Download Linguistic Characteristics of English Creole - communication

English Creole
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Generally: in the Caribbean and around the
north and east coasts of South America,
around the coasts of Africa, particularly the
west coast, and across the Indian and Pacific
Oceans.
Distribution related to the long-standing
patterns of trade (goods and slaves).
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Some areas exclusively Spanish- speaking, no
surviving pidgins or creoles: DominicanRepublic,
Cuba and Puerto Rico
Others have only English-based creoles like
Antigua, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica and
Guyana.
Others have only French-based ones like
Guadeloupe, St Lucia, and Haiti. Some have both,
like Dominica and Trinidad. Aruba, Bonaire, and
Curaçao have Portuguese-based creoles, and the
US Virgin Islands has a virtually extinct Dutchbased creole.
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on the northeast coast of South America
The official language Dutch, but native tongue of less than
2% of the population.
Sranan and Djuka (English based creoles) are spoken.
Sranan -in the coastal areas, a ‘conservative’ English
creole that bears little resemblance any more to English
Djuka- in the inland the most important of a group known
collectively as ‘Bush Negro’, is descended from a
pidginized variety of English used by runaway slaves. It is
a creole,but it is also found in pidginized varieties among
the native Indians of the interior of Suriname for whom it
has become a lingua franca.
Saramaccan- another creole in the inland, sometimes
regarded as Portuguese-based and sometimes as Englishbased. It seems to have been undergoing a process of
relexification.
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pidgins arise because the people among whom they
are found lack the ability to learn the standard l. with
which the pidgins are associated. European
languages- ‘better ’than others which are ‘deficient’
in certain respects.
"foreigner-talk" or "baby-talk" theory- Europeans
deliberately simplifying their l. in order to
communicate with others. These simplified forms
would, then, serve to provide pidgins with their basic
structure and vocabulary. There are too many
structural similarities among pidgins and creoles
associated with very different European languages to
make this theory plausible, e.g. between the Englishbased creole of Jamaica and the French-based creole
of Haiti.
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African sub-stratum. African slaves were
multilingual, treated English, French and
Portuguese in the same way. Bickerton: it is
impossible to trace certain basic similarities
back to an African source, e.g., the
characteristic creole tense-aspect system for
verbs.
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In Creole English the vast majority of lexical
items are derived from English, but other
languages as well.
There are some English words where the
usage and meanings are inconsistent with
traditional English usage.
Some Creole words are recognized to be
English words but do not mean the same
thing in English.
Lexical Item
English Meaning
Creole English
Meaning
Ignorant
Lacking knowledge or
information
Irritable and lacking
self control
salad
A cold dish of raw
vegetable
tomato
belly
A person’s stomach
Pregnant
dark
With little or no light
To be bashful and
introverted
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Some words have been compounded to create
nouns, adjectives and verbs which do not
exist in English
Creole English also forms words by the
process of reduplication (base words are
repeated to form new words).
Vocabulary: reduplication to avoid possible
confusion or to express certain concepts of
intensifying: san (“sun”), sansan (“sand”), look
("look"), looklook ("stare"), cry ("cry"),crycry
("cry continually").
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Compound Words
◦ Eye-water (tears)
◦ Hand- middle (palm)
◦ Neck-back (nape)
Compound Adjective
Hard-ears (Stubborn)
Red-Eye (envious)
Sweet Mouth (flatter)
“ De sweet mouth bwoy like mi”
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Reduplication
‘chati-chati’ talk excessively
‘gyaal-gyaal’ many girls.
The phonology of Caribbean Creole English is
not identical to that of English.
 The sounds are fewer: no differentiation
between: it-eat, pin-fin, sip-ship-chip.
ship=sip, sheep= sipsip;
 no distinction between /p/ and /f/wanpela=wanfela ("one").
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In English possession is signaled by the
addition of the apostrophe ‘s’ to nouns. In
Creole English the word ‘fi’ is used for
example.
A fi Jon mango = It is John’s mango
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Plurals are signaled by adding the word ‘dem’
to the noun to create a noun phrase.
“Mary dem want to come” = Mary and her
friends want to come.
“Dem” is multifunctional it can be used as a
pronoun. It can mean “they” as in ‘Dem a
come’.
It can also be used to show possession
Used as a demonstative pronoun.
Indirect Speech
 The word ‘say’ is used to indicate indirect
speech as in :
‘John tell mi say him buy a new kaar’
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Past Tense
The verb forms do not change in Creole English
but we sometimes use “Yesterday” as a time
marker or ‘did’.
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Gender Distinction
◦ The personal pronoun ‘him’ is used to refer to both
male and female. It may be used to refer to neuter
gender as well. Absence of sex discrimination is a
feature of West African Languages.
◦ “ Im have twin last week”
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Copula Verb Construction
◦ In English , a coupla links the subject of a sentence
to the predicate. Creole English can have a zero
coupla structure.
◦ “Jane sick” = Jane is sick.
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Future Tense
◦ The future tense marker most commonly used in
territories like Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas is
the word ‘wi’ in the Eastern Caribbean the marker is
‘go’ (goin,gwain).
◦ ‘wi’ and ‘go’ can also be used to indicate
predictable behaviour.
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Habitual Action
◦ The auxiliary verb ‘does’ is used to signal habitual
action in some caribbean territories, but it is absent
in Jamaican Creole instead we would indicate
habitual action by “John go a river everyday”.
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In Creole English the ordering and placement
of phrases and sentences are used to
highlight and emphasize different aspects of
meaning.
◦ “Is Pam eat de mango”
◦ “Is Pam eat de mango”
Time
“Is yesterday Pam eat de mango”
Action
“Is eat Pam eat de mango”