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Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents (Sandefur, 1986). A language, such as Kriol, characterised by this unusual degree of variability presents Kriol-acquiring children with a potentially difficult language-learning task, and one which challenges the prevalent theories of acquisition. To examine stop consonant acquisition in this unusual language environment, we present a study of Kriol stop and affricate production, followed by a mispronunciation detection study, with Kriol-speaking children (ages 4-7) from a Northern Territory community where Kriol is the lingua franca. In contrast to previous claims, the results suggest that Kriol-speaking children acquire a stable phonology and lexemes with canonical phonemic specifications, and that English experience would not appear to induce this stability.

We report on the rapid birth of a new language in Australia, Gurindji Kriol, from the admixture of Gurindji and Kriol. This study is the first investigation of contact-induced change within a single speaker population that uses multiple variants. It also represents an innovative modification of the Wright-Fisher population genetics model to investigate temporal change in linguistic data. We track changes in lexicon and grammar over three generations of Gurindji people, using data from seventy-eight speakers coded for their use of Gurindji, Kriol, and innovative variants across 120 variables (with 292 variants). We show that the adoption of variants into Gurindji Kriol was not random, but biased toward Kriol variants and innovations. This bias is not explained by simplification, as is often claimed for contact-induced change. There is no preferential adoption of less complex variants, and, in fact, complex Kriol variants are more likely to be adopted over simpler Gurindji variants.

This article focuses on the role of congruence in Creole formation and development, using a competition-and-selection framework. The proposal is that the similarities (the congruent features) that speakers perceive between the languages in contact are favored to participate in the emergence and development of a new language. Specifically, I illustrate how morphosyntactic and semantic features are more likely to be selected into the grammatical makeup of a given Creole when they PREEXIST and are shared by some of the source languages present in its linguistic ecology. This is empirically supported in this article by numerous case studies and a survey of congruent features in twenty contact languages across nineteen grammatical and lexical domains. In order to show how congruence operates, I propose a model of matter and pattern mapping, adapted to the multilingual setting in which Creole languages emerge.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the term creole in several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.

This paper foccusses on the Tangwang language, a Chinese variety spoken in southern Gansu that has been in contact with the Dongxiang language, a Mongolic language. Tangwang is believed to be a highly altaicised variety, as it demonstrate several traits that are usually absent in this language family are are reputed ‘typical’ of the Turkic-Mongolic languages. However, most of these traits are present in the other northwestern chinese varieties and are the result of reanalysis, thus, it is difficult to trace their exact origin. This paper aims at analyzing the influence of Mongolic languages on Tangwang from the perspective of borrowings, and in particular direct loans. Taking the formally identical features that are shared in Dongxiang and Tangwang as a starting point, we will try to determine which form can be seen as a direct borrowing due to the adstratal influence of Dongxiang and which one is probably due to an earlier altaic influence. We will try to classify which form is a ‘true’ direct loan from Dongxiang and which form could be the evidence of an earlier substrate. From the results, and based on the existing models on languages contact, we will try to understand which mechanisms from relexification, grammaticalization, and language shift is the most probable in the case of Tangwang.

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.

The goal of this paper is to further our understanding of the nature of functional features in Creoles while focusing on how the functional exponent is morphologically realized, assuming a late-insertion-based exoskeletal model in the language mixing scholarly literature. In language mixing, it is observed that words are mixed within a certain syntactic domain (e.g., DP-NP, VoiceP/vP-TP, etc.). For example, in the nominal domain, a determiner D may be from one language, and N (or a stem, e.g., root + categorizer) may originate from another language. Grimstad and Riksem propose that the functional projection FP intervenes between D and N, and both D and F are from one language and N from another language. The phonological exponent of the functional features (e.g., D and F) are assumed to be language-specific (i.e., from one language), subject to the subset principle. Closer to the case that concerns us, Åfarli and Subbarao show that through long-term language contact, functional features can be reconstituted, and the functional exponent can be genuinely innovative. In our study, we propose that functional features can be themselves recombined and that Creole languages can provide evidence for feature recombination either by virtue of their hybrid grammar or through the congruent functional categories they display, using a late-insertion-based exoskeletal model. That is, functional features are not individually inherited from one language or another but can be recombined to form new functional features, allowing a novel functional exponent. To show this, we use synchronic empirical data focusing on the anterior marker -ba from Cabo Verdean Creole (CVC), Manjako (one of CVC Mande substrates), and Portuguese (CVC lexifier) to show how the recombination may operate, as CVC -ba recombines the features it inherited from its source languages while innovating. In sum, the purpose of this study is to show that feature recombination targeting the functional categories of Creole source languages can lead to innovation and that a late-insertion exoskeletal model can best account for the novel functional exponents that result from feature recombination in Creole formation.

The Middle English period is well known as one of widespread lexical borrowing from French and Latin, and scholarly accounts traditionally assume that this influx of loanwords caused many native terms to shift in sense or to drop out of use entirely. The study analyses an extensive dataset, tracking patterns in lexical retention, replacement and semantic change, and comparing long-term outcomes for both native and non-native words. Our results challenge the conventional view of competition between existing terms and foreign incomers. They show that there were far fewer instances of relexification, and far more of synonymy, during the Middle English period than might have been expected. When retention rates for words first attested between 1100 and 1500 are compared, it is loanwords, not native terms, which are more likely to become obsolete at any point up to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, proportions of outcomes involving narrowing and broadening (often considered common outcomes following the arrival of a co-hyponym in a semantic space) were low in the Middle English period, regardless of language of origin.

In a series of recent works, Prof. Ilija Čašule claimed that Burushaski is not a linguistic isolate, as usually believed, but rather an Indo-European language of Balkan origin and, more specifically, a creolized form of Phrygian or of a closely related North-Western IE language (Thracian, Illyrian, etc.). This claim has raised some discussion among specialists. The present paper, therefore, aims at reviewing the evidence on which Čašule's view is based from a traditional, comparative perspective and concludes that Burushaski can be classified as a linguistic isolate that at some point in history experienced interference and partial relexification with one or more layers of Indo-European materials, whose origin cannot be ascertained with certainty, rather than as an Indo-European language in traditional sense.

In the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese Crown issued a succession of increasingly hostile regulations targeting a class of outlaw traders operating at the fringes of the Empire in West Africa: the tangomãos. A Creole adaptation of the Arabic tarjumān, or translator, the tangomãos were interpreters in the broadest sense, insofar as they served an intermediary role socially, commercially, and linguistically, and were a dominant presence in the critical commercial zone along coastal Upper Guinea. This essay first traces an itinerary of appearances of this enigmatic figure over several generations, offering an integrated profile of the tangomão as interpreter and commercial intermediary and situating them with regards to central themes of precolonial West African historiography such as hospitality, brokerage, and creolization. In so doing, this article will also give an account of the pivotal role they played in the assembly of the trading machine that made Upper Guinea the formative site of the Iberian-led first great wave of the Atlantic slave trade. The central argument is that the tangomão was deployed ambivalently in Portuguese documentation as a figure of both suspicion and utility—and that this ambivalence was productive for emergent ideological formations of large-scale slave-trading.