Editors' introduction

A question of great interest for students and professional linguists alike is, “How and why do new languages arise?” In this chapter Patricia Nichols describes three examples that illustrate how in extraordinary circumstances creole languages arise. Besides examining the social circumstances supporting the formation of Gullah in South Carolina and of Louisiana Creole and Hawaiian Creole, she illustrates these creole languages and describes creole characteristics more generally. The chapter also explores how creoles help forge new social identities.

Creole languages arise in periods of rapid social change in situations where people speaking different languages have extensive contact. Under the right circumstances, speakers incorporate vocabulary from the languages of other groups (usually dominating groups) into a scaffolding of their own ancestral language. Because the languages of the dominating groups are languages of wider communication such as English (for Gullah and for Hawaiian Creole) or French (for Louisiana Creole), outsiders may wrongly judge the creoles to be bastardized versions of the world languages. The particular circumstances surrounding formation of the US creoles differed, but in each case the essential ingredients needed to form a creole existed. In South Carolina, for instance, the slave population represented speakers of many languages of Central and West Africa, and slaves speaking different languages were sometimes deliberately grouped together to prevent a shared or common language to communicate with. If most slaves had no opportunity to learn the language of their masters, it is easy to see how a pidgin arose that would enable communication among them.