History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

James McElvenny

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences explores the history of the study of language in its varied social and cultural contexts.

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Mar 31, 2023 • 31min

Podcast episode 29: Interview with Marcin Kilarski on the study of North American languages

In this interview, we talk to Marcin Kilarski about the history of the documentation and description of the languages of North America. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 29 Primary sources Bloomfield, Leonard. 1946. “Algonquian”. Linguistic structures of native America ed. by Harry Hoijer, 85-129. New York: Viking Fund. Boas, Franz & Ella Cara Deloria. 1941. Dakota grammar. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office. Deloria, Ella Cara. 1932. Dakota texts. (= Publications of the American Ethnological Society 14.) New York: G. E. Stechert. (Reprinted with an introduction by Raymond J. DeMallie, 2006, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press). Deloria, Ella Cara. 1988. Waterlily. New edition, 2009, with an introduction by Susan Gardner, a biographical sketch by Agnes Picotte and an afterword by Raymond J. DeMallie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen & John Heckewelder. 1819. “A correspondence between the Rev. John Heckewelder, of Bethlehem, and Peter S. Duponceau, Esq. corresponding secretary of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, respecting the languages of the American Indians”. Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society 1.351-448. Edwards, Jonathan. 1788. Observations on the language of the Muhhekaneew Indians: In which the extent of that language in North-America is shewn, its genius is grammatically traced, some of its peculiarities, and some instances of analogy between that and the Hebrew are pointed out. New Haven, Conn.: Printed by Josiah Meigs. (New ed. by John Pickering, Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1823; Repr. in American Linguistics, vol. I. London: Routledge, 1997.). Eliot, John. 1666. The Indian grammar begun: Or, an essay to bring the Indian language into rules, for the help of such as desire to learn the same, for the furtherance of the Gospel among them. Cambridge, Mass.: Marmaduke Johnson. (New ed. with an introduction by John Pickering and commentary by Peter S. Du Ponceau, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 2nd series, vol. 9, 247-312, Boston, 1822; Repr. in American Linguistics, vol. I. London: Routledge, 1997). Gallatin, Albert. 1836. “A synopsis of the Indian tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian possessions in North America”. Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 2.1-422. Hewitt, J.N.B. 1903. “Iroquoian cosmology: First part”. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1899-1900 21.127-339. (Issued separately, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904). Hewitt, J.N.B. 1928. “Iroquoian cosmology: Second part”. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1925-26 43.449-819. (Issued separately, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1928). Hewitt, J[ohn] N[apoleon] B[rinton]. 1893. “Polysynthesis in the languages of the American Indians”. American Anthropologist 6:4.381-407. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1893.6.4.02a00050 Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 2013. Nordamerikanische Grammatiken. Edited by Micaela Verlato. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Jones, William. 1788. “The third anniversary discourse, delivered 2 February, 1786”. Asiatick Researches 1.415-431. Powell, J[ohn] W[esley]. 1891. “Indian linguistic families of America north of Mexico”. Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1885-86 7.1-142. Sagard, Gabriel Theodat. 1632. Le grand voyage du pays des Hvrons, situé en l’Amérique vers la Mer douce, és derniers confins de la nouuelle France, dite Canada. […] Auec vn Dictionaire de la langue Huronne, pour la commodité de ceux qui ont à voyager dans le pays, & n’ont l’intelligence d’icelle langue. Paris: Chez Denys Moreav. (Repr. as Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons, suivi du Dictionnaire de la langue huronne ed. by Jack Warwick, Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1998; Transl. as The long journey to the country of the Hurons by H. H. Langton, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1939.). Spencer, Herbert. 1884 [1876]. The principles of sociology. Vol. 1. New York: D. Appleton. (1st ed., London: Williams & Norgate, 1876.). Secondary sources Kilarski, Marcin. 2021. A History of the Study of the Indigenous Languages of North America. Amsterdam: Benjamins. McElvenny, James. 2019. “Alternating sounds and the formal franchise in phonology”. Form and formalism in linguistics ed. by James McElvenny, 35-58. Berlin: Language Science Press. Merriam, Kathryn Lavely. 2010. The preservation of Iroquois thought: J.N.B. Hewitt’s legacy of scholarship for his people. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Mithun, Marianne. In press. “Native American languages at the threshold of the new millennium”. Handbook of North American Indians ed. by Igor Krupnik, vol. 1: Introduction Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Steckley, John [L.], ed. 2010. Gabriel Sagard’s dictionary of Huron. (= American Language Reprints Supplement Series 2.) Merchantville, N.J.: Evolution Publishing. Thomason, Lucy. 2022. “26,000 pages of thoughts in Meskwaki by Meskwakis: The National Anthropological Archives’ Truman Michelson collection”. Paper presented at the Joint Session of the Linguistic Society of America and the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, D.C., 6 Jan., 2022. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1896-1901. The Jesuit relations and allied documents: Travels and explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. The original French, Latin, and Italian texts, with English translations and notes. 73 vols. Cleveland, Ohio: Burrows Brothers. Trudgill, Peter. 2017. “The anthropological setting of polysynthesis”. The Oxford handbook of polysynthesis ed. by Michael Fortescue, Marianne Mithun & Nicholas Evans, 186-202. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199683208.013.13 Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:20] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:25] In the previous episode, we spoke about Franz Boas and his contributions to the study of American languages, and of the development of the modern fields of anthropology and linguistics in America more generally [00:38]. In this episode, we’re going to zoom out and take a panoramic view of the documentation and description of the Indigenous languages of the Americas. [00:48] To guide us through this topic, we’re joined today by Marcin Kilarski, Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Poznań. [00:57] Marcin has just published a book on the very subject of this episode, his 2021 A History of the Study of the Indigenous Languages of North America. [01:09] So, Marcin, can you draw back the curtain for us on the grand vista of the description of the languages of the Americas? [01:16] When did the documentation and description of American languages start, and are there identifiable periods and schools in the study of American languages and, if so, what are their defining features? [01:30] MK: Hi, James. [01:30] Thanks for having me. [01:31] So, the description of North American languages has a long history going back to the first word lists of St. Lawrence Iroquoian, a Northern Iroquoian language that was spoken along the St. Lawrence River, and which were compiled in the 1530s. [01:47] And these were followed during the 16th century by vocabularies of languages belonging to the Algonquian and Eskimo-Aleut families spoken in North Carolina and on Baffin Island, respectively. [01:59] So, we are looking at nearly five centuries of documentation and description, and what can be described as a complex, heterogeneous tradition that is only marginally shorter than the study of Mesoamerican languages, and includes several local or ‘national’ traditions such as the French, British, and Danish traditions. [02:18] Note by the way that I’m using the term ‘North America’ with reference to the Indigenous languages and cultures north of the civilizations of central Mexico. [02:26] So, three periods are usually distinguished in the history of the Americanist tradition. [02:31] The first period extends from the 1530s till the late 18th century. [02:36] It is often referred to as the missionary period since most scholars who worked on the languages were missionaries, but the languages were also described by explorers and other scholars. [02:45] Since the period covers over 250 years, we can distinguish several phases within it, depending on the time, location, and richness of scholarship but also the background of the commentators and the phenomena they were concerned with. [02:59] Thus, the 16th-century word lists that I’ve mentioned were followed by grammatical descriptions of Algonquian and Iroquoian languages in the 17th century, including the reports from missionaries in New France that were published in the Jesuit Relations and the grammar of Massachusett by John Eliot, published in 1666, and finally grammars of Greenlandic and vocabularies of the languages of the Southeast that appeared in the second half of the 18th century. [03:28] The second much shorter period extends from 1788, that is, from the publication of the grammar of Mahican by Jonathan Edwards, Jr., till the 1840s, a decade that witnessed growing institutionalization of scholarship in the United States, and the establishment of several societies, such as the American Ethnological Society and the American Oriental Society, both founded in 1842, as well as the Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846. [04:00] For many reasons, this short period deserves to be treated separately. [04:04] Several original descriptions were published in this period, including the grammar by Edwards that I just mentioned, together with editions of earlier studies published by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and John Pickering, both of whom corresponded with Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose grammars of Massachusett, Mahican and Onondaga have recently been published. [04:25] These scholars made an important contribution to linguistics. [04:29] For example, Jonathan Edwards proposed in a lecture given in 1787 that Algonquian languages are related as “dialects of the same original language”, and this happened before the publication in 1788 of the famous statement by Sir William Jones about the common source of Sanskrit and European languages. [04:51] Our present understanding of polysynthetic languages largely derives from this period, as it was Du Ponceau who introduced the term ‘polysynthetic’ with reference to a manner of compounding or combination of concepts that are expressed in other languages by several words. [05:08] According to him, this was a common characteristic of “all the Indian languages from Greenland to Cape Horn”. [05:15] And finally, the third period extends from the mid-19th century to the present. [05:21] In the context of the institutionalization of linguistics and anthropology in the mid-19th century, one should also mention the Bureau of Ethnology, founded in 1879, and subsequently renamed as the Bureau of American Ethnology. [05:36] Seminal contributions were made in this period to the classification of North American languages by Albert Gallatin and John Wesley Powell. [05:44] Powell himself saw Gallatin’s “Synopsis of the Indian Tribes” as the beginning of a new era. [05:50] In turn, the arrival of Franz Boas in the United States in 1886 can be said to mark the end of the shift in American linguistics, and the beginning of a continuous tradition that lasts to the present day, and encompasses the work of Boas and his students, in particular Edward Sapir, as well as such scholars as Leonard Bloomfield and Charles Hockett. [06:11] The research carried out in this period reflects the preoccupations of earlier scholars, which can be described as the defining features of the Americanist tradition. [06:20] These include an emphasis on fieldwork and collaboration with Indigenous consultants, together with the early inclusion of women scholars such as Erminnie Adele Smith and Alice Cunningham Fletcher. [06:32] Viewed from the present perspective, Marianne Mithun, in her paper on “Native American languages at the threshold of the new millennium”, found in the forthcoming volume 1 of the Handbook of North American Indians, concludes that “the Indigenous languages are now cherished more than ever across North America”, with extensive work on documentation, description, maintenance, and revitalization that is often carried out in collaboration between Indigenous consultants and outside linguists. [07:02] JMc: So what challenges did scholars coming from European grammatical traditions face when they were describing the languages of the Americas? [07:11] MK: So, what I’ve tried to do in my book was to trace the history of the description of these languages through the lens of some of their most characteristic features, including the sound systems, morphology and syntax, and the lexicon, and focusing in each case on the challenges that scholars have faced. [07:28] Although we deal with different kinds of issues regarding different components of language structure, in many cases the challenges are interrelated. [07:37] In the first place, up until the late 19th century, describing sounds in unwritten languages was hindered by an absence of basic tools and terms such as methods of phonetic transcription and an understanding of phonemic contrasts and different types of variation. [07:52] This had consequences for the description of languages with phonetic inventories that were both more and less complex than those found in European languages, and which in both cases were evaluated in terms of typical European inventories – or rather, alphabets, due to an orthographic understanding of phonology. [08:11] Several enduring motifs can be distinguished in phonetic accounts, for example the notion that sounds lack consistency or fixedness. [08:20] The motif goes back to Gabriel Sagard’s account of variation in pronunciation in his Huron phrase book of 1632, where he mentioned an “instability of language”. [08:32] According to John Steckley, Sagard in fact recorded not only distinct dialects of Huron but speakers of another language, St. Lawrence Iroquoian. [08:43] However, his comments were frequently mentioned in reports on languages viewed as ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’. [08:48] As you showed in a recent paper, published in 2019, this interpretation was eventually dismissed by Boas as an effect of the native language of the commentators. [08:59] And finally, inaccurate phonetic analysis made it impossible to describe the structure of words, and, since the languages have complex polysynthetic morphology, to understand how they express lexical and grammatical meanings. [09:12] So, morphology and syntax pose another challenge, and here we need to emphasize the degree of complexity that we’re dealing with in most North American languages. [09:22] In a paper in the 2017 Handbook of Polysynthesis, Peter Trudgill has usefully collected expressions that linguists use to describe the complexity of polysynthetic languages, including the adjectives ‘exuberant’, ‘daunting’, ‘spectacular’ and ‘legendary’. [09:38] Considering the fact that even with the terminological baggage that we’re now equipped, the analysis of polysynthetic words is a difficult task, it’s amazing how well some pre-20th-century scholars coped with it, including the first grammatical accounts from the 17th century. [09:54] For example, French missionaries working on Huron described it as complex and beautiful: Jean de Brébeuf in his 1636 Relation referred to the variety of what he called ‘compound words’ as “the key to the secret of their Language”. [10:09] Gabriel Sagard made similar comments about Huron, but future readers of his phrasebook preferred to cite his more negative evaluations of the language such as his reference to “a savage language, almost without rules and likewise imperfect” and also his comments about the lack of consistency in pronunciation. [10:33] Similarly to the effects of inaccurate phonetic analysis that I’ve mentioned, inaccurate morphological analysis hindered the description of lexical meanings. [10:42] In a common motif, verb forms expressing grammatical meanings were interpreted as ‘different verbs’ or ‘different words’. [10:50] This allowed further reinterpretations, where languages such as Cherokee were attributed with an abundance of specific terms as well as a lack of generic terms, both assumed characteristics viewed as evidence of their ‘poverty’. [11:04] Such evaluations of Cherokee are common until the 20th century and complement a related notion according to which the languages lack abstract terms. [11:13] Challenges in descriptions of vocabulary are also illustrated by the Eskimo words for snow, a paragon example of sloppy methodology that encapsulates several typical features of the examples that I discuss in the book. [11:27] These include complex life cycles in their history, a rhetorical versatility that allows commentators to employ them as evidence of often contradictory claims about the languages and their speakers, and finally a certain timelessness of linguistic examples and the related stereotypes of the speakers that are disconnected from their present nature. [11:46] JMc: Can you tell us what linguistic scholarship or linguistic innovations, if I can put it that way, were made by speakers of American languages themselves? [11:56] So one famous example is perhaps the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah. [12:02] Could you tell us about this and other comparable efforts? [12:05] MK: Yes, you’re right, the Cherokee syllabary is the most famous example. [12:10] It’s amazing how quickly it was adopted by the Cherokees in the 1820s and how it contributed to a rich literary tradition and a sense of national identity. [12:20] Several periodicals were printed in the syllabary, one of which, the Cherokee Advocate, was published with one break up until the early 20th century. [12:29] The syllabary is also familiar to non-linguists: street signs in the syllabary are part of the linguistic landscape in North Carolina and Oklahoma, and most users of Apple computers are familiar with the Cherokee font that has long been supplied with the operating system. [12:44] It’s worth looking at the historical context of the development and history of the syllabary. [12:50] In 1838, most Cherokees who were still living in their traditional homeland in the southern Appalachia were forcibly removed to what is now the state of Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, which resulted in a heavy loss of life, similarly to the other forced removals of the other so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast. [13:10] There are many poignant reports of the removal, for instance by the missionary Daniel Butrick, who accompanied the Cherokees on the death march. [13:18] It’s also striking to compare the literature printed in the syllabary with the contexts in which the Cherokee language was typically mentioned in European publications in linguistics, ethnology, and sociology in the second half of the 19th century. [13:34] If we look at these surveys, for example The Principles of Sociology by the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, we’ll find a reference to the Cherokees as one of the so-called “inferior races” that are not capable of abstract thought and so their language abounds in specific vocabulary. [13:50] This is one of the common misconceptions I’ve mentioned earlier. [13:54] But apart from the Cherokee syllabary, there were also other writing systems that were developed indigenously. [14:00] There is, for example, the Great Lakes Algonquian Syllabary. [14:03] I only mention it in my book, but Lucy Thomason recently gave a paper about it at a session documenting the contribution of the Smithsonian Institution to American linguistics. [14:13] There is a large corpus of literature in Meskwaki written in the syllabary, known as papepipo, which was collected for the Bureau of American Ethnology by Truman Michelson, and is now found in the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives. [14:28] The manuscripts have been a source of grammars, dictionaries and collections of stories compiled by several generations of scholars, for example Bloomfield’s 1946 sketch of Algonquian. [14:39] As for linguistic work by Indigenous scholars, I’ve already suggested that collaboration with Indigenous consultants can be seen as one of the defining features of the Americanist tradition. [14:50] One should mention John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, a part-Tuscarora staff member at the Bureau of Ethnology, and later the Bureau of American Ethnology. [15:00] Hewitt initially worked as a consultant to Erminnie Smith, but later became an authority in Iroquoian studies. [15:06] He’s now mostly known for his two-volume “Iroquoian cosmology”. [15:10] Hewitt was a very gifted linguist but unfortunately, he left little published theoretical work, basically one paper on polysynthesis published in 1893. [15:19] His uneven career at the Bureau has been attributed to various factors, including a lack of a college education, his Indigenous heritage, poor communication skills and attention to detail as well as the negative response to his paper on polysynthesis by Daniel Garrison Brinton, professor of archaeology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and president in 1894 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [15:48] An apt description of Hewitt’s status was given by William John McGee, Hewitt’s mentor at the Bureau, who described him as “handicapped by unsatisfactory literary methods and practically no ability to express himself orally” but second only to Franz Boas among American scholars in his linguistic knowledge. [16:10] And finally, there are Indigenous scholars who worked with Boas, including William Jones, whose work on Meskwaki was continued by Truman Michelson after Jones was killed while doing fieldwork in the Philippines. [16:23] More well-known is Ella Cara Deloria, who worked with Boas until his death in 1942, and with Ruth Benedict till her death in 1948. [16:34] Her writings fall into three categories: linguistic, in particular the collection of myths and tales Dakota Texts and the Dakota Grammar, which she co-authored with Boas, as well as ethnographic studies and a work of fiction, the novel Waterlily, published in 1988. [16:52] These works were written for different audiences, lay and professional, but all result from her wish to preserve and disseminate knowledge about her people, as documented by herself in conversations and interviews. [17:05] In summary, Indigenous scholars have made an important contribution to linguistics, which, however, remains poorly known to a wider audience. [17:14] There are many scholars whose life and work deserve interest, and it seems it’s now time someone told the story of nearly five centuries of Indigenous scholarship, in a way, to go beyond what I have tried to in my history of European and American scholarship in general. [17:30] JMc: Well, thank you very much for this tour of Americanist scholarship. [17:34] MK: Great, thanks. [17:34] I really enjoyed it. [17:36]

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Sep 30, 2022 • 29min

Podcast episode 28: Franz Boas and the Boasians

Franz Boas, a groundbreaking figure in American anthropology and linguistics, and Ruth Benedict, a key cultural anthropologist, delve into the fascinating dawn of American linguistics. They discuss Boas's transformative approach to documenting indigenous languages and his challenge to evolutionary frameworks of his time. The dialogue also highlights the clash of phonologies, examining Boas’s critiques of earlier anthropologists and his pivotal contributions to understanding sounds across cultures. Their insights illuminate the lasting legacy of Boas and his students in language sciences.

Jul 31, 2022 • 30min

Podcast episode 27: Interview with Peter Trudgill on sociolinguistic typology

Peter Trudgill, a renowned sociolinguist, shares fascinating insights on how community structures shape language. He discusses the emergence of linguistic complexity, using ancient Greek as a case study and illustrating how language contact can either simplify or complicate language. Trudgill contrasts modern perceptions of human societies with realities of the past, emphasizing diversity in pre-modern communities. He also explores the nuances between linguistic categories and native understandings, shedding light on the importance of preserving endangered languages.

Jun 30, 2022 • 26min

Podcast episode 26: Interview with Philipp Krämer on creoles and creole studies

In this interview, we talk to Philipp Krämer about the history of the study of creole languages and present-day efforts to standardise creoles around the world. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 26 Primary sources Adam, Lucien (1883): Les idiomes négro-aryen et maléo-aryen. Essai d’hybridologie linguistique. Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie. Baissac, Charles (1880): Etude sur le patois créole mauricien. Nancy: Berger-Levrault et Cie. Dietrich, Adolphe (1891): Les parlers créoles des Mascareignes. In: Romania, 20: 216-277. Focard, Volcy (1885): Du patois créole de l’île Bourbon. In: Bulletin de la Société des Sciences et Arts de l’île de la Réunion, année 1884: 179-239. Magens, Jochum Melchior (1770): Grammatica over del creolske sprog, som bruges paa de trende Danske Eilande, St. Croix, St. Thomas, og St. Jans i Amerika. Copenhagen: Gerhard Giese Salikath. Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas (2000): Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan, insbesondere der dasigen Neger und der Mission der Evangelischen Brüder unter denselben. Erster Teil: Kommertierte Ausgabe des vollständigen Manuskriptes aus dem Archiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut (G. Meier, S. Palmié, P. Stein, & H. Ulbricht, Eds.). Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung. Oldendorp, Christian Georg Andreas (2002): Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan, insbesondere der dasigen Neger und der Mission der Evangelischen Brüder unter denselben. Zweiter Teil: Die Missionsgeschichte (3 vols.). (H. Beck, G. Meier, S. Palmié, A. H. van Soest, U. von Horst, & P. Stein, Eds.). Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung. Poyen-Bellisle, René de (1894): Les sons et les formes du créole dans les Antilles. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. Saint-Quentin, Auguste de (1872): Notice grammaticale et philologique sur le créole de Cayenne. In: Saint-Quentin, Alfred de (ed.): Introduction à l’histoire de Cayenne. Antibes: Marchand. 99-169. Schuchardt, Hugo (1882-1987) : Kreolische Studien I-X. Online at http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/werk/schriften/vollstaendige-liste Turiault, Jean (1874): Etude sur le langage créole de la Martinique. (1ère partie) In: Bulletin de la Société Académique de Brest, deuxième série, tome I (1873-1874): 401-516. Turiault, Jean (1877): Etude sur le langage créole de la Martinique. (2e partie) In: Bulletin de la Société Académique de Brest, deuxième série, tome III (1875-1876): 1-111. Secondary sources DeGraff, Michel (2005): Linguists’ most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism. In: Language in Society, 34: 533-591. Krämer, Philipp (2013): Creole exceptionalism in a historical perspective – from 19th century reflection to a self-conscious discipline. In: Language Sciences 38. 99-109. Krämer, Philipp (2014): Die französische Kreolistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Rassismus und Determinismus in der kolonialen Philologie. Hamburg: Buske (Kreolische Bibliothek, Band 25). Krämer, Philipp / Vogl, Ulrike / Kolehmainen, Leena (2022): What is Language Making? In: International Journal of the Sociology of Language 274. 1-27. Krämer, Philipp / Mijts, Eric / Bartens, Angela (2022): Language Making of Creoles in Multilingual Postcolonial Societies. In: International Journal of the Sociology of Language 274. 51-82. McWhorter, John (2001): The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars. In: Linguistic Typology, 5: 125-166. McWhorter, John (2005): Defining Creole. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press. Selbach, Rachel (2020): On the History of Pidgin and Creole Studies, in: Umberto Ansaldo/Myriam Meyerhoff (edd.), The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Londres/New York, Routledge, 365–383. Sousa, Silvio Moreira de. (2016) : A influência de Hugo Schuchardt na primeira geração de lusocrioulistas (Dissertation). Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Sousa, Silvio Moreira de / Mücke, Johannes / Krämer, Philipp (2019): A History of Creole Studies. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. (online). Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:13] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:25] In this episode, we continue our exploration of contact linguistics by talking to Philipp Krämer. [00:33] Philipp is a researcher at the Free University of Berlin and has published widely on the history of the study of creole languages and on the sociolinguistic situation of several present-day creoles. [00:46] So, Philipp, to get us started, could you give us a brief sketch of the history of creole linguistics? [00:53] So when did pidgin and creole languages first attract the interest of scholars, and is there continuity between the earliest scholarly efforts and current creole studies? [01:05] PK: Well, creole languages had already been around for a while when they first were described. [01:10] We find the first descriptions of creole languages towards, say, the end of the 18th century. [01:16] There were a few mentions before in courtroom proceedings, for example, and traveller reports, but then we have the first grammars, which are quite particularly already grammars of the Dutch-based creole of the Virgin Islands at the end of the 18th century. [01:31] And then there’s sort of a pause where there’s not a lot going on until the end of the 19th century, where we find a lot of new descriptions mainly of French-based creoles, so we find descriptions basically of almost all French-based creoles within the range of 20, 30 years, with the exception of Haitian Creole, which is a very important exception, and Seychelles Creole, but the rest gives us almost a complete picture. [01:54] And those were very interesting persons who actually wrote them, because they were physicians and teachers and colonial administrators, so no trained linguists for the most part. [02:05] And at the same period, we also, of course, have to mention the name of Hugo Schuchardt, who is usually seen as sort of the founding father of creolistics, who published widely on creole languages also towards the end of the 19th and early 20th century, mainly on English-based and Portuguese-based creoles. [02:23] So this sort of completes the picture, and those are very interesting universes, so to speak, those early creolists and Schuchardt as a sort of monolith. [02:32] And then there’s another sort of break towards the beginning of the 20th century until the post-war period when, of course, linguistics picks up as a whole and the whole theory-building of contact linguistics and also pidgin and creole linguistics sort of emerges as a discipline and academic practice. [02:49] JMc: So when you say creole languages had already been around for a while before they attracted the attention of scholars, does that imply that creoles, as we understand them today, are specifically a phenomenon that has come out of European colonialism of the modern period, or were there creoles or contact languages more broadly earlier in human history? [03:13] PK: I think it depends on the definition that you have of a creole or pidgin or contact language. [03:18] One definition is often to say that, yes, that’s a phenomenon of colonialism, of colonial expansion – not necessarily only European expansion, but for the most part, of course. But creoles, of course, connect in a lot of ways also structurally in the way they emerge to other contact scenarios also in earlier times or even in antiquity. [03:38] So it’s a matter of definition, probably, and I would say it’s a sort of continuum going from creoles to other contact phenomena, so setting them apart to some extent, I think, theoretically won’t work. [03:51] JMc: Yeah. [03:51] And what sort of other contact phenomena are you thinking of? [03:55] PK: Well, one that is often mentioned is, of course, the history of English and also the history of French. [03:59] Some linguists often say that French is a creole that made it, sort of it used to be Latin and then had a heavy history of contact but grew into a national language and a dominant language, of course, but also underwent a lot of restructurations in this whole process of, for example, of unguided language acquisition of Vulgar Latin by the population in what is today France. [04:22] So there are some parallels, but of course the setting, the historical setting, of European expansion and colonialism is still pretty much different from what we can see in the Roman Empire, of course. [04:33] JMc: So do you think it’s something that is unique, European colonial expansion of the modern period? [04:37] PK: Well, it’s probably unique at least in the completeness of the project, this way of, ‘We want to conquer the whole world, and we will divide the whole world between the European colonial powers,’ so this whole completeness and absoluteness of the aspiration of European colonialism is probably something that is quite different, yes. [04:58] JMc: And do you think that it’s also a uniform thing, that European colonialism had the same expression everywhere in the world, or is the experience different in, say, Africa and South America, Australia and North America? [05:13] PK: Well, it’s different, of course, locally or geographically, for example, depending on whether or not there was a local population already. [05:19] If you look at creole contexts, for example, in the Indian Ocean, Réunion, which wasn’t populated before colonialism, whereas in many other colonial contexts, of course, we have local population with their languages, and this creates a completely different dynamic. [05:33] And also, the different colonial powers had different approaches to their colonial projects and the way they transmitted their European languages, the way they imposed them or didn’t impose them, and the way there were possibilities for the local populations to acquire those languages, which, of course, also explains why there are fewer Spanish-based creole languages and more French-based or English-based languages. [05:59] That’s all part of the colonial histories of the different colonial powers. [06:02] JMc: OK. [06:03] What is specifically the story, the difference between French and Spanish? [06:07] PK: It often is said that the Spanish Empire more tried to push through with colonialism through language and sort of also very much connected to the Christian mission, which often had an effect in imposing the language to the local population. [06:25] Also, the way, for example, plantation economy was organized, which in the French context, for example, if we look at the Indian Ocean, provided more contact with the French language in the beginning, and then later with mass slavery and the plantations, this context was more and more reduced, which led to more and more creolization, and those different models of organizing the colonies and the colonial economy, I think, made a huge difference. [06:52] JMc: OK. [06:52] Yeah, so if I may misquote Nebrija, didn’t he write something along the lines of, ‘Empire always expands with language’? [07:01] PK: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it does, but probably the empire itself takes a decision on how to expand and how to expand with language. [07:08] For instance, we don’t see a lot of Dutch around in the world anymore except for a few pockets, sort of, even though the Dutch Empire was huge and the Dutch influence during colonial times was immense, but still, the approach to language was a different one. [07:23] JMc: Yeah. [07:24] And you mentioned also that the early descriptions of creoles were often not by trained linguists. [07:31] What sort of difference does that make to the descriptions? [07:35] Are they better quality or less good quality, or do they just have a completely different approach to describing the languages? [07:42] PK: I’m not sure if the profession of the author has a huge impact on how those descriptions turned out to be. [07:50] I think it’s very often more the personal approach to the language, the personal relationship to the language, that makes a difference. [07:57] Most of these descriptions are extremely colonial in the way they look at language, but they have different nuances in the way they approach it. [08:04] We’ve got some of those physicians that have a more sort of nature and biology-based perspective, some of them, that try to connect, for example, to evolutionary theory that came about in the 19th century. [08:17] Others, of course, strengthen a bit more the educational aspect of language acquisition, for example. [08:23] That’s more the teachers who do that, but those are broad tendencies. [08:27] I wouldn’t say that this is a sort of very deterministic pattern of organizing the texts. [08:35] JMc: So do you think that the attitudes that they had were markedly different from the sorts of attitudes that linguists have today when they’re describing creole languages, or do you think that there are prejudices and even tropes about creole languages that continue to influence present-day scholarship? [08:52] So in the last interview with Felicity Meakins, we discussed Michel DeGraff’s polemical notion of creole exceptionalism. [09:00] Do you think that this is a genuine problem in creole scholarship? [09:04] PK: Well, there is, of course, a difference between then and now in the way that those texts from, say, the 19th century were openly colonialist, of course. [09:11] They very much explicitly followed the racist ideology of colonialism and tried to explain the emergence of creole languages on the basis of these racial hierarchizations, saying that those speakers supposedly had less cognitive abilities, that character was supposed to influence creolization and so on. [09:30] And of course, we don’t find that anymore in creolistics today. [09:33] I think most creolists today would say that they adopt a decolonial attitude to languages or to creole languages but, of course, the way of doing that can be very different from one person to another, and we find some who say that, ‘We document creole languages. We take a purely descriptive approach, and that’s an apolitical approach to creole languages,’ but of course, that means also that you let the whole linguistic inequality thing run its course, because you don’t interfere with it. [10:04] And that’s something that I often observe, especially in this sort of exceptionalist corner of creolistics, and that creates a problem, of course, in the way we as researchers deal with the societies that we interact with. [10:18] We still have sort of epistemological residues, I think, in the way we describe creole languages today, and very often they are described in a sort of dialectic relationship with their European-based languages. [10:31] The research practices are often institutionally dependent on the traditional disciplines, like if I’m researching French-based creoles, that will be in the French department; if I’m researching English-based ones, that will be in the English department, and so on… [10:46] JMc: But I guess maybe to put that in context, at least in Germany, even if you’re studying Basque, for example, you will usually be attached to the… PK: Definitely, yes. [10:54] JMc: …department of Romance linguistics. [10:56] PK: Exactly. [10:56] JMc: Or if you’re studying Australian languages, you’ll be attached to a department of, you know, Anglistik… PK: Exactly. [11:02] JMc: …English linguistics, yeah. [11:03] PK: So those categories are still very strong and very influential. [11:07] And this also means that the field of creole studies is often divided along those lines of different background languages, if you like. [11:17] And then we also have this very strong notion of trying to construct creole languages as different, as inherently different, and that’s also the basis of the strain of thought of creole exceptionalism, to try and show that they are different, and they form a distinct class, and, of course, that’s something that can very easily feed back into the sort of colonial logic of creating the Other, of exoticizing the object of study that you have. [11:44] It’s not necessarily the intention of these researchers, but it creates a basis, especially outside academia, for those who want to sort of exclude creole languages and say like, ‘We can’t use them in formal domains or in education because, as research has shown, they are simple, they are not complex,’ and so on. [12:01] And I think there’s a huge responsibility there to explain that even if we find that they are less complex or simple (which I don’t think they are, but others would), then, of course, the responsibility is to explain that this doesn’t mean they are unsuitable for human communication in all contexts. [12:19] JMc: Can you unpack that for us a little bit, what it might mean to say that a creole is ‘simpler’, in inverted commas, than some other kind of language, and why you disagree with that? [12:33] PK: Well, it’s probably… It depends, of course, on your definition of complexity. It’s often said that, for example, there’s less inflectional morphology in creole languages, or the typical prototype of three different criteria that creoles are supposed to not have, so they are described, again, in these terms of lack of certain features as compared to other languages, which I’m pretty critical of as well, the sort of ex negativo approach to describing them. [13:00] And of course, I think the complexity of a language is difficult to break down into numerical values, and that’s basically those quantitative approaches that a lot of researchers are trying to adopt to show complexity in terms of measurable entities and units, and I think that’s not an approach to language that leads us anywhere. [13:26] JMc: In your own sociolinguistic research on present-day creoles, you’ve looked at the question of language-making in several Atlantic and Indian Ocean creoles. [13:35] What is language making, and what does your research tell us about how present-day speakers of creole languages conceptualize and take ownership of their languages? [13:46] PK: Well, language making is an approach that we recently developed in cooperation with colleagues from Belgium and from Finland, and the idea is to describe processes in which we conceptualize languages as entities, which we often do. [14:03] We sort of assign them boundaries. [14:05] We call them names, give them labels, and they are supposed to be units that are clearly delimited and also countable units, sort of, you know, how many languages there are in the world or in a country and so on. [14:18] And our approach is to, even though in linguistics we try to show that this is actually not reality, we are moving towards the sort of fluidity and flexible approach to linguistic practices, but in social contexts, this is still a very strong view of languages, to have them as units. [14:36] So we are trying to show how these processes come about. [14:39] And creoles basically are interesting cases to look at because we have a lot of open debate about them in all those multilingual and postcolonial societies, so this whole language making process of conceptualizing creole languages as entities on their own is very much out in the open. [14:57] It’s always a matter of public debate and a lot of conflict, also, contradictions, and discourse. [15:02] So that’s why it’s interesting sort of to apply this language making approach here. [15:06] And the way speakers claim ownership of their language leads us to something that I would often refer to as a decolonial dilemma, because we have two different ways of looking at the languages. [15:19] Either we construct them as autonomous languages, as entities that are separate from French or English or Portuguese and so on, we do conscious and structured language making in terms of creating standards and spelling and introducing them as school subjects and so on, so we move forward with the emancipation of creoles, but also by imposing a sort of language making approach that we know from Europe, this whole standard language ideology, that is now transferred from French to Creole and so on. [15:49] And on the other side, we have this idea of, it’s fluid practices, we have a continuum between, for example, French and French-based creoles, we have very flexible approaches. [15:59] We might incorporate that into the notion of what a creole is. [16:02] A creole is a system that is open towards the neighbouring languages, as it were, but also, this has the risk of always going on to see creole languages as dependent or as part of the European languages, sort of dialect of French, as they were seen for a long time. [16:19] And this is a sort of dilemma, and emancipation of creole languages from the European languages, that is difficult, and I think the language making approach helps us understand this problem that is there and how to how to move forward with creole languages today. [16:34] JMc: OK. [16:34] And who’s driving the standardization process of creoles in these various postcolonial places? [16:42] So could you mention perhaps a couple of places where this standardization process is actually taking place? [16:48] PK: Mm-hmm. One that was interesting to look at was Mauritius. [16:51] In the past 10 years or so, Creole was introduced in school as a school subject and also as a medium of instruction, and to do so, there was a very structured and systematic strategic process of standardizing, of creating spelling, of providing normative dictionaries, normative grammars and so on. [17:11] So there was, first an academy was put into place that was charged with this mission of elaborating all those linguistic norms that were supposed to be applied in school, and that was a very sort of structured and systematic approach to language making that was driven both by politics, so there was a political will, and also done by specialists with an academic background, by linguists, by trained linguists, who knew the structure of the language who had training also in standardization questions. [17:43] And I think that was a relatively successful approach to how a creole language can be standardized. [17:50] Another example is Cape Verde a while back already. [17:54] It’s a bit of a slower and longer process where, for example, a spelling system was devised that was supposed to be used according to a person’s individual dialect, so you could sort of, had a unified, you had a unified spelling approach, but still could write the dialect the way you speak it under a common roof, as it were. [18:15] And that’s a very interesting approach, I think, also in in terms of language making to keep things open a little. [18:21] You don’t put it all in the same box and it’s fixed and there’s no way to the left or the right, so you can sort of incorporate this reality of fluid linguistic practices, even while standardizing to a certain extent the language. [18:36] And that’s, I think, a very interesting way of looking at language making. [18:42] JMc: OK, and what sort of domains are these newly standardized creoles used in? [18:46] Are they used for television and radio, or for literature, sort of written literature in the form of novels, or for government business? [18:55] PK: That depends on the context and on the country, and there’s quite some media presence for creole in, for example, Mauritius, also in Seychelles. [19:05] Papiamentu, for example, in the Caribbean is widely used across all formal domains, basically, also in politics, in the media, and so on. [19:13] It’s much less so, for example, in the French overseas departments, where French is extremely dominant for all the formal domains, for instance, so it depends very much on the recognition in a given context, and also the way language policy includes creoles into different domains, to what extent it is accepted, and to what extent it is formally accepted. [19:37] For instance, in Cape Verde, some provisions in language policy were extremely detailed. [19:44] For example, there was a decree saying that Creole was supposed to be used in airplanes, so that’s an extremely fine-grained detail of where to promote a creole language in which context. [19:58] JMc: Yeah. [19:59] OK. [20:00] And what is the domestic political situation like in these postcolonial places where creoles are being standardized? [20:08] So who is driving the process? [20:11] Is it local elites, or is it more like a grassroots phenomenon? [20:15] PK: Well, if we look at public discourse about creole languages in some of those societies, it is often said that it is an elite project. [20:25] That’s part of the criticism, particularly by those people who say that ‘We need to hold on to the colonial languages because they provide global opportunities. [20:34] If we teach our children Creole, they will only be able to communicate in the local context.’ [20:40] And one argument that is often put forward is that those local elites allegedly want to teach children Creole to keep them in the local context and then sort of to limit access to the privilege of the global languages. [20:56] But this, of course, doesn’t mean that there are not majority projects. [21:02] Especially in Mauritius, there was quite a widespread support also for the officialization and also introduction of Creole in schools. [21:11] It’s often a matter of social conflict, of course, and of political conflict as well. [21:16] Many of those efforts also in the past, say, 50 years were, of course, driven by decolonial political projects, so more on the left side of the spectrum in terms of using Creole also as a tool of emancipation and of independence from the former colonial powers. [21:35] JMc: Yeah. [21:35] OK. [21:36] And you say that this idea of fluidity, of the fluidity of boundaries between the creole and the European colonial language that the creole is related to, so I think the traditional terms in creolistics are like ‘basilect’ and ‘acrolect’, so you say that that’s part of the definition of a creole, or at least how you would understand a creole. [21:59] How do you even establish the notion of a creole or a mixed language or a standard colonial language? [22:08] How do you even establish that notion? [22:10] Are there structural criteria you can use, or is it purely a sociological phenomenon? [22:18] PK: Well, the question for me would be, do we have to establish boundaries, or is it our job to establish boundaries? [22:25] Linguists are language makers as well, and they have a huge tradition of being language makers, of assigning labels, and of sort of, as soon as you put a grammar into a book, ‘This is a language, and I have the authority, supposedly, that as a linguist I can define it.’ [22:39] Of course, all those questions of what is code switching, where does it start and end and so on, those are questions that we have to raise in research practice because they affect our way of analyzing data and of describing what we find. [22:54] But a much more important question for me is, what makes sense to the community? [22:59] How do they make sense of their own linguistic practices, and do they draw boundaries? [23:03] That’s what actually interests me more. [23:06] When they use this continuum or this fluidity of linguistic practices, are they aware of any differences in their practices, and does this make a difference for them in the way they communicate with one person or another? [23:21] Do they call them different names? [23:24] Do they assign different labels? [23:26] Do they see any boundaries in what they do, and how does this sort of connect to their reality, to different social groups, for example, that they feel they are part of? [23:36] And this is also, there’s a sort of grassroots language making that I’m particularly interested in. [23:44] JMc: OK. [23:44] So you would say, is it a fair representation of your position to say that you believe it’s a social construction, like a creole and a standard language is a social construction, and that it’s a social construction made by the speakers of the language, by the speaker community? [23:59] PK: It is, yeah. [24:01] JMc: So then I guess the question is, what expertise does the linguist bring to the table? [21:06] Are they just reporting on what the community says, or does a linguist have any special expertise? [24:10] PK: Well, the linguist has the expertise of observing what’s happening and also in assisting the local community in making sense of what they do, especially if they want to improve their social context in any way, for example, in education, in politics and so on, particularly in settings where part of, or a huge part of, the speech community is excluded from social resources and from economic resources if they don’t know the dominant language, for example. [24:39] And then our responsibility as linguists is to, first of all, to describe the situation, to diagnose the social problem that arises from this, from the multilingual situation, from the dominance of a certain language or a certain variety, and then to at least provide a base for decision that then the local community can take. [25:02] So it’s more of empowering the decision by the way of information, and by the way of documentation. [25:10] JMc: OK. [25:12] So the linguist brings in a broader sort of worldwide context of familiarity [25:18] with different situations. [25:18] PK: Exactly, yes, and also from a comparative perspective to show like, ‘This has worked in a different community. [25:23] Maybe it’s worthwhile looking at this if some parts can be transferred and if not, where are the differences? [25:29] Why doesn’t this work here if it worked there,’ and so on, so… [25:32] JMc: Yeah. [25:32] OK. [25:33] Great. [25:35] Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [25:37] PK: Thanks for having me. [25:38]

May 31, 2022 • 28min

Podcast episode 25: Interview with Felicity Meakins on contact linguistics

In this interview, we talk to Felicity Meakins about Pidgins, Creoles, and mixed languages. We discuss what they are, and how they are viewed in both linguistic scholarship and in speaker communities. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 25 Bakker, Peter, Daval-Markussen, Aymeric, Parkvall, Mikael, & Plag, Ingo. (2011). Creoles are typologically distinct from non-creoles. Journal of Pidgin and Creole languages, 26(1), 5-42. DeGraff, Michel. (2005). Linguists’ most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism. Language in Society, 34(4), 533-591. McWhorter, John. (2001). The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars. Linguistic Typology, 5(2/3), 125-166. Mufwene, Salikoko. (2000). Creolization is a social, not a structural, process. In I. Neumann-Holzschuh & E. Schneider (Eds.), Degrees of restructuring in creole languages (pp. 65-83). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Meakins, Felicity. (2013). Mixed languages. In Y. Matras & P. Bakker (Eds.), Contact Languages: A Comprehensive Guide (pp. 159-228). Berlin: Mouton. Meakins, Felicity, Hua, Xia, Algy, Cassandra, & Bromham, Lindell. (2019). The birth of a new language does not favour simplification. Language, 95(2), 294-332. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:20] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:24] Regular listeners will recall that in the last episode, we finally concluded our look at European linguistics from the 19th to the 20th century, and were planning to continue our story in America. [00:36] The North Atlantic is well known for being a stormy sea. [00:40] During our passage from Europe to America, we were blown off course and will now make a short detour over the next few episodes via the topic of contact linguistics. [00:51] To introduce us to this topic, we’re joined today by Felicity Meakins, who’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Queensland in Australia. [01:01] Felicity is an expert on contact linguistics, having described several Australian contact varieties, and having made a number of important theoretical contributions to the field. [01:12] So Felicity, can you put us in the picture by telling us what contact linguistics is? [01:19] What does it mean to say that languages are in contact, and are some languages more in contact than others? [01:26] FM: Thanks, James. [01:27] Yeah, so contact linguistics is the study, I guess we would like to say, of languages in contact, but in fact, it’s a bit disingenuous to think about languages being in contact, because, of course, speakers are the agents of languages. [01:42] But to even think about languages being in contact or speakers being in contact, too, is a bit of a funny metaphor. [01:50] So really, when we think about language contact, we’re thinking about bilingualism, we’re thinking about languages being in contact, in a sense, in a bilingual or a multilingual individual’s brain, and we’re starting with those processes, the way that words slide between languages, we talk about these as borrowings, but again, it’s a bit of a tricky metaphor, the way that grammars come into contact and the kinds of influences that grammars within a bilingual’s mind might have. [02:18] So when we’re talking about languages in contact, what we’re really thinking about is the individual, bilingual individual, and the kinds of processes that are going on in their mind. [02:26] But of course, then, that individual exists in a society. [02:30] They talk to other people, so we’re also very interested in contact linguistics in the kinds of contact processes that are perpetuated between speakers, what kinds of uptake, new structures, new lingo that comes in that’s, you know, words that are borrowed and that sort of thing, have within communities. [02:48] So it’s not just about the individual. [02:50] It’s also about that individual and how they interact within other speech communities. [02:54] JMc: So would you say that the way that you describe the bilingual individual means that they have separate languages contained in their mind, and how do you think that the way that you’ve conceptualized contact linguistics in this respect relates to recent work in areas like translanguaging, where there’s this notion that the bilingual individual is not someone who has one or more languages contained in different regions of their brain, but has a selection of resources that they can deploy in different speech situations? [03:24] FM: Yeah, so going back to the first part of that question about whether people have languages compartmentalized in different parts of their brain or different ways of thinking about that, I guess we have that question about language itself. [03:36] So if we go back to Fodor’s idea of modularity of mind — and of course, this taps into a lot of generativist ideas (for instance, Chomsky and others) about the idea that, for instance, language and cognition are separate parts of the mind — we can also think about bilingualism in a similar way. [03:54] So do people have two or more languages that are somehow interconnected within a kind of neurological network, or whether these things are separated — these are all questions that people are exploring. [04:05] One of the ways that people explore these ideas is through what you’ve called translanguaging, which has been a more recent term, but many of us, particularly in the typological literature, have been referring to as code-switching for a long time. [04:17] So this is, yeah, the individual bilingual or multilingual speaker who switches between languages, they might do that between sentences, so they might start a conversation in one language and switch to another language. [04:29] We call that alternational code-switching, but some speakers actually even switch within sentences, and we call that insertional code-switching. [04:36] So that’s where you plonk a word from one language into the grammar of another language, so those are really common ways of code-switching. [04:46] And in more recent times, the literature’s shifted to talking about translanguaging, and we think of this as a more fluid process, but again, questions about whether that involves languages being separated within the mind or not are really interesting. [05:00] JMc: But I guess the term ‘code-switching’, you know — which has its origins in cybernetics, I guess, you know, in the cybernetic notion of code — implies that there is a whole language as a as a defined unit that can be clearly identified, which is perhaps precisely the problem when you’re talking about language mixing and contact languages? [05:19] FM: Yeah, absolutely. [05:22] So, for instance, if you look at the mixed language literature — so mixed languages are bilingual languages which we generally understand as being derived from code-switching in the first place, so I can talk about different forms of mixed languages, but one of the questions that comes up in that literature is whether a mixed language is different from code-switching, so whether it’s an autonomous language system, and by an autonomous language system is a sort of Saussurean idea — we’re thinking about whether changes in components of that language are reflected in components of the ancestry language or not, whether that language as a system is really evolving on its own accord. [06:02] So yeah, that definitely goes back to whether or not we’re compartmentalizing languages in the mind or whether we’re really thinking about these in a more sort of fluid way, so that might be the sort of idea that you’re thinking about. [06:17] JMc: Yeah, and do you think that this idea of a mixed language is a construction of the linguist who is researching the language, or is it something that the speakers of the language, do they think of it, do they conceptualize the languages they’re speaking as mixed languages themselves? [06:34] FM: Yeah, look, that’s a really excellent question. [06:36] So to answer that from a linguist’s perspective, mixed languages were something that I guess the linguistics literature only really started realizing maybe in the ‘80s, so the work of Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman in their really classic 1988 book, and then of course Peter Bakker had the really nice monograph A Language of Our Own, so this is the monograph about Michif, and this was really when mixed languages really started coming on the radar as being contact languages in their own right. [07:10] So of course, a lot of us, as linguists, we’re really pushing against people saying, “Well, this is just code-switching. [07:16] This isn’t mixed… You know, this isn’t a mixed language. [07:18] This isn’t really what we call in Saussurean terms, again, an autonomous language system.” [07:24] So, in a sense, as linguists, we’ve been tasked by other linguists to demonstrate that these really are separate languages, but, of course, speech communities think about them in different ways, and there’s different reasons for that. [07:36] So I work a lot on a mixed language called Gurindji Kriol. [07:38] This is a language that’s spoken in Northern Australia. [07:41] It’s a combination of Gurindji, which is a traditional language of Australia, and Kriol, which is a more recent English-based Creole language. [07:50] So before I started working on this language a couple of decades ago, people would just generally call it, you know, quite derisive terms like sort of ‘rubbish Gurindji’ or, you know, just sort of saying that younger generations weren’t speaking Gurindji properly. [08:04] So the way of speaking that younger generations have didn’t have a label, in a sense, and Salikoko Mufwene, actually, who’s a creolist, really cautions against linguists and contact linguists from labelling languages and contact languages. [08:20] And so I have had this in mind, but it has been quite a useful thing for the community to say, “No, as younger generations we speak a different kind of Gurindji. [08:29] Kriol is mixed in. [08:30] It’s done in really systematic ways in terms of word choice, in terms of grammatical structure, and for us, we’re going to call this language Gurindji Kriol.” [08:40] And so for instance, in the Australian national census now, you can say, “I’m a speaker of Gurindji,” you can say, “I’m a speaker of Kriol,” or you can say you’re a speaker of Gurindji Kriol. [08:49] So in a sense, the speech community now recognizes that as a language in its own right, but yeah, there are real differences often between what speech communities think and what, you know, how linguists label languages. [09:00] JMc: And taking the variety of Gurindji Kriol as an example, what sort of image does the language have? [09:07] In what way is it used now? [09:09] Is it something that is purely used for conversation, or are there sort of efforts at standardization, if I can put it that way, where there’s an effort to develop a standard orthography and where it’s used in official signage or correspondence or to write literature? [09:25] FM: Yeah, so Gurindji Kriol is still a part of the larger language ecology, so the Gurindji community themselves are really aware that it’s only older generations that speak the hard language, the old language, Gurindji, and there’s a lot of grief associated with that, and with that grief, Gurindji Kriol isn’t valued as much. [09:47] It is valued much more by younger generations in the last couple of decades, but so Gurindji itself has an orthography. [09:54] It’s got a spelling system. [09:55] It’s got a dictionary. [09:55] It’s now got a grammar that we released last year. [09:59] Gurindji Kriol itself, we’ve been writing about the language in scientific papers and this sort of thing, but within the community, there isn’t a standard orthography for it. [10:08] It’s really just used among the community, among, you know, people under the age of 45 or 50. [10:14] But having said that, this is starting to change, so we had a wonderful project that started last year that was based around termites. [10:22] So termites are a much-maligned insect variety. [10:26] You know, we usually think of them as eating up houses and that sort of stuff, but they’re very valued by Gurindji people. [10:32] They’re used extensively in bush medicine practices, and the resin from termite mounds is used to stick spearheads, for instance, to wooden shafts and that sort of thing. [10:40] So we had a project around this. [10:40] We have produced a book with the Karungkarni Arts Centre there. [10:46] The book has been written in hard Gurindji, so in the traditional language. [10:49] It was then translated into English, and then we had extensive conversations with the community about actually including the third language, which was Gurindji Kriol, and so there was a lot of discussion about this, about what it meant for the community in terms of how much it values the language or not, but this will actually be the first book that’s produced within the community that actually has Gurindji Kriol as one of the languages of literacy, I guess. [11:14] JMc: So that’s a very interesting point about how the community feels about their language. [11:17] Could you say something about how this feeling that the loss of hard Gurindji represents a loss of culture, so this feeling that maybe Gurindji Kriol is a degenerate form of hard Gurindji, how that sort of idea relates to efforts that are widespread across Australia, and in other countries that have suffered from settler colonialism, to revitalize or revive traditional Indigenous languages? [11:46] Because I guess you could make the argument that reviving a traditional language, so a language that has been lost from use in in day-to-day speech altogether, represents this idea that you’re trying to bring back something that has, you know, a cultural artefact that has been completely taken from you, but I guess in Gurindji Kriol, a new language has developed, like a new way of being a Gurindji person has developed. [12:15] FM: Yeah, that’s right, so Gurindji Kriol sits on the cusp of tradition and modernity. [12:22] It both represents the continuity of traditional Gurindji culture, as well as a nod to the modern world, and the modern world for Indigenous people in northern Australia is Kriol (spelt with a K), which is an English-based Creole language. [12:37] Nonetheless, Gurindji is a really important part of the community — and by that, I mean traditional Gurindji. [12:44] So people are aware that in no longer speaking the traditional language, there are really important cultural aspects that are also not being practised. So, for instance, Gurindji has got an incredible system of cardinal directions. [12:58] There’s at least 32 different ways of saying north, and, you know, multiply that by four, so we’ve got north, south, east, and west. [13:05] Gurindji people don’t use left and right, so if they’re talking about the, I guess, position of the Vegemite in relation to the flour — let’s make this nice and Australian — you know, people talk about the Vegemite being to the east of the flour on the shelf instead of to the left or right, for instance, and so this is a really complex system that is underpinned by the trajectory of the sun but is really absolutely in operation regardless of whether it’s day or nighttime. [13:32] So younger generations who speak Gurindji Kriol absolutely have a sense of cardinal directions, use them. [13:38] They’re absolutely anchored in the world as well, but they don’t have this incredibly complex system as well, so they use terms like ‘north’, ‘south’, ‘east’, and ‘west’, but they’re not inflected for the 32-plus forms that we know that hard Gurindji has. [13:55] So there are certainly ways that the traditional language as it’s no longer being spoken in this really rich form, there are, you know, sort of cultural effects. [14:05] And, you know, another part of the system that we might think about and what we have in Australia, which are called tri-relational kinship terms, so this is where you have highly complex morphology which reflects the relationship of the speaker to the person who’s listening, and also to the referent. [14:21] So you have a three-way relationship that’s encoded in single kinship terms, and that kind of kinship structure is exceedingly important in all First Nations communities across Australia. [14:32] The tri-relational kinship system is incredibly complex, and it is something that’s really on the wane. [14:38] So again, it’s something that there’s a lot of anxiety about these really important systems, whether it’s spatial awareness or kinship, where there are changes going on, and some of those changes are still captured in Gurindji Kriol, but not in quite the same ways. [14:52] JMc: So if we can zoom back out again to broader questions of contact linguistics, can I ask you, are there different kinds of contact varieties? So linguists frequently talk about such things as Pidgins, and Creoles, and mixed languages. [15:09] These terms have come up in your answers to the previous questions. [15:12] How are these different kinds of contact variety defined? [15:16] Do they exhibit specific structural properties, or do these labels describe certain kinds of sociolinguistic situations? [15:24] FM: Yeah, so there has been a debate for a long time about whether we define contact languages according to typological, or structural criteria, or socio-historical criteria. [15:36] Most of us have landed on socio-historical criteria. [15:40] So, for instance, Pidgin languages we consider to be really nobody’s first language. [15:46] They’re languages that are born out of a need to communicate between disparate groups but where there’s also disparate power, so colonial situations, for instance, whether it’s, say, in Australia where people have remained on country but have been colonized in particular ways, or whether you’ve got West African slaves, for instance, being brought to the Caribbean. [16:05] Sometimes those Pidgin languages start being learnt as the first languages of mostly Black communities, different kinds of Black communities, whether it’s in the Caribbean or Pacific or other parts of the world where there are European colonial masters, although I accept that’s gendered [16:23] language, actually. [16:25] So in those situations where children start learning the languages, and over a number of generations, those languages complexify, and they become the first languages of communities, that’s when we start thinking about them as being Creole languages. [16:36] So they generally have a lexifier, which is a European language (particularly English, French, Portuguese, German, even, in Papua New Guinea, has been a lexifier language), and then a number of substrate languages, which influence the way that the structure of the semantics, the sound system, the phonology, and some aspects of grammar are then structured. [16:55] And those languages which then complexify are called Creole languages. [17:00] So those are sort of socio-historical definitions. [17:03] Mixed languages differ because they’re usually born out of situations where there are bilingual communities, so there might be language shift going on. [17:12] This is the case with Gurindji Kriol, which is a complex situation, because there’s a pre-existing Creole, right? [17:16] So this is like a second degree of language contact. [17:19] So in this particular situation, you’ve got language shift from Gurindji to this English-based Creole language, but you’ve got a community that were highly bilingual at the point where this mixed language was produced, but you get other situations like Michif, which I was talking about before, which is a Cree-French mixed language where you had French buffalo hunters who were the men, and then they were married to Cree women, and so this mixed language came about from that kind of socio-historical situation. [17:48] So the mixed languages come out of quite, you know, literally mixed situations, but we prefer to talk about socio-historical criteria to, you know, typological or structural criteria. [18:00] JMc: And do you think there’s enough similarity between these different socio-historical situations to be able to come up with a category like Pidgin, or Creole, or mixed language? [18:10] So is there enough similarity between the experience of people living on country in Australia with British white settler colonists coming in to Africans who have been transported from West Africa to the Caribbean to work on plantations and so on? [18:26] FM: Yeah, I think there is, because what’s at the core of this is a power differential, and a power differential and also, say, numbers of humans. [18:36] So what you have is a very small number of people who are, you know, absolutely in power (these are the European colonists), and then a large population of non-European people who speak different languages who are in a much less powerful situation. [18:54] So I think that’s the real commonality between, say, a situation of slavery, for instance, that we saw in the Caribbean where people were displaced, and Australia where we would still call it, actually, a situation of slavery, although slavery had been officially abolished at this point, but it’s still slavery, but where people are still largely on country or displaced, but not to a large extent. [19:15] JMc: Okay. [19:17] So let me ask you as well: Over the past 20 years or so, there’s been much controversy over so-called Creole exceptionalism, and this is a cluster of ideas and approaches in linguistics that try to treat Creoles as in some way a special type of language different from ‘normal’ languages (in inverted commas). [19:36] I guess this issue feeds back into the previous question about how contact varieties are defined, so do you think there is, for example, a Creole prototype that can be identified on structural grounds, and what do you think the postulation of a Creole prototype tells us about the researchers? [19:53] You know, why would they want to imagine such a thing, and why do they pick the particular parameters that they choose to define the prototype? [20:02] FM: Yeah, so I guess the most recent instantiation of that has been John McWhorter’s 1998 Creole prototype, so that was based on three different features. [20:14] So the idea of that is that Creoles lack inflectional morphology, they lack tonal contrast, and they lack non-compositional derivational morphology. [20:23] And we don’t really have to think too much about two and three. [20:26] It’s really that the thing that linguists have mostly focused on is that lack of inflectional affixation. [20:31] So the idea with this, really, is that the Creole prototype, and therefore Creoles, are actually simpler, morphologically simpler forms of language. [20:40] So Michel DeGraff, who’s a Haitian linguist, has really taken exception to this, and this is where the label, sorry, ‘Creole exceptionalism’ comes from. [20:51] So he had a seminal paper that came out in 2005 called ‘Linguists’ most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism,’ and this appeared in Language in society. [21:02] And so he really called out the field of linguistics for continuing to postulate exceptional and abnormal characteristics in the diachrony or synchrony of Creoles as a class, and he went further, and he was saying that this is really still rooted in the racial essentialism that underpins European colonial expansion, and it’s really perpetualizing the marginalization of Creole languages and their speakers. [21:29] So that’s the kind of background to that debate. [21:31] The thing that really, I guess, it comes down to is whether or not Creole languages have inflectional morphology, and bearing in mind that a lot of lexifier languages are pretty poor — like English, we’ve got, you know, an inflectional s in agreement, our third-person singular agreement system, we’ve got a past tense in -ed — it’s not a whole lot to go on with. [21:52] But yeah, if Creoles have less morphology, then we’re talking about simplification processes and, of course, simplification really, quite reasonably, tweaks the antenna of people when we’re talking about languages which are majority spoken by Black people. [22:08] So that debate has gone on for a bit. [22:10] What’s happened more recently is that there have been phylogenetic approaches to try and, I guess, scale up the data that’s thrown at this debate. [22:19] So there was a very well known paper that came out that was written by Peter Bakker and a number of authors in 2011, and so they really used a lot more Pidgin and Creole languages in this analysis. So, for instance, John McWhorter’s 1998 survey was based just on eight Creole languages; Peter Bakker’s paper was based on a data set of 18 Creole languages, and then they had a second set of analyses that actually ramped this up a lot more and used a lot more Creole languages in it. [22:50] And what they did was, they used features that had been coded in different kinds of databases. [22:55] One of those was the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. [22:59] The other database that was coded up was from John Holm and Patrick’s Comparative Creole Syntax, so they coded up a whole bunch of features and then compared these and used phylogenetic NeighborNet models to see whether Creoles clustered differently based on typological structural features, as opposed to non-Creoles. [23:22] They found clustering, but one of the main criticisms of this paper is that they’re using features that are already identified as perhaps Creole features, so they’re features that we as creolists are kind of interested in, so there’s a sort of circular argumentation to this. [23:37] And many of us have criticized this approach saying what we need to be doing is taking a large database of language features, whether this is from the WALS database, or whether this is from the new Grambank [23:49] database that’s coming out of Jena, and then randomly sampling features from both languages that have been labelled Creole languages based on socio-historical factors and also non-Creole languages, and then seeing whether we get clusters of features. [24:05] And, you know, I’m interested in this question, but what I want to see is the methodology done well, and I think we haven’t really seen that happen just yet, so as of yet, the jury is out, really, on whether we want to be saying that Creole languages have particular structural or typological features that can categorize them as a separate class, or whether really we want to be leaning on those socio-historical features as the way that we categorize contact languages. [24:32] JMc: And do you think that the sort of circular reasoning that has been happening in these studies so far, do you think that it’s just poor methodology, or do you think that it’s that people are blinded by an ideology about simplicity, as DeGraff may argue, or do you think there’s even sort of evil intentions in trying to cast Creoles and Pidgins as inherently defective? [24:57] FM: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. [25:01] I think to answer that, I’d say that linguistics is relatively new to the use of biological methods, so we have been doing this for a while in historical linguistics. [25:11] We’ve been using phylogenetics to create language trees and NeighborNet models for a little while, but I think we still have a little bit to learn from biology. [25:22] So biology has this idea of an ascertainment bias, and an ascertainment bias is where, for instance in linguistics, specifically choosing language features that have been noted for their complexity and simplicity in a particular way. [25:37] So biology is already at a point where they’re interested in particular questions, but what they do is, they randomly select features. [25:44] And I think this is something… [25:46] This is a methodological issue that we really have to think about in linguistics, so this is work that I’ve been doing with biologists Lindell Bromham and Xia Hua, who are at the ANU in Canberra, and we’ve been taking into account, for instance, the idea of the ascertainment bias. [26:03] So we’ve been thinking about the idea of morphological simplification as, for instance, the preferential adoption of simpler elements, like if you’re borrowing, say, prepositions over case morphology, or the simplification of more complex language features, so for instance syncretism of case in language shift scenarios — but the way that we’ve gone about this is to select language features simply on the basis of the fact that they vary, and then we’ve gone through and categorized all of those features and their variants according to morphological complexity, and we’ve used established criteria in the morphological literature, and then we’re asking the question, is there a preferential, you know, for instance, adoption of simpler variants over more complex variants? [26:49] And I think this is the way to get around things like ascertainment bias. [26:53] So I think, you know, as linguists we’re still quite young in using biological methods. [26:59] We’re still not necessarily learning the lessons that biology has also learnt. [27:05] Inadvertently, we’re then perpetuating, for instance, racial stereotypes of Creoles being simpler languages because Creoles are spoken by mostly Black people of different kinds. [27:16] This then feeds into racial stereotypes which are really, you know, just not helpful. [27:22] And so I think that’s how that process is working. Michel DeGraff, of course, would have stronger things to say about this, though, and I absolutely acknowledge those, as would Salikoko Mufwene. [27:33] JMc: Okay. [27:34] Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [27:36]

Mar 31, 2022 • 27min

Podcast episode 24: Interview with Lorenzo Cigana on the Copenhagen Circle

24 snips

Feb 28, 2022 • 27min

Podcast episode 23: Interview with Noam Chomsky on the beginnings of generative grammar

In this insightful conversation, Noam Chomsky, a pivotal figure in linguistics known for his groundbreaking theories on generative grammar, reflects on the emergence of this revolutionary framework. He critiques the behaviorist approach and explores key psychological experiments that reshaped cognitive theories. Chomsky shares intriguing anecdotes from his early academic journey, exchanging political influences for educational choices, alongside personal stories that reveal his relationships in academia. The discussion highlights the cultural shifts that fostered modern linguistic thought.

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