1989), Rickford (1986) in paying attention to the nonstandard vernaculars spoken by the European indentured servants and yeomen with whom the non-European laborers interacted regularly in the colonies.
Other relevant factors include cross-colony “differences in initial condi- tions, stochastic events, time lags, processes operating on different time scales, and spatial subdivisions” (Brown 1995:15–16). Thus, all structural input factors being equal, differences in the latter algebraic variables account for cross-creole differences. For instance, we know that in the territories where large-scale plantation industry started early, basilectal varieties also developed early and they tend to be more drastically different from those of other colonies. The case of scantness of Spanish-based creoles was also dis- cussed in chapter 2, in which it was pointed out that in Cuba, for instance, it took the Spaniards until the nineteenth century to launch into the sugar cane economy, over 150 years of homestead economy during which they had lived closely with their slaves and taught them Castellan Spanish too. The switch to the plantatation economy was also during a time marked by no rapid pop- ulation replacements nor dramatic labor population increase.
It was also shown in chapter 2 that early European:non-European popu- lation disproportions account for cross-colony differences regarding the basilect. This accounts for differences in the development of Creole in, for instance, Jamaica and Barbados. Early removal of the lexifier, or demo- graphic attrition of its speakers, also accounts for differences between, for instance, the English creoles of Suriname and those of the Caribbean. The nature of the plantation industry – tobacco in Virginia, rice in coastal South Carolina, and sugar cane in the Caribbean – as well as the timing of segregation, account for more cross-colony differences.
There are thus numerous ecological factors which explain why every creole differs somewhat from another, although they share many structural features. The ecological factors also explain why creoles are generally different from new extra-European dialects of the same lexifiers spoken by descendants of Europeans, despite some similarities. Several creolists have invoked break in the transmission of the lexifier to account for the develop- ment of creoles. However, it was shown in chapter 2 that this argument does not apply even to the plantations of Suriname, where the English left early, during the homestead phase of colonization. The lexifier did not need the presence of Europeans to be spread in its early colonial koiné form. There was hardly a time when language was not transmitted normally in the colo- nies. There was no time when those who developed creoles did not resort to strategies used by other speakers in natural, nonscholastic contexts of lan- guage transmission. Their target was of course not metropolitan, nor nec- essarily focused. Still it was a target. The ecological factors and selective restructuring which produced creoles are of the same kind as those which produced “normal” language change. Contact at the interidiolectal level is a critical factor in almost any case of language evolution.
5.3 Ecology and linguistic evolution 137
5.4 “Creolization” as a social process
I summarize here the gist of the arguments presented in Mufwene (2000a).
In light of the preceding discussions, what is called creolizationin the lin- guistics literature does not correspond to any particular structural process or any combination thereof. One can safely say that it amounts to a social process by which vernaculars associated with particular social groups, typi- cally descendants of non-Europeans in exogenous colonial settings, were disfranchised from other colonial varieties that developed around the same time but are related primarily to descendants of Europeans. The tradition of this social process has existed in colonial societies, and in those which succeeded them, since before linguists became interested in “creole genesis.” Creolists simply became trapped in some of the social biases which influenced their research, and attempts to operationalize not only the termcreoleand the like, but also the process creolizationhave failed.
The different stages posited by linguists about the development of creoles – from jargon or pidgin to creole – are not consistent with history (Mufwene 1997a). As shown in chapter 1, a useful rough generalization is that pidgins developed in trade colonies but creoles developed in settlement colonies.2 The most adequate interpretation of creolization – if such a process must be posited – appears to be the social marking of a particular colonial vernacular of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries from other colonial varieties because of the ethnic/racial affiliation of its primary speakers. The interpretation of the term as basilectalization, a more neutral term that can apply to any communal variety which diverges maximally from the local acrolect, is just an attempt to validate the social process with structural evidence. However, there is no basilect common to all creoles.
Every basilectal variety is identified relative to its acrolect. Having been restricted historically to (sub)tropical European colonies of the past few centuries, creoles are far from being a general structural type of language, although they form a special sociohistorically defined group of vernaculars and share several features on the family resemblance model. To be sure, similar social and linguistic developments took place elsewhere and at other times. However, the term creolewas not used for their outcomes there and then. Thus, what we have everywhere seems to be simple evolution of lan- guages from one state to another in different ecological conditions.3
As observed above, the fact that the (ex-)colonial vernaculars spoken by descendants of Europeans outside Europe are different from their metro- politan kin suggests that they too are outcomes of restructuring under contact conditions. Only some ecological conditions were different. In British North American colonies, for instance, an important proportion of
the indentured servants came from continental Europe, and a large propor- tion of the indentured servants from the British Isles, especially from Ireland, were also not native speakers of English. Thus, even if the Africans had not been present in the North American colonies, American Southern White vernaculars would still have wound up different from their metropol- itan kin. Appalachian and New England English vernaculars, for instance, reflect variable restructuring despite their limited contacts (during the colonies’ founding periods) with speakers of African languages. Trudgill (1986) underscores the role of restructuring in the development of English also in Australia and the Falkland Islands.
What we should now do is focus on how much light socioeconomic history can shed onto genetic linguistics. I have tried here to articulate more explicitly the notion of “sociohistorical linguistics” presented in Romaine (1982). In the next section, I espouse the “Uniformatarian Principle” – adopted critically by Labov (1994) – in the looser sense that basically the same processes have produced creoles that have also produced new varieties of other languages. I then go back in time to highlight the role of contact in the evolution of especially English and French.