An English-based creole language (often shortened to English creole ) is a creole language for which English was the lexifier , meaning that at the time of its formation the vocabulary of English served as the basis for the majority of the creole's lexicon . Most English creoles were formed in British colonies, following the great expansion of British naval military power and trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The main categories of English-based creoles are Atlantic (the Americas and Africa) and Pacific (Asia and Oceania).
9-468: Over 76.5 million people globally are estimated to speak an English-based creole. Sierra Leone, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, and Singapore have the largest concentrations of creole speakers. It is disputed to what extent the various English-based creoles of the world share a common origin. The monogenesis hypothesis posits that a single language, commonly called proto–Pidgin English , spoken along
18-495: The theory of monogenesis in its most radical form, all pidgins and creole languages of the world can be ultimately traced back to one linguistic variety. This idea was first formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Taylor (1961) and Thompson (1961) . It assumes that some type of pidgin language, dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese, based on Portuguese
27-861: The West African coast in the early sixteenth century, was ancestral to most or all of the Atlantic creoles (the English creoles of both West Africa and the Americas). [REDACTED] British Virgin Islands [REDACTED] Sint Maarten [REDACTED] Puerto Rico [REDACTED] Saint-Martin [REDACTED] Sint Eustatius [REDACTED] Saba [REDACTED] Mexico [REDACTED] United States [REDACTED] Norfolk Island Not strictly creoles, but sometimes called thus: Monogenetic theory of pidgins According to
36-522: The features that allow linguists to identify relatedness. Relexification assumes that, in learning a second language, people can learn vocabulary and grammar separately and will learn the latter but replace the former. In addition, pidgin languages are inherently unstructured, so relexification does not account for how the syntactic structure of a creole could emerge from the languages that lack such structure. Bickerton (1977) also points out that relexification postulates too many improbabilities and that it
45-593: The idea that a proto-pidgin "spread via normal linguistic diffusion " and claimed that there are many similarities between Spanish contact vernaculars and languages of this type used in the Philippines and a Portuguese Creole in India . These similarities are to be found in the fields of syntax and certain parts of vocabulary. While many creoles around the world have lexicons based on languages other than Portuguese (e.g. English , French , Spanish , Dutch ), it
54-417: The relatedness of pidgins and creoles, with a lingua franca known as Sabir or Mediterranean Lingua Franca as the starting point, which was then relexified by the Portuguese and then subsequently by various other European powers. However, monogenesis and relexification have a number of problems. First, as Todd admits, pidgins, by "shedding linguistic redundancies" such as syntactic complexity, have removed
63-423: The relexification hypothesis. Also, Saramaccan seems to be a pidgin frozen in the middle of relexification from Portuguese to English. However, in cases of such mixed languages , as Bakker & Mous (1994) call them, there is never a one-to-one relationship between the grammar or lexicon of the mixed language and the grammar or lexicon of the language they attribute it to. Todd (1990) attempted to postulate
72-509: Was hypothesized that such creoles were derived from this lingua franca by means of relexification , i.e. the process in which a pidgin or creole incorporates a significant amount of its lexicon from another language while keeping the grammar intact. There is some evidence that relexification is a real process. Pieter Muysken and Bakker & Mous (1994) show that there are languages which derive their grammar and lexicon from two different languages respectively, which could be easily explained with
81-420: Was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts established by the Portuguese on the West African coast. This variety was the starting point of all the pidgin and creole languages. This would explain to some extent why Portuguese lexical items can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous grammatical similarities shared by such languages. Keith Whinnom pinpointed
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