Concepts search
When talking about pidgins and creoles, the following concepts are important. What do they mean? Don’t forget to state your sources! (no wikipedia please)
- substrate language
- superstrate language
- lexifier
- ‘common core’ hypothesis
- monogenesis
- relexification
- polygenesis
Note: you do not have to define every single term, just pick one.
Recent Comments
Patrick Eichhorn on A Dialect Continuum Eltje Lahno on Pidgins and Creoles: Issues fo… Eltje Lahno on Pidgins and Creoles: Issues fo… Eltje Lahno on Creoles Julia on Creoles
Pidgins and Creoles: A Course Blog 
December 9, 2007 at 1:50 pm
We discussed the term ‘lexifier’ when we talked about the key points of pidgins. Pidgins usually draw most of their vocabulary from one language. This source language is called lexifier. The lexifier of Fanakalo is the Zulu language, because it draws most of its vocabulary from this language.
Most of the well known pidgin have only one lexifier. An exception is Russenorsk. Norwegian and Russian had the same status when they developed their lingua franca . Thus this pidgin drew nearly the same amount of words from both languages.
Sources:
Winford, Donald. “Pidgins and Pidginization”. In: An Introduction to Contact Linguistics”. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 273.
December 17, 2007 at 10:06 am
1. substrate language
“The original language of a community which has adopted a new language, where the latter has been to some extent influenced by the original language.”
source: Meetham, A.R.: “Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, Information and Control”. Oxford u.a.: Pergamon Press, 1969. 707.
6. relexification
We may speak of relexification if the original vocabulary of the substrate is replaced by that of the new language.
source: Meetham, A.R.: “Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, Information and Control”. Oxford u.a.: Pergamon Press, 1969. 480.
December 23, 2007 at 6:26 pm
1. substrate language
“The original language of a community which has adopted a new language, where the latter has been to some extent influenced by the original language.”
source: Meetham, A.R.. “Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, Information and Control”. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1969. 707.
6. relexification
We may speak of relexification if the original vocabulary of the substrate is replaced by that of a new language.
source: Meetham, A.R.. “Encyclopaedia of Linguistics, Information and Control”. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1969. 480.
December 26, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Each pidgin usually draws most of the vocabulary from one language. That is the lexifier, the main source of words in a pidgin.
Delaware Pidgin, for example, has its lexical and grammatical base mostly in Unami, a dialect of Delaware.
However, this does not necessarily mean that those words have the same pronunciation or meaning as in the source. The words may also look different from their source words. This is due to simplified phonological system (syllable structure).
In Russenorsk, being a jargon, draw its vocabular from Norwegian and Russian, due to equal status of both languages.
Sources:
Yule, George. “The Study of Language”. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Winford, Donald. “Pidgins and Pidginization”. In: An Introduction to Contact Linguistics”. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
December 28, 2007 at 2:33 pm
When a creole comes to existence, two or more languages have on influence on it. according to the contact situation one language dominates the other one and is called the superstrate, consequently the dominated language is the substrate.
for instance, european languages mostly dominated the ones of africa in the emergence of a new creole.
the superstrate language is the one easier to identify as it is more obvious.
however, the substrate language doesn not simply vanish but has an influence on the lexicon and the grammar.
Sources:
http://www.hku.hk/linguist/program/contact3.html
Click to access AAVE-2-P+C%20(Lohse-Zahn%20short%20version).pdf
http://epistemic-forms.com/Online-course/Course%20Files/What-is-Asian-Substratum-Theory.html
January 9, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Relexification means to replace the vocabulary of (a language, esp. a pidgin) with words drawn from another language, without changing the grammatical structure.