Creole

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

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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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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

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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 … ↪

Derek Bickerton (1926-2018), the insular linguist, and his work

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Derek Bickerton was a world-famous linguist and author. He died in 2018, at the age of 91 years. He has written scholarly books about creole languages, human evolution, the brain, but also poetry and novels. Ten years before he died, he had written a kind of intellectual biography focusing on his research on creole languages and pidgins which he had called Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages. These (according to the public, not according to him or me) lowliest languages are pidgins and creoles.

When this book came out in 2008, published when he was 81 years old, I did not get to read it. For one thing, there … ↪

Lang Belta: the Belter language from SYFY/Amazon’s The Expanse

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The Belter language, which in the TV show is referred to as Lang Belta, is a Creole language spoken by the Belter people in the The Expanse universe. A creole language can be characterized as a new language, based on the vocabulary of an existing language, but with an innovated grammatical system.

The Expanse takes place 200 years from now, in a future in which Earth has colonized the solar system. In this world, people emigrated to the Asteroid Belt from Earth looking for work, and now survive by scavenging materials in the Belt. In this contribution I will outline the construction and general characteristics of this very complex and interesting Creole and discuss some of its grammatical characteristics.

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