Creoles as hybrid languages

Abstract

The central claim of Enoch Aboh’s book is that creoles combine features of different languages spoken by people involved in their genesis. In the case of Haitian French Creole and the Surinamese English creoles, the main substrate languages in the formative founding period are claimed to be the languages of the Gbe group, part of the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family. After a summary of the book, the claims are evaluated. The book is considered well written and an excellent piece of scholarship but unfortunately its central claims failed to convince this reader. Creoles are seen as a result of failed acquisition. It is shown in the article that Bantu speakers were more numerous than Gbe speakers, on the basis of historical, genetic and linguistic evidence. Still, Bantu languages are structurally quite different from the creoles, which can be taken for an argument that Gbe as well only had a minimal influence on the grammatical structures of the creoles. The analytic structures are argued in the article to be as diverse for creoles as they are for the Gbe languages. Some structures are found to be different in all three creoles and five varieties of Gbe.

Keywords:

• creole languages
• hybridization
• Bantu
• Kwa
• Gbe
• language contact
• substrate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Peter Bakker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2072-0430

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Velux Foundation, project “Cognitive Creolistics”, 2013–2015 [grant number 31971].