Creole

From Kortrijk to the Caribbean: the significance of a final -t

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carriols2

Some linguistic features are striking and unmistakable. Others are so subtle that outsiders barely notice them – while insiders hear them instantly. A t-sound at the end of a word can be one of those features. It may seem insignificant, yet it can signal where you are from, where you belong, even who you are.

In Dutch, final –t is a fragile consonant. In everyday speech, it is often dropped altogether: Dutch speakers say nie instead of niet ‘not’, wa instead of wat ‘what’, and da instead of dat ‘that’. No speaker deletes every final –t, but no one keeps them all either.

This type of deletion is often associated with informality in Standard Dutch. But it … ↪

Book review: Before the Linguistics Wars, was there peace? An edition of the correspondence between Hugo Schuchardt (linguist) and Gaston Paris (philologist)

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Maanen i min kuffert

Perhaps, dear reader, you are at a linguistics department, while your friend – studying very similar courses at a different university – is in a philology department. Some departments used to call themselves one way but later renamed themselves, such as Harvard’s Department of Linguistics, originally Comparative Philology. What differences are there and why does the name seem to matter? A highly readable and enjoyable article containing both qualitative and quantitative data tackled this issue over three decades ago – Margaret Winters & Geoffrey Nathan’s 1992 “First he called her a philologist and then she insulted him” (a worthwhile longer account can be found in Momma 2012).

And a likewise highly readable and enjoyable book has existed since … ↪

Creativity as an approach: the frame(works) of egos in academia & beyond – Some Islands 3 video review

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Frames7 scaled

Míša Hejná has reviewed Some Islands 3, and as she stated in her review of Some Islands 1: “This is not your typical linguistics / language studies journal, and so this is not going to be a typical review.” The same can be said for issue 3, which has resulted in this impressive video review.

You can read Lingoblog’s reviews of the previous issues here: Some Islands 1   Some Islands 2.

Cover illustration: Collage by Míša Hejná, with excerpts from or inspired by Some Islands 3.

 

Míša Hejná is an Associate Professor in the English Language at the Department of English at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the founder and the current coordinator of the Centre … ↪

Berbice Dutch: a language in South America

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Guyana orthographic projection.svg

Known to its speakers as di lanshi (= the language), Berbice Dutch was declared extinct, after the death of its last fluent speakers, Albertha Bell and Arnold King, in the early 2000s. Auntie Bertha and Uncle Arnold – as I knew them, using the usual terms of address for one’s respected elders in Guyana – were cousins who grew up together after King’s parents died in the flu pandemic of 1918 which reached even the remote tributaries of the Berbice River in Guyana, in South America; having survived that deadly flu as children, they both lived long lives, into their 90s.

Berbice Dutch: language of the Berbice colony

Like other creole languages in the Caribbean region, Berbice Dutch was once … ↪

Creole languages and island vernacular architectures

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Palmerston Island church and other buildings

It is my belief that analogies between Creole linguistic patterns and West Indian vernacular architecture are valid and important. When well constructed, they should open up many important avenues for further research in Caribbean architectural ethnography. They must not be drawn too specifically, however, or they will remain unproductive. Similarities between these two institutions of West Indian culture relate more directly to sociocultural processes than to specific forms. One should begin not only with the forms of the Creole language, but with the dynamic interrelationships between all levels of the post-creole speech continuum. Both architecture and language are forms of social symbolic communication. In both, the adoption of specific forms from a scale of possible alternatives symbolizes one’s identity, values

… ↪

Bob Marley and his language, the film about him, and irates of the Caribbean

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There are still places where you can see the “biopic” about the life of the Jamaican reggae star musician Bob Marley. The title of the film is One Love, a kind of slogan of the Rastafari movement, of which Marley was a prominent member. All religions seem to have love as a central topic, but representatives of the major religions sometimes forget that. It is also the title of a Bob Marley song with more than a quarter billion views on Youtube.

Bob Marley was a Rastafari. Rastafaris believe that their God is a living man and living in Africa, and they pointed to emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia as their living god Jah – at least until … ↪

Papiamentu: a new description of a young language

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A new book has just appeared, describing and analysing the grammar of Papiamentu, the principal language of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao (aka the ABC islands), three islands off the coast of Venezuela. It is the first in a new book series from Brill Publishers edited by Peter Bakker, dedicated specifically to contact languages, including pidgins, creoles and mixed languages.

As the world is home to an estimated 7,000 different languages, you have to ask yourself why you would want to spend time looking specifically into Papiamentu. Does this language in any way stand out as special or unique?

In fact, it does.

First of all, Papiamentu is a creole language. This means that, like other creole languages, it was formed … ↪