Creole languages have long had a bad reputation. They were thought to be simpler than other languages and therefore less worthy of study. Lecturer Benjamin Storme and PhD candidate Tristan Chopinez want to change that perception.
A defining feature of Creole languages is their origin in a colonial setting. Contact between colonisers and enslaved people gave rise to new languages, which were often variants of the English or French spoken by the rulers. 'These languages have characteristics that set them apart from other languages,' explains Storme. 'For example, they do not always have a plural form. As a speaker, you have to deduce the quantity from the context.'
Many researchers have overlooked Creole languages due to such simplifications. Storme: 'Even many native speakers view their language as a broken version of French or not even as a real language. With our project, we aim to demonstrate that these are indeed real languages, which can be studied just as seriously as other languages.'
Case study
Storme has been awarded an NWO XS grant for this, as well as a university grant for PhD student Chopinez. 'I'm working on Haitian Creole,' says Chopinez. 'In many languages, the definite article takes on a consonant if the word that follows begins with a vowel. With the English "apple", you get "an"; with a word beginning with a consonant, it remains "a". Haitian reverses this. Among other things, I will investigate the acoustic details of this phenomenon and then analyse, from a more theoretical perspective, how this fits into the creolisation process.'
'I will be focusing on pronouns,' says Storme. 'Haitian has adopted personal pronouns (e.g., "him", "them", etc.) from French and developed its own complex usage for them that does not occur in other forms of French. I will use phonological, rhythmic and syntactic factors to map out how this works. That makes it a complex case study, but in this way we will probably discover that the languages were much more complex than we thought when we were still relying on grammars and textbooks. It is only in the last year that a corpus of spoken language has become available, allowing us to see more clearly that practice is often more complex than the description.'
'By gaining a better understanding of Haitian Creole, we will also gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of "languages"', adds Chopinez. 'It is precisely Creole languages that can show us the extent to which the process of language development varies.'
