). Here, η refers to an abstracted gestural effort which violates a scalar constraint promoting effort reduction or avoidance; a single scalar violation of effort results in the violation of LAZY η + 1, a double violation in the violation of LAZY η + 2 and so forth (cf. Kirchner 1998:200 for full discussion of binarized Laziness). (17) Binarized Laziness (Kirchner 1998:201, his 6-13) ... LAZY η + 1 »

LAZY η »

LAZY η -1... (where η = 'Do not expand effort > «')

From the categorizations of (15), LAZY may be targeted to voicing, penalizing positive activation of glottal muscles. Glottal-specific LAZY may also be binarized, so that a sound resulting in two greater efforts (e.g. a voiced dorsal in word-final position) is considered twice as marked as one transgressing only one effort boundary (e.g. a voiced dorsal in any other position). Assuming for the purposes of discussion that all categorizations are of equal articulatory cost or savings, each greater effort is given a score o f + 1 . Voice-specific LAZY and binarized LAZY are provided in (18). (18) Voice-specific LAZY a.

Targeted: LAZY(glot): Minimize articulatory effort/glottis 'Do not make active glottal gestures' b. Binarized: LAZY(glot) η + 1 » LAZY(glot) η » LAZY(glot)

η-I...

With regard to E-NGH, the phonology must account for three phenomena: word-final devoicing, a strong preference for labial voicing and fricative devoicing. Taken individually, each of the three rules are targeted by the same constraint, LAZY(glot) η + 1. These considerations capture the relative importance of markedness with regard to obstruent voicing in E-NGH, as seen in hoeso and dag, presented in Table 1. Note that, even without a specific input, the optimal candidate is selected by the constraint LAZY(glot) η + 1; word-final voiced candidates are eliminated, as are voiced fricative candidates.

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53

Table 1: E-NGH, fricative voicelessness and word-final devoicing LAZY(glot) η + 1 huzo huso dag »"dak

*! *!

The polar application of LAZY(glot) η + 1 in Table 1 belies both a systemic complexity and theoretical elegance. A system such as E-NGH presents the possibility of competing factors in the selection of the less effort inducing candidate under evaluation, as in the case of a word-final labial or a labial fricative in any position. Is it better to promote word-final devoicing, even if this implies added effort by virtue of a voiceless labial? Is it better to allow for a voiced labial fricative, even if this implies more effort, vis-ä-vis labial voicelessness? LAZY(glot) η + 1 can only eliminate sub-optimal candidate and does not distinguish between equally optimal ones. While this might appear problematic, I assert that this is of great benefit to phonological models and, more specifically, to our understanding of the phonology of E-NGH. Under this analysis, both are equally good options, a deductive assertion reflected in the data. Examples of evaluative co-optimality (or equal optimality) are given Table 2. Table 2: E-NGH, co-optimality LAZY(glot) η + 1 vor for heb hep

? ? ? ?

At a later stage of phonological processing, alternations such as heb/hep are accounted for by morpheme concatenation. When combined with a postposition, as in the data of (8) and (9) discussed in § 3.1 the final labial obstruent has essentially become non-final and LAZY(glot) is satisfied. At the same time, voor/for exemplifies a case of variation.

4.4. L-NGH and input faithfulness Phonological analysis of L-NGH must predict word-final devoicing (14a) and fricative devoicing (14d), as well as the maintenance of voicelessness in intervocalic environments. In contrast to the discussion of E-NGH, above, the inclusion of faithfulness constraints is both motivated and necessary: motivated, as by this time input and respective representations had undoubtedly stabilized; and necessary, as the structures of L-NGH reflect marked voicelessness (e.g. intervocalic /t/ in watu). Following Kirchner (1998), faithfulness is provided as feature preservation, as in (19).

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(19) Faithfulness as Preservation (Kirchner 1998:74, his 3-7) PRES(erve) (F Input/Output): For all α e {+, - } for each a F specification in the input there is exactly one corresponding a F specification in the output, and for each a F specification in the output there is exactly one a F specification in the input. Parallel to LAZY(glot), PRES maybe targeted to input glottal specification, as in (20): (20) Voice Preservation PRES(voice): For all voice specification α in the input there is a corresponding voice specification α in the output, and for each voice specification α in the output there is a voice specification α in the input. An absolute application of PRES(voice) does very little to advance our understanding of voice patterns in languages such as Negerhollands, however. Beckman (1998) and Steriade (2001) note that languages tend to preserve input in certain positions, namely in syllabic onset or pre-vocalic positions. This is largely attributed to perceptual needs on the part of the listener, specifically a relative lack of contextual and/or lexical information that might facilitate repair of a defective acoustic signal. Preservation may be further focused to these environments, as in (21). (21) Voice Preservation by position PRES(voice/onset): For all voice specification α in the input, in syllable onsets, there is a corresponding voice specification α in the output; for each voice specification α in the output, in syllable onsets, there is a voice specification α in the input This constraint does well to account for Auslautsverhärtung and inhibits intervocalic voicing of fricatives and labial plosives, the two obstruent types of concern here. Interaction of PRES(voice/onset) and LAZY(glot) η + 1 in strict dominance provides adequate treatment of the L-NGH data that are in question and generates optimal candidates with regard to word-final devoicing. The reader will note that this approach assumes that all plosives are present in the underlying form; while there are no position-specific minimal pairs for /d1 and IM, the selection of one versus the other as an input segmental representation is highly untenable, as these are in complementary distribution in all L-NGH sources. A preliminary assumption is made that both are input forms. Table 3 shows the interaction of PRES and LAZY in L-NGH, focusing on fekete, watu, lipu and abo. In opposition to E-NGH, L-NGH must make recourse to faithfulness constraints and to the presence of an input form. While LAZY(glot) is indeed active in L-NGH, its effect is limited to restrictions placed on fricative voicelessness and to the promotion of word-final devoicing.

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Table 3: L-NGH data PRES(voice/onset) cir

/fekete/ fekete fegete /watu/ watu wadu /lipu/ lipu libu /abo/ apo abo

LAZY(glot) n + 1

*! *

*! *

*! *!

*

5. Discussion and conclusion

The primary goal of the present work was the description of Negerhollands obstruent voicing at two periods of time, also pointing out positional and distributional restrictions heretofore unnoted and unaccounted for. Contrasting early and later data supports the hypothesis that the phonology of voicing in Negerhollands underwent important changes after initial creolization. This evolution specifically affected fricatives (increasing preference for voicelessness) and certain classes of plosives (labial voicing). Taking into account the phonetic naturalness of voicing, according to both position and type of segment, distinction between the relative prominence of markedness in the phonologies of EN G H and L-NGH is made. During earlier stages of the language - those temporally closest to initial creolization - markedness played a relatively greater role in shaping output. With regard to voicing, respect of phonetic naturalness qua phonological markedness is quite strong; the few apparent violations are analyzed as cases of competing markedness considerations or co-optimality. In contrast, L-NGH phonology evidences many of the same voicing asymmetries as do all languages, in which phonetically natural tendencies may be overruled by other grammatical considerations (e.g. faithfulness to lexical representations). The decreased role of markedness in L-NGH may be considered the reflection of an increased role of faithfulness or input-output correspondence at that stage of the language's evolution, when representations had stabilized. A secondary goal was the formulation of a functionally oriented, phonological analysis of voicing in both E-NGH and L-NGH. Within the proposed analyses, the role of markedness is seen in the relative ranking of glottal specific LAZY(glot) with regard to faithfulness or PRESERVATION. In E-NGH, output can be deduced without recourse to faithfulness; the reverse is true in L-NGH, where faithfulness must be targeted to position (PRES(voice/onset)) in order to arrive at the attested output. It should be stressed that

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neither markedness nor faithfulness - nor the interaction of these within phonological grammars, indeed - are teleological, but reflect the tug-of-war between articulation and perception in phonology, a quasi-Aristotelian parallel to that between phonetic economy and salience (Lindblom 1990 and 1983; Boersma 1998). This competition between goodnesses, whether systemic (phonological) or biomechanical (phonetic) is hardly unique to Creoles; it might be hypothesized, however, that the relative importance of markedness is a characteristic of early Creole phonologies. This observation points to issues of interest in future phonological work looking at Creole languages, specifically the role of markedness early in the language's evolution and the type or substance of faithfulness at later stages. These issues clearly deserve greater attention within the creolist and phonological communities.

References

Beckman, Jill (1998): Positional faithfulness. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Massachusetts. Boersma, Paul (1998): Functional phonology: Formalizing the interactions between articulatory and perceptual drives. The Hague: LOT. de Josselin de Jong, Jan Petrus Benjamin (1926): Jlet huidige Negerhollandsch. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen. Hayes, Bruce and Tanya Stivers (2000); Postnasal voicing. Ms. UCLA. Hayes, Bruce (1996): Phonetically driven phonology: the role of Optimality Theory and inductive grounding. Ms. UCLA (also ROA 158-1196). Hesseling, Derk Christiaan (1905): Het Negerhollands der Deense Antillen. Leiden: Sijthoff. Hirose, Hajime (1997): Investigating the physiology of Laryngeal structures - In: William Hardcastle and John Laver (eds.): The handbook of phonetic sciences, 116-135. London: Blackwell. Kirchner, Robert (1997): Contrastiveness and faithfulness. - In: Phonology 14, 83-111. - (1998): An effort-based approach to consonant lenition. Ph.D. dissertation. UCLA. - (forthcoming): Phonological contrast and articulatory effort. Ms. University of Alberta. Lindblom, Bjorn (1983): The economy of speech gestures. - In: Peter F. MacNeilage (ed.): The production of speech, 217-245. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. - (1990): Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory. - In: William J. Hardcastle and Alain Marchal (eds): Speech production and speech modeling, 403-439. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Ohala, John J. (1983): The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints. - In: Peter MacNeilage (ed.): The production of speech, 189-216. New York: Springer Verlag. Ruhlen, Merritt (1976): A guide to the languages of the world. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Russell Webb, Eric (2004): Voice alternation as passive lenition: the case of Irl in French. - In: Linguistikonline 18 (1), 127-148. Sabino, Robin (1990): Towards a phonology of Negerhollands: an analysis ofphonological variation. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. - (1994): They just fade away: Language death and the loss of phonological variation. - In: Language in Society 23(4), 495-526. Stein, Peter (1985): Die Anfänge der Verschriftung einer Kreolsprache: das Negerhollands im 18. Jahrhundert. - In: Per Sture Ureland (ed.): Entstehung von Sprachen und Völkern: glotto- und ethnogenetische Aspekte europäischer Sprache, 437-457. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Toward a phonology of obstruent voicing in Negerhollands

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Steriade, Donca (2001): The Phonology ofperceptibility effects: the P-map and its consequences for constraint organization. Ms. UCLA. Stolz, Thomas (1987): Kreolistik und Germanistik: Niederländisch-basierte Sprachformen in Übersee. - I n : Linguistische Berichte 110, 283-318. Stolz, Thomas and Peter Stein (1986): Language and history in the former Danish Antilles: Nonlinguistic evidence for a diachronic description of the Negro-Dutch language. - In: Publikaties van het Instutuut voor Algemene Taalwetenschap 51, 103-122. van der Wal, Marijke (1992). Geschiedenis van het Nederlands. Utrecht: Spectrum, van Rossem, Cefas and Hein van der Voort (1996): Die Creol Taal: 250 years of Negerhollands texts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Westbury, John R. and Patricia Keating (1986): On the naturalness of stop consonant voicing. - In: Journal of Linguistics 22, 145-166.

Eric Russell Webb, Assistant Professor, French Linguistics, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA, Email: [email protected]

Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

1. Introduction

The ultimate aim of this paper is to explain why a number of English-lexifier Caribbean Creoles exhibit different types of vowel system. We will explain the observed typology in terms of sociohistorical events relating to the (lack of) control by the colonial authorities of the slave populations, and to the subsequent influence of the types of English spoken by identifiable migrant groups. In this paper three kinds of vowel system are distinguished which make their appearance in the English-based Creoles of the Atlantic area. We claim that the three types are related in the following hierarchical fashion. Table 1: Relationships among creole vowel systems Early Modern English vowel systems (17lh century) A. Surinam-type vowel systems

B. Jamaican-type vowel systems Bl. Bajan-type mid vowels

B2. Jamaican-type mid vowels

The first type, the so-called Surinam-type (Smith 1999), does not preserve the long vowels of English, realizing these instead as short vowels. In addition diphthongs are normally monophthongized preconsonantally, thus appearing only in open final syllables. In the second type, the so-called Jamaican-type, both short and long vowels, as well as diphthongs appear, distributed more or less as in English. The former type appears in the Surinam and West African creole languages, the latter type appears in Jamaican Creole, Bajan, Guyanese Creole and Gullah among others. The second focus of this article will be to try and explain why some of the Jamaican-type systems exhibit lowering diphthongs1 for English long mid vowels (Jamaican-type mid vowels), while others do not (Bajan-type mid vowels). In summary: (1)

Why do some English-lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic area preserve the Early Modern English vowel length contrasts and others not?

(2)

Why do a number of Creoles, like Jamaican and Kittitian, have lowering diphthongs /ie, ia/ and /uo, ua/ where most present forms of Standard English have raising diphthongs - /ei/ and /ou/, or to a lesser extent, monophthongs /e:, oi/?

1

By lowering diphthongs we mean diphthongs exhibiting lowering of vowel height. These are to be distinguished from falling diphthongs which exhibit an intensity drop.

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Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

We have divided the rest of the paper into five sections. Section 2 describes the influence of koineization on the varieties of English spoken in the transatlantic English colonies. Section 3 will focus on the description of the different vowel-systems of the Atlantic English-based Creoles, and our explanation for the difference between Surinam-type and Jamaican-type vowel-systems. Section 4 will address our account of the source of non-standard lowering diphthongs in Jamaican and Kittitian. We examine the possible influence of the transported Monmouth Rebels as an explanation for the presence of this apparent South-Western English dialect phenomenon in the West Indies. Section 5 discusses further some necessary sociohistorical pre-conditions. Finally, in Section 6 we present our conclusions.

2. The phonological basis of the English-lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic area

In previous work on the phonology of the Surinamese English-based Creoles, the first author has claimed (Smith 1987) that it is not necessary to appeal to any other dialectal source than the various social varieties of the Early Modern English of the London area. The rationale behind this claim was that in the 17th and 18th century a colonial English koine had developed in the various American colonies from which all the phonological dialectal peculiarities pertaining to non-London dialects had been removed. This happened despite the fact that the majority of colonists from the British Isles had as their first tongue some non-standard dialect of English, or Scots. Many readers of this article, only familiar with the various accents of Standard English as spoken in the U.S.A, the British Isles, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa will not perhaps realize the extreme variety of the Germanic dialects spoken in the British Isles. To make this clearer we will give an example of the pronunciation of the word soon in a number of dialects. This word had in Middle English a long vowel /o:/ - /so:n/. The eight dialects illustrated exhibit a great variety of vowels in this word - /is, iu, ui, u:, i, 0, ε/ - of which only one resembles a "standard" Early Modern English pronunciation. Table 2: The pronunciation of soon in eight dialects (LAS 3 = Mather and Speitel 1986) Place

Byers Dentdale Windhill Hilton Meikle Wartle Green Co. Yorkshire Yorkshire Dorset Aberdeenshire Durham

Fair Isle Pirnmill Canonbie Orkney Ayrshire Dumfriessh.

Source Orton 1933

Hedevind Wright 1967 1892

Widen LAS 3 1986 1949

LAS 3 1986

LAS 3 1986

LAS 3 1986

Form

siun

zu:n

J0n

Jen

s0n

sian

sum

sin

The first three dialects are taken from Northern England, and illustrate various non-standard realizations of the above-mentioned Middle English vowel. In the Northern English dialects of Northumberland and Durham this vowel is generally unrounded to a diphthong like /ra/. The next two columns illustrate two dialect treatments of this vowel found in Yorkshire. One of these represents a Northern English dialect /iu/, the other a Midland English dialect

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

61

/ui/. The Dorset dialect form in the fourth column exhibits the same treatment of the vowel as in forms of standard English, but the initial /s/ appears in a voiced/lax form /z/, formerly typical of South-Western English dialects (and earlier of Southern English dialects in general). The next four dialects are all forms of Scots (the native Germanic language of Scotland), representing the major subdivisions, respectively Northern Scots, Insular Scots, Central Scots, and Southern Scots. Middle Scots had a front rounded vowel /φ/ in such words, and this has became unrounded and/or raised in most local dialects. It is clear that if a non-Scots speaker had addressed the question "When are you coming?" to a speaker of such a dialect, and had been given the single word reply "Soon", he would have not have understood a response like /sin/ or /J0n/, or even been able to identify which language was being employed. The fact that the first language of most "English"-speaking immigrants to the Americas before 1900 was so deviant from the various standard Englishes now spoken, is, as we have said, not always appreciated. This is largely because koineization has been such a successful process. Only in very remote places in the former colonies have regional dialectal phonological markers of British origin survived. One example is rural Newfoundland, where, for example, phonological features of South-Western dialects can be found, including the above-mentioned, and recessive, voicing/laxing of initial fricatives. In most of the English-speaking areas of the world the amount of phonological variation is fairly limited if considered from the perspective of the very large phonological differences among British traditional dialects of "English". So, in 17th century Western Pennsylvania, with its numerous Scotch-Irish immigrants, probably the majority of "English"-speakers spoke Scots, as their stay-behind cousins in northern and eastern Northern Ireland did until recently. However the social pressures from speakers of other forms of English, as well as from L2-learners of English, ensured that what finally emerged was basically characterizable in historical terms as an accent of the standard Early Modern English of the South-East of England. Thus, even a favourable concentration of speakers of similar dialects did not lead to the survival of (Central) Scots as a language in Western Pennsylvania. However, what did survive from the dialects spoken by immigrants were largely those lexical items representing aspects of rural culture for which the urban standard English of the London area had little use, and which therefore had largely been lost. As most early immigrants both came from and went to a rural or semi-rural economy these words were required, and the local majority dialect of English, whichever that was, would therefore be called upon to provide them. But even dialect words which made it into the 20th/21stcentury accents of standard forms of American English often receive a (partial) standard pronunciation. So, Scots /dru0/ 'drought, dryness', where /Θ/ is a by-form of Scots fxt/, is pronounced as /draufi/ in Western Pennsylvania.

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Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

3. Creole vowel systems

English-lexifier Creole vowel systems in the Atlantic area can be divided into two main types, depending on whether the distinction between short and long vowels is maintained. In the first type, which Smith has referred to as Surinam-type systems, the Early Modern English vowel-length distinctions are lost, and diphthongs followed by consonants are reduced to monomoraic monophthongs. In the second type, Jamaican-type systems, the vowel-length distinctions are in general preserved, as is the diphthongal nature of Early Modern English diphthongs. Table 3: Examples of the neutralization of vowel length in Sranan (Surinam-type) Gloss

Early Modern English

Jamaican Creole (Cassidy and LePage 1980)

Sranan (Smith 1987)

meet

mi:t

miit

miti

big

big

big

bigi

call

krcl

kaal

kari

god

god

gad

gado

fight

fait

fait

feti

buy

bai(~bai)

bai

baj

fly

flai(~flai)

flai

frej

The following Creoles have Surinam-type vowel systems: (3)

Surinam-type vowel systems a. Surinam: Sranan, Saramaccan (+ Matawai), Ndyuka (+ Aluku, Paramaccan, Kwinti) b. Jamaica: (Eastern) Maroon Creole2 c. West Africa: Krio, Pichin (Bioko), Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroonian, Pidgin, (Ghanaian Pidgin)

(4)

Jamaican-type vowel systems a. Western Caribbean: Jamaican, Providencia (+ San Andres), Miskito Coast, Belizean b. Northern Leewards: Kittitian (+ Nevis), Antiguan, Monserrat c. Central Leewards: Bajan d Southern: Guyanese e. Northern: Gullah, Afro-Seminole, Bahamian

2

Better known as the Maroon Spirit Language (MSL) from the writings of Bilby (1983, 1992).

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

63

A glance at a map of the Caribbean makes clear that the distribution of these two types of system has nothing to do with geography. The Surinam-type systems are located in three different locations, in the bottom-right corner of the map, in Surinam, in the top-left area of the map, in Eastern Jamaica, and of course way off the map to the right, in West Africa. There is no areal cohesion here. And all that one can say about the Jamaica-type systems is that they are located in between the Surinam-type systems. For students of dialectology this will convey a significant message. A feature that occurs in various places on the margins of a linguistic area (in this case the English-lexifier Creole area) is an archaic feature. Map 1: The Caribbean creole languages Jamaicj

• Samana ; • St.T| Dominican $ Republic Puerto Rico St Croix Β

Anguilla Barbuda St Kitts Ki

Nevis Garifuna

I

Antigua

Montserrat § | GGuadeloupe U£

I

Miskito

Dominica

&

& Miskito Coast H Creole

1 :

Providencia s Andres

j c i a ιJ i St. Lucia

a

Aruba

Limon Bocas

Barbados

St. Vincent I

Miskito Coast I Creole

11

Martinique

I Curagao

j Grenada GCiiria

Ι Tobago

Palenque H

I

ΓTrinidad Trir

©Callas ! Guyanese Skepl 0 . H Berbice D.

Sranan

ΚΛ

•

I

η:ι

Γ

Creole language

I

Maroon group

Features that only appear in widely-dispersed marginal portions of some linguistic area are interpreted by dialectologists as recessive features that at a previous stage covered a larger single area. The conclusion would then be that the possession of a Surinam-type vowel system is a recessive feature, one that was more widely distributed at an earlier period.

3.1. Historical support for loss of vowel-length contrasts as an archaism? In this section we will address the question of why a change should have taken place in some systems, the Jamaican-type vowel systems, but not in others, the Suriname-type systems. Given that the distribution of Surinam-type systems does look like an archaic feature

64

Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

considered in dialectological terms, we will look for a historical explanation to explain this phenomenon. The most likely explanation is that English linguistic influence was removed early on in the case of all the Surinam-type vowel systems as Smith (1999) suggests, but remained in the case of the Jamaican-type systems. Firstly, we will consider the Surinam-type systems.

3.2. Languages with Surinam-type vowel systems Surinam Creoles Surinam had been colonized successfully by the English for the first time in 1651, under the then Governor of Barbados, Francis, Lord Willoughby. There had been previous attempts at colonization (Arends 2002), but there is no clear evidence that these had been anything but transitory failures. The colonists did not come from England directly, but from the alreadyestablished colonies of Barbados (settled in 1625), and to a lesser extent from St. Kitts (settled in 1624), Nevis (settled in 1627), and Montserrat (settled in 1633). Due to international political events the English surrendered the colony by the Treaty of Breda to the Dutch in 1667, although the change of power only became effective in 1668. There is some debate about the number of Englishmen remaining after the handover, but to judge by the figures we have for the English who left, this number cannot have been very large after 1675 (see Smith 2001: 53-55). We may conclude that the Surinam Creoles were deprived of any significant influence from Standard English after about 1675. The Maroon Spirit Language In the case of the Maroon Spirit Language, the language with the second Surinam-type vowel system, which Colonel Harris of the Eastern Maroons confirms was the ordinary creole language used by the Eastern Maroons of Jamaica in the early years of the 20th century (Harris 1994), we know that the British concluded a treaty with the Jamaican Maroons in 1739. We cannot tell precisely how old the ethnic group comprising the Eastern Jamaican Maroons is. We know that there were maroons under Spanish rule, before the English took over in 1655, but to what degree these form a continuity with the maroons who escaped under English, and later British control is not clear (Bilby 1994). What is clear is that the Jamaican Maroons removed themselves at an early period from the direct influence of the English. Krio and its offspring Krio, the third language with a Surinam-type vowel system, seems to basically be the parent of all other West African "pidgins"3 (Huber 1999). There is a controversy, however, as to which of four groups contributed most to the creation of Krio. We will deal with this controversy here, mainly relying for our data on Huber (1999):

3

Ghanaian Pidgin English, investigated by Huber (1999), appears to have undergone greater influence from Standard English in respect of its vowel system.

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

(5)

65

a. the original settlers of 1787, including 328 Black Poor, who came from England, and were of disparate origins. In 1791 there were only 58 Black original settlers left inside the colony. By 1811 they had disappeared altogether as a recognisable group. b. a group of slaves who had fought on the British side in the American War of Independence and were freed and taken to Nova Scotia in 1783. They were transferred to Sierra Leone in 1792. Of the third whose antecedents in America are traceable, Huber finds two-thirds were from Virginia, and one-third from the Carolinas. In 1811 they numbered 982, a reduction on their original number.. c. the Trelawny Maroons from Jamaica (a town of the Western Maroons of Jamaica4), who had been shipped to Nova Scotia in 1796 after a revolt. In 1800 this group were also shipped to Sierra Leone. By 1811 the 525 disembarkees of 1800 had increased to 807, largely because of the youthful nature of the population. This represents a very large increase, and is an important factor in the debate on the basis of Krio. d 60,000-odd Liberated Africans, captured between 1808 and 1840 from slave-ships intercepted by the British Navy along the West African coast. In the initial period they were either enlisted in the army, or apprenticed to Nova Scotians, Maroons, or Europeans.

We can probably ignore groups a) and d), as being respectively too small, and too late, to have had any fundamental influence on the structure of the language. The Liberated Africans, disproportionately Yoruba and Igbo-speaking, were however responsible for the large Yoruba component in the Krio lexicon. Krio and Afro-American Vernacular English The debate concerning the form of earlier Afro-American Vernacular English (a.k.a. Black English) is of relevance here, because of the possibility that Krio owes something to the liberated slaves from Nova Scotia (group b. above). There are still black remnant populations in Nova Scotia, who speak non-standard forms of English. Their English does not show any systematic tendency to shorten English long vowels, however. (6)

"Because current speakers and their forebears have evolved in enclave situations since the original settlement, their speech reflects quite faithfully the state of the English language at the time their ancestors were acquiring it, and has developed independently of modern African American Vernacular English (AAVE)." (Poplack with Tagliamonte 1995-1997)

For further evidence concerning earlier stages of AAVE, we can also refer to the various types of Liberian English spoken by remigrant freed slaves from the southern U.S.A. There are at least three varieties that have been described to some extent:

4

The other group of Western Maroons, the Accompong Maroons remain in Jamaica to this day, but, now at least, employ only Jamaican Creole.

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Nerval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

(7)

a. Liberian Settler English spoken around Monrovia, Liberia by 60,000 descendants of freed American slaves who arrived, starting in 1787, from Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina (Singler 1995). b. Cape Palmas English spoken near the Cape of the same name by the descendants of freed American slaves from Maryland. (Hancock and Kobbah 1975) c. Sinoe Settler English spoken in Sinoe County, Liberia by the descendants of freed American slaves from the Southern States. The majority came from Georgia and Mississippi (Singler 1994).

These three groups represent a cross-section of the freed slaves who came to Liberia. None of them speaks a form of speech with a Surinam-type vowel system like Krio. The first group, especially, would seem to share their geographical background with the Nova Scotians in Sierra Leone. The fact that the Nova Scotia freedmen had a similar background suggests that if Krio had been largely their creation it should have been similar to Liberian English, which it is not. And what is more, the time of arrival of the freedmen in Sierra Leone, and those in Liberia, is basically the same. To conclude, since neither Liberian English nor Nova Scotia Black English possesses a Surinam-type vowel system, it is exceedingly unlikely that anything like Krio was brought from by Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Krio and MSL In other publications Smith (e.g. 1984, 1987) has drawn attention to the similarities between Krio and MSL (and the Surinam Creoles, cf. also Bilby 1983). This supports a Maroon connection for Krio. The Western Maroons in Jamaica were as such as independent of British control as their Eastern counterparts were. The linguistic evidence of Krio suggests a Creole with a Surinam-type vowel system for the Western Maroons too. Table 4: Similarities across Creoles English

Jamaican

Krio

MSL

Sranan

climb

klaim

klem

krem

kren

time

taim

tem

tem

ten

white

wait

wet

wete

weti

fight

fait

fet

fete

feti

night

nait

net

net

neti

Another extremely important piece of evidence pointing in the same direction is that from the pitch-accent systems of various English-lexifier Creoles (Devonish 2001). A nucleus of common words show shifted accent in Guyanese and Krio, indicating an irrefutable relationship between these two languages. It seems probable then, on the basis of this positive and negative evidence, that Krio is basically derived from - or basically represents - the Western Jamaican Maroon language as spoken by the Trelawny Maroons.

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

67

3.3. Jamaican-type vowel systems The Jamaican-type systems can themselves be divided into two groups as referred to above. Those with lowering diphthongs as in Jamaican corresponding to Early Modern English mid tense vowels, and those with either monophthongs, or raising diphthongs. We refer to these two types as Jamaican-type mid vowels, and Bajan-type mid vowels. Table 5: Incidence of Jamaican-type and Bajan-type mid vowels in Creoles Type

Front mid vowel

Back mid vowel

Incidence in Creoles

Jamaican-type ie ~ ia ~ ea mid vowels

uo ~ ua ~ oa

Jamaican, Kittitian, Antiguan, Providencia Creole, Miskito Coast Creole, etc.5

Bajan-type mid vowels

ο: ~ ou

Bajan, Guyanese, Belizean, Kittitian mesolect, Bahamian, Gullah, etc.

e: ~ ei

The Bajan-type mid-vowels require no explanation, as they correspond entirely to what is found in various standard forms of English. How the Jamaican-type mid vowels are to be explained will form the object of the rest of this article.

4. Where do these non-standard lowering diphthongs come from?

Let us stop and take a look at where we have got to. We have encountered two types of vowel system. These seem to differ in terms of their exposure to the influence of English. Creole languages which had English influence removed fairly early on in their history seem to have retained certain African features in their vowel phonology. One of these is the basic lack of a lexical distinction between long and short vowels in English lexical items. So for instance the two major 17th century sources of African slaves were the West African Slave Coast, and the Central African Congo-Angola region. Neither region has languages with a lexical distinction between long and short vowels (excepting ideophones). Creole languages with a longer history of exposure to English have presumably acquired the basic distinction between long and short vowels in English-derived words. Certain of these Creoles display in addition non-standard lowering diphthongs corresponding to standard mid tense vowels/diphthongs. There does not seem to be any room for an explanation which proceeds from the normal ingredients of the creolization recipe. Why should a non-standard pronunciation take root in the Caribbean? The only conceivable reason would be a major input from a particular dialect 5

Tobagonian assumes an intervening position, with /e:/ for the front mid vowel, but /uo/ for the back one.

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Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

area, and an input that took place under unusual social conditions. Why unusual? Note that such dialect influence outside the original English/Scots-speaking homeland is only evidenced in very remote communities, as we have illustrated above. In general the phonological force of the colonial koine is all-powerful. And so far, the explanations that have been put forward for English dialectal influence in Creoles are weak, and reminiscent of the cafeteria methodology which gave substrate explanations their bad name. We believe we have indeed identified such a set of unusual social conditions which could account for the Jamaica-type mid vowels. We will deal with this in the following section.

4.1. The Monmouth Rebellion In 1685, following an unsuccessful uprising, which became known as the Monmouth Rebellion, a large number of rebel Englishmen, largely hailing from the West Country, were transported to the West Indies in punishment. The possible consequences of this movement of population on certain Creole languages spoken in the West Indies are what will concern us in the following sections. For our basic understanding of the sequence of historical events, we are indebted to Chevenix Trench (1969) in particular. The Monmouth Rebellion took place in the context of the 'religious wars' between Protestants and Roman Catholics in England between 1685 and 1749. King Charles II was until his death in 1685 both the King of England and the King of Scotland.6 He was a Roman Catholic. The English Parliament, by means of various Exclusion Bills, continually tried to exclude his Roman Catholic brother and heir, James, Duke of York, from succeeding to the throne. The Parliament preferred James' daughter, the Protestant Mary Stuart, who was married to the Dutch William of Orange. However, each time an Exclusion Bill was introduced, Charles II dissolved Parliament before it could be passed. When Charles II died in February 1685, his successor was thus his Catholic brother James II. Charles II also had an illegitimate son, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth. Charles never officially recognized James Scott as his son, although he did so indirectly by ennobling him. James was born in 1649 and at the early age of 13, his father created him Duke of Monmouth. In 1677, he fought as a volunteer with the French against the Dutch, and a year later he fought on the side of the Dutch. James Scott became Captain General of the Dutch king's land forces. In 1679, he suppressed a revolt in the Netherlands against King William. After his victory, he became popular with the English Parliament. Some members of parliament preferred him as heir to the throne. After a failed conspiracy against Charles II and his brother James (the future James II), in which he had planned to assassinate both his father and his uncle, the Duke of Monmouth fled to his cousin Mary Stuart in the Dutch Netherlands in 1684. After the death of Charles II, and James' succession as King, the Duke could no longer stay in Holland, because Mary Stuart could not give shelter openly to an exile from the country her father now ruled. Monmouth moved to the Spanish Netherlands. In the meantime, Whig exiles (liberals) and other conspirators tried to convince James Scott of the need for a Protestant Rebellion to replace the Catholic King James II on the throne.

6

England and Scotland were separate countries until 1707.

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

69

On May 30th 1685 Monmouth sailed to England, accompanied by 82 followers, and landing in Dorset on June 11th. James Scott apparently had the idea that all England would support him in a Protestant Rising. The followers who had joined Monmouth in Holland were non-conformists and some republicans. A proclamation distributed when Monmouth set foot in England contained the following essentials: (8)

"....first, that no Protestant of what persuasion so ever, shall be molested or troubled for the exercise of his Religion; secondly, that Parliament should be chosen annually; and thirdly, that though the Duke had incontrovertible proofs of his legitimacy, he would not at once claim the throne, but would leave a freely elected Parliament to settle the future government of England." (MacDonald Wigfield 1980: 36)

The Rebellion was not only part of the continuing Protestant-Roman Catholic conflict in the British Isles, but was also concerned with liberty of conscience. Most of Monmouth's followers were passionate nonconformist Protestants, i.e. they did not belong to the Anglican state church, and therefore had suffered discrimination because of their religion. The people who joined Monmouth in England came from the West Country, especially East Devon, West Dorset, and Somerset. Most of these rebels were farmers or craftsmen. In every village new followers joined Monmouth, increasing his army steadily to several thousand. Monmouth failed however in his plan to win over the important city of Bristol, which was a vital part of his plan to gain further support. Map 2: The route of Monmouth's army

English Channel

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Norval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

By the end of June, James Scott had himself lost faith in the Rising - the promises of largescale support turned out to be not true. He wanted to retreat and return to the mainland of Europe, but he became convinced that he could not abandon his supporters. If he had fled to Europe however, his men could have surrendered and have received free pardons. For James II had granted a 'Four Days Act of Pardon' for every rebel who surrendered. The Rebellion lasted for 5 weeks and ended in the battle of Sedgemoor on July 6, where the rebels were defeated by the royal army. 400 rebels were killed in this battle. Conceivably, 1000 others were summarily put to death or hanged immediately afterwards. Estimates of the size of Monmouth's army vary between 3200 and 7000 men. Monmouth fled, but was captured two days after the battle at Sedgemoor. He was beheaded on Tower Hill in London on July the 15th, 1685.

4.2. The aftermath After the rebellion the notorious Judge Jeffries sentenced 1400 rebels to death, imprisonment, or slavery in the West Indies. These trials became known as the Bloody Assizes and took place in the autumn of 1685. Judge Jeffries travelled through the West Country (from Winchester via Dorchester, Exeter, Taunton, and Wells, before returning to London) to convict the rebels, who received very short shrift from him. When the Bloody Assizes had done their work, Judge Jeffries was appointed Lord Chancellor by King James II. According to MacDonald Wigfield (1980) the rebels were advised to plead guilty. They were told that if they did, they would not be hanged. The real reason was that the prosecution needed the rebels' own testimonies in order to convict them. Most of the rebels who pled guilty were eventually either executed (320) or transported to the West Indies. The Bloody Assizes were used to set an example for others who wanted to revolt against the King. The heads and limbs of rebels who were hanged, drawn and quartered were displayed in towns and villages throughout the rebels' home area, until only bones were left. The land and property of rebels was confiscated and sold for the Crown's benefit. Most rebels, however, went into hiding and only came out of their hiding places after a general pardon was finally granted in March 1686. 800 to 1000 rebels - the majority of those who had pleaded guilty - were condemned to slavery in the West Indies; they were to be sold for a period of at least 10 years as indentured servants. Unfortunately for them the general pardon of March 1686 came too late as they had already arrived in the West Indies by that time. For the present study, this last group of rebels is of special interest to us. These men were sent to the Caribbean in order to punish them more severely because of the adverse climate and circumstances. In addition there were small English communities in comparison with North America, so that they would not have any support networks. Judge Jeffries was instructed by the King to provide rebels to be sold for the benefit of the following men: - Sir Philip Howard, Governor of Jamaica, 200 rebels - Sir Richard White, 200 rebels. - Sir William Booth, a Barbados merchant, 100 rebels. - Sir James Kendall, later Governor of Barbados, 100 rebels - Sir Jerome Nepho, the Queen's secretary, 100 rebels.

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems -

71

Sir William Stapleton, Governor of the Leeward Islands, 100 rebels. Sir Christopher Musgrave, 100 rebels.

In addition the Queen was also awarded a number of rebels. This makes a total of about 900 rebels, who were transported to the West Indies in eight ships. The names of some 890 men are in the records, but it is not certain that this is a complete account. The exact number of rebels who were transported remains unclear. For table 5 we have based our figures on The Monmouth Rebels by MacDonald Wigfield (1985). According to his figures 416 rebels were transported to Barbados, 291 to Jamaica and 101 to the Leeward Islands; this makes a total of 808 rebels. Different figures can be found in The Complete book of Emigrants by Coldham (1987). Unfortunately, the destination of most rebels is not given, except for the rebels transported to Barbados. The following figures are given by Coldham: 384 rebels are transported to Barbados and the destination o f 4 8 4 rebels is unspecified; this gives a total of 868 rebels. We presume that of the 484 rebels with an unspecified destination, 100 were transported to the Leeward Islands (this number is mentioned in every other source we have consulted). This leaves 384 rebels who presumably ended up in Jamaica. Table 5: Number of vessels and rebels and their destinations (MacDonald Wigfield 1985) Vessel

Destination

Date of departure

Contractor I

Betty

Barbados

26/9/1685

J. Nepho

78

5

Happy Return

Barbados

25/9/1685

W. Booth (for J. Kendall)

92

5

John

Barbados

24/10/1685

W. Booth

88

14

Rebecca

Barbados

21/10/1685

J. Nepho

14

Jamaican Merchant

Barbados

The Queen

68

Constant Richard

Jamaica

9/12/1685 arrival 12/3/1686 31/10/1685

R. White (for Bridgeman)

68

25/10/1685

P. Howard

183

W. Stapleton

101

Jamaica

Port Royal Jamaica Merchant Indeavour

St Kitts/Nevis 20/10/1685

Rebels Contractor I

Rebels Deaths

C. Musgrave

77

C. Musgrave

20

Heywood

20

4

1

We will assume for our purposes here that the rebels were transported as follows: 400 to Barbados, 400 to Jamaica, and 100 to St. Kitts or Nevis. In what follows concerning the conditions the rebels encountered in the West Indies, we are indebted to the work of Mark Quintanilla (1993,1996).

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The transportees in the West Indies The merchants sold the rebels to planters when they arrived at their destination. Most rebels were weakened by the long trip, so sometimes the merchants had to fatten them up before they could be sold. The price of white servants was less than the price of slaves - the rebels represented a lease, whereas a slave was property. According to Quintanilla, these rebels arrived at a crucial time for the sugar production in the West Indies. There was a severe shortage of white servants in the West Indies. In a short period in the 1680s the production of sugar grew enormously, but the labour force did not keep pace with this growth. Another reason for this shortage of labour, was that white indentured servants had been being replaced by black slaves. This was because of the better labour conditions the white servants demanded and received (better housing and food, shorter contracts); therefore increasing the expenses of planters for these servants. However the supply of slaves was not sufficient to compensate for this. The Monmouth Rebels, in contrast, were political prisoners - in temporary servitude; and were therefore not in a position to make any demands. The position of the rebels on the plantations is unclear. It is known that the transportees were seen as possessions that could be sold like slaves, or left in wills. They were not allowed to marry. In January 1686 the Barbados Assembly adopted a law under which the rebels would serve: (9)

"This act fixed the term of their indenture to ten years and prohibited them from obtaining their freedom before the expiration of their term. It also made freeing, or assisting the escape of, the convicts an offence punishable by a £200 fine, a one-year sentence in the common jail, and the loss of public office. In addition, it made the escape or attempted escape of a rebel a crime punishable by thirty-nine lashes in the nearest market place, one hour in the pillory, and branding on the forehead with the letter F.T. (Fugitive Traitor)" (Quintanilla 1993:115).

According to Quintanilla this law did not prevent the rebels from trying to escape. Few succeeded in this however. In Barbados the rebels were important for the defence of the island. Every landowner had to provide one man for the colonial militia for every 20 acres of land. Due to the departure of small plantation owners (because of the large-scale nature of sugar production), and white servants, who had become more expensive to maintain than slaves, the numbers of militia had fallen below par. In 1689 Queen Mary Stuart and her husband William of Orange became the new rulers of England, following a bloodless revolution. They issued free pardons at the beginning of 1690 to the rebels in the West Indies. The plantation owners did not agree with this - they had counted on a 10 year's stay by the rebels. According to James Kendall (Governor of Barbados): (10) "This [the departure of the former rebels, NS/MvdV]would cause injury to planters who had 'taught them to be their boilers, distillers, and refiners, and neglected to teach any other as they would otherwise have done'." (Quintanilla 1993:120).

In March 1691 the Barbados Assembly reached a compromise, the rebels were to stay on the plantations for five years from the day of arrival (all had arrived early in 1686), and the

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73

plantation owners did not have to pay the customary dues for freeing them. Another condition was that the rebels could not return to England - they were forced to stay on the island. The Assembly stated that the island needed the rebels for the purposes of defence. In 1691 the rebels in Barbados became free men again. Unfortunately they were free men without any money, and with no legal possibility of returning to their homes. Some families had, however, collected money for the return of a rebel. After the rebels became free men, they could remain on the same plantation as a wageworker, but most of them went to the towns of Bridgetown and Speightown, where they worked in the shipping and warehouse industry. Some of them became clerks, tavern assistants and artisans. It was hard to find a job, because most of the rebels had no relevant skills apart form those of the sugar trade that they had learnt. It was also difficult for them to climb the social ladder. Land was increasingly expensive to buy, and they had to compete with freed blacks and mulattos for work and the possession of land. They were not allowed access to political office. Barbados, like other Caribbean English colonies, was a monoculture society, which depended primarily on sugar production. This did not provide many other opportunities for poor whites, the class the rebels belonged to (Quintanilla 1993). In the census of 1715, and in Barbadian wills, marriage and baptismal records, not more than 10 percent of the former Monmouth rebels are be to found. Some left for England or other colonies in search of better opportunities. Quintanilla has to admit that it is hard to find descendants of the Monmouth rebels in Barbados, because of the common last names of some of the rebels. There is another likely reason why it is hard to trace rebels - the rebels were not Anglicans - and therefore would not often appear in the official Anglican church registers. In Jamaica too the planters disagreed with the departure of the rebels the General Pardon by Queen Mary, although the pardons were issued a lot quicker than in Barbados. No restrictions were put on the former rebels, apart from the same financial ones that existed in Barbados - they were not provided with free transport back to England. With the exception of a 40-strong group round Monmouth's former doctor, who were granted a pardon in May 1690 and left in September, it is not thought that many rebels were able to afford the journey home. The freed Jamaican rebels had better opportunities than in Barbados. The colony was more attractive for white servants, because of the availability of land, the shorter contracts and the economic opportunities. Until the destructive earthquake in June 1692, Port Royal was a place where possibilities for economic prosperity existed. The wages were three times as high as in England and there was enough food and work for everyone. For most of the rebels these were good reasons to stay on the island. After the destruction of Port Royal, Kingston became the new commercial center of the colony. Most rebels had gone to Port Royal or Kingston when they were freed, where they lived a fairly simple life. 35 percent of the Monmouth rebels who arrived in Jamaica can be found in parish records (marriage, death, baptism) after they were given free pardons. As was the case in Barbados most rebels were not Anglicans; therefore it is likely that an even higher percentage of rebels stayed on the island. Unfortunately, most of the 17th and 18th century Jamaican wills have been lost (Quintanilla 1996).

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According to Quintanilla, most rebels left the colony after 1692. Due to the destruction of Port Royal the opportunities for poor whites became few. He presumes that they went to North America. However there is no recorded evidence to support either the assumption that they left Jamaica, or that they went to North America. Most rebels who were sent to the Leeward Islands (Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat and St. Kitts) went to Nevis or St. Kitts. The islands, although administered as a unit, looked upon each other as rivals. In comparison with the other English colonies in the Caribbean the Leeward Islands were less developed. One reason for this was the persistent fear of a French invasion. Nevis was a trading centre for goods and slaves. It was not a monocultural sugar economy. Because of this the opportunities for poor whites were greater than in the other colonies. In 1688 the French invaded St. Kitts and took over the island, causing most of the English to flee to Nevis. In the ensuing chaos, the Monmouth rebels on both islands tried to escape. There were several outbreaks of the plague in Nevis, and there was a limited food supply. Too many mouths had to be fed after the arrival of the refugees from St. Kitts, and there was a blockade by the French. Many people died because of disease and starvation. Most of the Leeward Islands wills have been lost, except those of Antigua, which are not relevant for our purposes, so nothing can be said about the number of rebels who stayed on in Nevis or St. Kitts (Quintanilla). Overall it can be said that the rebels in Barbados and Jamaica had fewer opportunities than in the Leeward Islands, because of the sugar monoculture in the first two islands. The destruction of Port Royal further diminished their opportunities in Jamaica. After the free pardons were issued, most rebels had no money, and no prospects for a well-paid profession. Our conclusion is that most of the rebels could not leave the islands (see also Quintanilla p.c.7) Apart from not being able to afford to leave, the rebels might well have been motivated to stay on the islands by the liaisons they had established. Although we only have incomplete records concerning the transportees, there are at least some details on their ages at the time of their transportation to the West Indies. For those transportees on the Jamaican Merchant (transported for the Queen) the following can be concluded (Coldham 1987: 553): of the 67 men, sixteen were between the age of 15-19, twenty-three between 20-24, nineteen between 25-29, four between 30-34 and five above 35. The oldest rebel in this group was 40. These figures show that most rebels were quite young when they were transported. We assume that most of these 39 rebels under 25 were not married at the time they were sentenced to transportation. This would reduce their desire for returning to their homeland. It is also to be expected that they contracted relationships with local women (coloured or white, but either way of low social class). If this is true, we assume that this would be another reason for these men to stay in the West Indies, especially if children were involved. When we consider conditions in the West Indies in general, and the age of the transportees in particular, it is quite likely that most of them entered into sexual liaisons. Initially, this would perforce mostly be with slaves, as the rebels were treated similarly to the slaves, and as there were disproportionately fewer European women in the West Indies.

η

"I suspect, but cannot prove, that most simply melded into the local population and took African or Black Creole common law wives." (Quintanilla, p.c.)

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

75

4.3. The dialects spoken by the rebels As we have stated above most of the rebels came from East Devon, West Dorset, and Somerset in the South-West of England. What do we know about the dialects spoken in this area at the period? Very little information is preserved from the relevant period, it must be admitted. Our first real knowledge of the dialects of most of England dates from the end of the nineteenth century, with the works of Ellis (1889) and Wright (1898-1905). Wright (1898-1905) gives us the following pronunciations of relevant lexical items for the area of interest to us: 8 Table 6: Lowering diphthongs in the area of the Monmouth Rebellion English

East Devon

Somerset

West Dorset

Hilton, Dorset 1949

gate

gist, gset

giat, geat, gjet

giat, gjet, gjset

g'et

bake

beak

biak, beak

biak, beak

b'e:k, be:k

bacon

beakan

beakan

b'e(:)kan

face

feas

feas

fe:as

g a p , giap, geap

geap

ga(0P

boat, buat

bwoat

b w oat

gwoat

go:at

gape boat

boat, bo:t

goat

goat, go:t

goat

coat

koat

koat, kuat, kwuat

board

boad, bo:d

buad

door

du:a(r)

du:a(r)

cold

kuald, ko:ld, kwoild

k w o(:)at bwoad

bo:ard

kwoild

k w o:ld

do(:)ar

The similarity in development of these diphthongs to that found in the Jamaican-type mid vowel systems is obvious. The Creole languages with lowering mid diphthongs as developments of Early Modern English long mid vowels display a variety of reflexes, e.g. [uo, ua, oa] for /o'J and [ie, ia, ea] for /e:/. Compare this with these South-Western English dialects with [wua, ua, woa, oa, wo;, Ola] for toil and [is, ea, je, j®, 'e:, e:a] for /e:/. It is of course one thing to point out similarities in the development of Early Modern English sounds in two areas. It is another to make the question of influence from the one linguistic system on the other credible. We will deal with this question in the next section.

g

We have amplified Wright's information with Widen's more accurate West Dorset dialect fieldwork from 1949.

76

Nerval Smith and Marleen van de Vate

5. Necessary sociohistorical conditions for SW English dialect influence on Jamaican, etc.

The following three pre-conditions would seem to be necessary if we want to demonstrate a connection between the two situations. - A sufficiently large body of dialect-speaking individuals would be required. - These people would have to be of low social status. - The dialect would preferably have a vowel incidence that was otherwise similar to that of Standard English. We will examine these pre-conditions in the following sections.

5.1. Was a sufficiently large body of dialect speakers available? While the sources differ in the number of transportees they give, they do mostly agree on a number in the 800's, as mentioned above. At the time of writing we have collected about 890 names from the various sources. Roughly 400 rebels were sent to Barbados, a similar number were sent to Jamaica, and 100 went to St. Kitts and Nevis. We pose now the question of how these figures match up with what is known about the populations of the islands at this period. Table 7: Proportions of transportees to the populations Island

Blacks Whites

Transportees

Trans./Blacks

Trans./Whites

Barbados

39000

21000

400

1.0%

1.9%

Jamaica

13500

6000

400

3.0%

6.7%

St.Kitts-Nevis

5700

5900

100

1.8%

1.7%

Having asked the question whether a sufficiently large body of dialect speakers was available, we are now confronted with another, and unanswerable, question: what number of dialect speakers would be required to change the pronunciation of vowels in a Creole language? We will restrict here ourselves here to observing that the lowest percentage of transportees to blacks in Table 7 is observed in Barbados, where the diphthongal pronunciation is not found, and which had the lowest percentage of transportees to blacks, and return to this question in section 5.4.

5.2. Was the social status of the transportees sufficiently low? The Monmouth transportees came to the Caribbean as convicted rebels. They cost less than a slave to purchase. They arrived at a time when there was a great shortage of manpower due to the expanding sugar-production. In Barbados they were subject to stringent laws

Population movements, colonial control and vowel systems

77

enacted specially for them, with severe penalties such as branding for even attempting to escape. One reason for sending this largely nonconformist group to the West Indies was that they would be less likely to have friends and coreligionists there than in North America. One or two did have access to social networks in the West Indies, but they appear to have been the exception. In general the intention was to punish them by giving them demeaning work. We can conclude that their social status was low.

5.3. Was their dialect sufficiently close (phonologically) to Standard English? There is a general lack of phonological descriptions of dialects within the area that concerns us. The above-mentioned description by Widen of the dialect of Hilton, Dorset (Widen 1949), is at the extreme eastern edge of the catchment area of the rebel troops, but will be utilized because of the lack of anything more suitable. It is representative of the dialect of rural artisans and agricultural workers born around 1870, so can be assumed to be reasonably free of Standard English influence. Its closeness to the Standard English vowel system will be measured in terms of the Wells sets of vowels. Table 8: 9 The vowel systems of Early Modern English, Dorset English and Jamaican/Kittitian Class

ME

EModE

HD

J/SN

KIT

I

i(e)

I

i/i

DRESS

e

ε(ι)

e(i)

e/e

TRAP

ä

a~ae

®(0, (a(0)

a/a

LOT

δ

0~D

a(0

a/a

STRUT

ü