Tok Pisin (Gramley – Pätzold 2004: 345): once a member of the House of Assembly said les long toktok long sit nating 'tired of talking to empty seats', which was, due to the merger of sibilant consonants, mistranslated as 'tired of talking to a bunch of shits'.
pidgins (Fromkin – Rodman 1998: 423): earlier editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica defined Pidgin English as "an unruly bastard jargon, filled with nursery imbecilities, vulgarisms and corruptions".
pidgins (Fromkin – Rodman 1998: 423): illustrations of PE linguistic creativity: the question whether the sow has given birth to a litter is Him cow pig have kittens?, and Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, was described in Tok Pisin as fella belong Mrs Queen.
the Caribbean* (Gramley – Pätzold 2004: 269): the mumming parade at Christmas time is called John Canoe. In the West African language Ewe,
5.4 ANECDOTES
dzonck means 'a sorcerer', and -nu is a suffix for 'man'. As the chief dancer of the ceremony is a medicine man, the parade has been named after this 'sorcerer-man', whose Ewe name has been reanalyzed as the English name John Canoe.
Black English vs. Southern US English (Wells 1982: 554): a test has revealed that Chicagoans, for instance, "consistently interpret the speech of urban-reared white Southern college professors as that of rural uneducated Negroes". (In fact, it is indicative of the similarity between the two varieties that the list in Wells (1982: 556) of BE pronunciation features starts with the following remark: "It will be noticed that almost all of the following points were mentioned above in 6.5, The south. It may well be that any that were not should have been.")
a possible etymology of okay (but who knows?) (Wikipedia): Waaw-kay is an exclamation in Wolof (an African language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and southern Mauritania), a combination of waaw, which means 'yes', and kay, which is an emphatic element. An English traveller heard the expression from a slave in Virginia in the 18th century: Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe;... (J. F. D. Smyth, A Tour in the United States of America (London, 1784), 1:118–21).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okay
Chicano English (Gramley – Pätzold 2004: 262): "Various studies have shown that there are considerable obstacles in the way of general acceptance of Chicano English as equivalent to other accents of StE. A matched guise test, for example, in which the participants were told that all the voices they heard were those of Mexican Americans showed a clearer association of pejorative evaluations (stupid, unreliable, dishonest, lazy etc.) with a Chicano voice than with a near-Anglo accent".
5.5 Revision and practice
1. Decide whether the following statements are true or false.
• In pidgin languages, the bulk of the vocabulary usually derives from the substratum language.
• Pidgin languages are no one's mother tongues.
• The Vikings spoke a creole language.
• That part of the world where black people constitute the great majority of native speakers of English is the Caribbean.
5.5 REVISIONANDPRACTICE
• Neither pidgins nor creoles are spoken in the Caribbean.
• The most populous of the West Indian English-speaking territories is Cuba.
• There is no native English-speaking population in West Africa.
• The major speech area of English-based pidgins and creoles in the Pacific is Melanesia.
2. What kind of languages are the following?
AAVE, Bajan, Bislama, Gullah, Hausa, Igbo, Krio, NAE, Sranan, Tex-Mex, Tok Pisin, WAPE, Yoruba
3. Can you guess where the name of Krio comes from?
4. Can you "translate" the following pidgin expressions into Standard English?
eye water foot-bottom grass belong face
gubmint catchum-fella hand-middle hard ears him belly allatime burn lamp belong Jesus sweet mouth 5. In pidgin/creole pronunciation, initial consonant clusters are sometimes
broken up by a vowel inserted, sometimes by one of the consonants deleted, as in Tok Pisin pelet 'plate', Nigerian PE filag 'flag', but Nigerian PE tori 'story', Jamaican Creole [] 'scratch', [] 'strong'. Is the choice of the repair strategy random or rule-governed?
5.6 Further reading and references
Fromkin, Victoria – Robert Rodman (1998) An introduction to language. 6th ed. Harcourt Brace College Publishers: 412–425.
Gramley, Stephan – Kurt-Michael Pätzold (2004) A survey of modern English, 2nd ed. London & New York: Routledge: 247–248, 259–270, 335–347.
Pyles, Thomas – John Algeo (1993) The origins and development of the English language. 4th ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 230–2.
Trudgill, Peter – Jean Hannah (1982) International English. A guide to varieties of Standard English. London: Edward Arnold: 95–111.
Wells, John C. (1982) Accents of English. Vol.1–3. Cambridge: CUP: 553–
591, 632–645.
5.7 Links
• General:
http://www.ethnologue.com (search for all pidgins and creoles)
5.7 LINKS
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~jpcl (the website of The Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages with useful links)
http://www.fiu.edu/~linguist/carrier.htm (The Carrier Pidgin: A newsletter for those interested in pidgin and creole languages – with the photo of a pigeon :-) on the website)
• Pidgins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
http://www.extreme-hawaii.com/pidgin/vocab (learn Hawaiian pidgin) http://www.e-hawaii.com/fun/pidgin/default.asp (searchable pidgin English
dictionary)
• Creoles:
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mark/cwbc/cwbcman.htm (The Corpus of Written British Creole)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-based_creole_languages http://www.yale.edu/glc/gullah/06.htm (Gullah)
http://www.language-museum.com/h/hawaii-creole-english.htm
http://www.une.edu.au/langnet/definitions/hce.html (Hawaii Creole English) http://www.jamaicans.com/speakja (speak Jamaican)
• Black English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mark/resource/creole.htm (creole English and Black English)
http://www.linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics
http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE
http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE/ebonics http://bryan.myweb.uga.edu/AAVE
• Chicano English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicano_English
http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/chicano http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/spanglish