have long acknowledged that while in some species genes are transmitted from parent to offspring, which is typical of the animal kind, in some others, they are transmitted (also) horizontally, involving a multitude of contributors to the genetic makeup of each of the individuals that form the species through time. Heterogeneity and hybridityare thus normal charac- teristics of a natural species.
It is not completely true that genetic linguists have not acknowledged external influence on the evolutionary trajectory of a particular language.
Terms such as substrate/substratumand superstrate/superstratumare clear evidence that such influence is accepted as part of history, albeit as part of deviations from regular and normal developments. Unfortunately, there are no cases of language evolution that have involved no external influence at all. Nor is it clear where one must draw the line between, on the one hand, those cases that involve external influence but still yield regular and normal language evolution, and, on the other, those cases that do not. As suggested in chapter 4, it is not certain that the distinction between creole and noncre- ole vernaculars is a valid one on structural grounds. It does not help us gain any particular insights about language evolution in general. Below, I explain why.
of creoles as separate languages (chapter 4). An important reason for this ambivalence is a pervasive commitment to the genetic linguistics Stammbaummodel, in which contact has played no important role in the normal speciation of languages into their dialects and daughter languages.
Thus Appalachian English is a dialect of English, presumably because contact played no significant role in its development, whereas Gullah is a separate language, because it developed out of the contact of English with African languages.
If the origins of creoles are so special, we would indeed like to know how special they are. However, as I show below, our position should not be based on the typically simplistic hypotheses which pervade the literature, in particular:baby talk,foreigner talk, exclusive or dominant substrate influ- ence, language bioprogram, imperfect second-language learning, or exclu- sive or dominant superstrate influence. To be sure, there are differences between the ecologies in which creoles developed and those in which non- creole languages have changed “normally.” On the other hand, some studies have highlighted similarities between the two kinds of evolution (e.g., Fisiak 1995; Posner 1996), suggesting that creoles have probably not developed in such “nonordinary,” “untypical,” or “unnatural” ways. We must thus ask ourselves the following questions: (i) Does language contact make the resulting language change less natural than internally motivated change? (ii) Where does the boundary lie between external and internal motivations in language change (Labov 1994)? I argue below, along with James Milroy (1992), that one cannot do adequate historical linguistics without factoring into one’s explanations the social ecology of the changes discussed.
As for Schuchardt’s second concern, linguistics does not seem to have changed much on the subject matter. For instance, although they argue for the existence of “mixed languages,” Thomason and Kaufman (1988) main- tain that these “cannot be classified genetically at all” (p. 3). They state that
“it is usually possible (except in relatively borderline cases) to distinguish mixed languages, whose origins are not genetic, from languages whose development has followed the much more common genetic line” (p. 3).
Arguing indirectly against Hjelmslev’s (1938) observation that all lan- guages are mixed to a certain extent and that traditionally genetic classifica- tions have been based more on shared lexicon than on shared grammar,1 they reject Weinreich’s (1953) position that creoles should be grouped genetically with their lexifiers. They argue that “a claim of genetic relation- ship entails systematic correspondences in all parts of the language because that is what results from normal transmission: what is transmitted is an entire language” (p. 11). Concurrently, “a language cannot have multiple ancestors in the course of normal transmission” (p. 11). One problem is the
reason that they give to defend their position: roughly, this is the way it has been done in genetic linguistics.
The tradition that Thomason and Kaufman espouse is disputable. There is no obvious yardstick for determining the point at which influence from other languages makes the resulting variety nonclassifiable genetically.
Thomason (1997) invokes the fact that the model works well for prototypi- cal cases, but she does not address the question of the size of the set repre- sented by prototypical cases, nor that of what the justification is for treating the traditional cases as prototypical. Thomason and Kaufman could very well have used the evidence of language-mixing to dispute the established Stammbaumtradition. For instance, the evidence in the case of Romance languages (see below) is still in favor of language contact as a critical factor in their speciation.
One might want to make allowance for language shift, which Thomason and Kaufman present as an important factor in the development of creoles.
Unfortunately “shift” is an ethnographic concept, which means changing to a communicative system other than the usual one. It is not a structural change within one’s language, although it often leads to such a change, due to language contact. Many speakers of European languages outside Europe today, such as the majority of them in North America, have descended from people who shifted from other languages. If we took
“shift” and language contact as legitimate criteria for questioning the genetic connection of some language varieties to others, then we would be equally justified in treating North American English varieties as nongenetic developments, unless some measure can be provided of the extent of contact-induced restructuring that does not affect genetic affiliation. I argue below that such criteria are not operational.
One might also want to argue that genetic classifications are based on the comparative method. Unfortunately, the comparative method itself has not been applied to creoles and their nonstandard colonial lexifiers. Thomason and Kaufman’s position is based on the usual casual comparisons of creole structures against those of the standard varieties of their lexifiers. Yet, lexical evidence points nowhere else but to the colonial nonstandard lexifiers of creoles. As for grammatical evidence, unless one inequitably expects perfect replication from parent to daughter varieties in the case of creoles, their connections to their lexifiers can hardly be denied. The only issue one may raise regards the multiplicity of dialects of the lexifier to which each creole is partially related. However, the question that arises is whether creoles represent unusual cases or whether the genetic linguistics tradition is flawed by the kind of corpora on which the methodology has been devel- oped, viz., written texts from highly restricted and “conventionalized”varie- ties which may not represent the normal speech of the average populations
5.1 Preliminaries 129
of speakers. Creoles may simply be an opportunity for genetic linguists to re- examine accounts of facts about which they cannot continue to be too certain.