because it is an exogenous variety and the appropriation of English among Indians in South Africa enabled both wider communication among them- selves and communication with non-Indians, especially the British colo- nists who brought them there. It is also interesting that the varieties identified as “indigenized” are spoken in former exploitation colonies.
South Africa was partly a settlement colony, like the territories where creoles have typically developed, and partly an exploitation colony, espe- cially where the British rule is concerned.
Outside the UK, native Englishes are also spoken in former settlement colonies, in which globalizing economic policies have at least endangered the indigenous languages, starting with the Celtic languages in the British Isles. The development of SAIE is associated to some extent with such eco- logical factors, although these did not obtain in quite the same ways as in the New World. One may argue that SAIE fits among native Englishes but, to my knowledge, no expert has classified it as such. Note also that English creoles are native vernaculars, but not necessarily native Englishes, based on the literature on both creoles and indigenized Englishes. If one had to slavishly follow this misguided tradition, another category would have to be invented for SAIE!
Some may speculate that native Englishes have well-established norms and are associated with some standard. Ironically, indigenized Englishes are in several structural respects no more distant from standard English varieties than native nonstandard vernaculars are. In a way, the educated varieties of indigenized Englishes represent local standards. The question to address is actually whether indigenized Englishes lack norms. I argue in Mufwene (1997b) that, like expanded pidgins, indigenized Englishes do have stable norms, although these have been established and perpetuated by populations of primarily non-native speakers. Such realities show that norms are not necessarily developed by native speakers but by a stable pop- ulation of speakers who use a variety regularly (Chaudenson 1992). Norms emerge out of communicative habits of individual speakers. What the habits share, including patterns of variation, form the community’s norms, i.e., manners in which a speaker can expect other members of their com- munity to express things. Thus, the “native”/“non-native” distinction as applied to language varieties, rather than to speakers, seems to serve some social ideology more than it sheds any light on language evolution, espe- cially on the speciation that often ensues from it.
4.4 The development of English in England: when does substrate
is an important ecological factor in language evolution in general, both in cases where it has produced creoles and in those where it has produced varieties which are identified by other names. Regarding the spread of English around the world, I maintain that native Englishes, indigenized Englishes, and English pidgins and creoles have all developed by the same kinds of natural restructuring processes. Structural differences among them are due to variation in the ecological conditions which assigned different values to the variables of the language-restructuring equation and thus determined varying outcomes from one case to another. We will now re-examine some of those putatively nonexceptional cases of traditional genetic filiation (identified as “ordinary” or “natural”) and show how contact-based explanations also apply to them.
I do not wish to reactivate the misguided hypothesis that French devel- oped by the “creolization” of Vulgar Latin or that Middle English devel- oped by “creolization” out of the contact of Old English with French. I support Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) position against the creoliza- tion-of-Old-English hypothesis with the following arguments: first, it is French which would have “creolized” in England, not English; second, most English speakers did not shift to French as their vernacular (although a handful of the elite who interacted with the Norman colonizers may have);8third, the Normans who shifted to English could certainly acquire English very competently, not any worse than non-native speakers of English living in North America or in the United Kingdom acquire English if they are well integrated in these societies – their children must have spoken English as natively as the English children.
To be sure, something ethnographically similar to the formation of creoles happened in the development of Romance languages, in that the Celts shifted to the then-Gallicizing Vulgar Latin, although they did not leave their motherland. However, I do not wish to talk about “creolization”
at all, for the simple reason that it is not a restructuring process. It is just a social phenomenon, which does not alone explain how new varieties devel- oped that are called creoles. And, I reiterate, the processes which produced creoles may be observed in the developments of other languages too, as also noted by Hock and Joseph (1996:15).
Assuming the above, let us compare the spread of Vulgar Latin and that of the languages of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. Vulgar Latin, which was exported to the Celtic-speaking countries of continental Europe west of the Alps, is a name for vernacular Latin, as a nonstandard variety distinct from Classical Latin, the counterpart of standard varieties of European lan- guages today. It was, as the adjective vulgar(from Latin vulgaris) says, the language of the common people, a social classification that certainly also applies well to most of the West Germanics who invaded England in the fifth and sixth centuries and would develop Old English. Interestingly,
4.4 The development of English in England 113
soldiers were involved in both cases of colonization and language spread.
The reason why Vulgar Latin was so influenced by the Celtic substrate and became French, Spanish, and Portuguese (focusing on Western Europe, and depending on where the contact took place) certainly had to do with its appropriation by the colonized Celts.9
The above appropriation process and shift to the dominant group’s lan- guage is not different in kind from what produced creoles and indigenized Englishes. Indeed, Thomason and Kaufman (1988) recognize the impor- tance of language shift in both the case of the development of indigenized varieties and that of creoles. Since at first glance one may perceive similar- ities in the domination of England, France, Spain, and Portugal by foreign powers, the following question arises: Why did the same thing not happen in England until after the seventeenth century, during the colonization of Wales and Ireland in particular? Recall that England was invaded in the fifth century. Crystal (1995) submits a hypothesis, although he does not discuss the development of Romance languages. The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons settled in England in more or less the same way that the Europeans settled in North America, not mingling with the native populations but pushing them further away from their settlements or killing them – in North America, more by the spread of Old World diseases than in wars (Crosby 1992). As Crystal observes, the Germanic invaders called the native Celts
“foreigners,” the meaning of the term Welsh, and did not mingle with them.
The native Celts were surely no more eager to appropriate English in their homeland than the Native Americans wanted to shift to European lan- guages. Changes in socioeconomic conditions led them to do so, several centuries later; and when they did there was substrate influence. The social integration of the Celtic populations in the frontiers of the British Isles, coinciding with the development of potato “plantations” there and the imposition of English as the rulers’ language, subsequently produced varie- ties such as Irish and Scots-Irish Englishes (Filppula 1991; Harris 1991).
Among the reasons why there is no Native American structural influence in North American varieties of English lies the fact that Native Americans were not integrated in mainstream American society until the late nine- teenth or early twentieth century, as minorities, and under socioeconomic pressures from the majority. To date, there are still Native Americans who speak English non-natively, while most of their children, who are more fully assimilated to the dominant culture, speak American English natively.
Thus the Native American influence on North American English remains lexical (cf. Mithun 1992).
Contrary to what some may think, missionaries’ attempt to teach Native American children English in boarding schools and thereby spread English among the indigenous populations was no more successful than similar 114 The legitimate and illegitimate offspring of English
attempts in Africa and Asia. Outside the boarding school, Native American languages, rather than English, served as the vernacular, espe- cially in intimate settings with relatives and friends. English remained an auxiliary languagefor those who did not have to live in socioeconomic set- tings where it was useful and proficiency in it enabled them to be competi- tive. The globalizationof the American economy and the involvement of Native American populations are the factors that did the trick, affecting even those left on the reservations.
Likewise, as reported by Odlin (forthcoming), migrant labor, rather than schools (which taught English as a dead language), are largely responsible for the spread and vernacularization of English in Ireland. The informal contexts of language appropriation are correlated with the nonstandard nature of the varieties which the learners then targeted. They account in part for the extent of substrate influence on the structure of Irish English.
This is very similar to cases of language shift and appropriation which resulted in the development of varieties identified, for specific sociohistori- cal reasons, as creoles.