Where do creoles get their grammar?

A. Much of a creole grammar is based on the native languages of its creators. For example, in Sranan, That hunter bought a house for his friend is A hondiman dati ben bai wan oso gi en mati.

Sranan:

A     hondiman      dati     ben bai    wan oso     gi    en    mati.

the  hunter-man    that    PAST buy  a     house  give his mate

“That hunter bought a house for his friend.”

Sranan runs the verbs together in this way because the West African language many of its creators spoke, Fongbe, does the same thing:

Fongbe:

Koku   so    ason  o   na   e.

Koku   take crab   the give her

“Koku gave her the crab.”

B. Other parts of creole grammars appear exotic today but are actually just features of the regional dialects spoken by the whites with whom slaves had contact. For example, Gullah is a creole spoken on islands off of

South Carolina. Gullah for I come here every evening is Uh blant come yuh ebry eebnin. This blant appears strange to us, but it comes from regional British dialects, such as the one of Cornwall, which used belong in the same way: Billee d’ b’long gwine long weth ‘e’s sister, “Billy goes with his sister.”

C. In other ways, creoles revert to what many linguists think are innate grammar “defaults” that many or even most languages have drifted away from but lie at the base of our capacity for language. For example, no matter what the word order is in a creole creator’s native language or the one that the creator is learning, a creole’s word order is almost always subject-verb-object. Many linguists consider this order the basic one for language, even though all possible orders exist throughout the world.

مواضيع ذات صلة

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Finale—Master Class Introduction

Finale—Master Class

Sign language

Artificial spoken languages

Artificial Languages

Predictions

The success story

Obstacles to keeping 6,000 languages alive

Language revival movements

Language Death—Prognosis

What happens to a language when it is dying?