Sound language policies must be consistent with natural language evolution

Societal multilingualism and multilectalism have been among the leading justifications for language policies, especially in the Global South, where many of these have failed. I associate the failures with poor choices of official languages and media of education, which are not consistent with the linguistic behaviors of the majority of the citizenry and the socioeconomic structures of the relevant polities. I review some cases of adequate and inadequate policies around the world and explain ecologically some reasons for either their successes or their failures. In a subset of the cases, I assess the results as mixed. My recommendation is of course not to follow the policy of a particular polity simply because it has succeeded there but to also check whether the ecology of its success is similar to that of the new polity. The relevant ecology includes the socioeconomic structure/system and the linguistic practices of the citizenry for whom the policy is intended. Among the issues to address is, for instance, whether the language adopted as the official language and medium of education is easy for the majority of the citizenry to learn successfully. Another is whether the language policy will make the economic development of the nation more inclusive and empower the majority economically and politically

Les créoles. L'état de notre savoir

RÉSUMÉLes créoles. L'état de notre savoirDans cet article, je définis les vernaculaires créoles d'un point de vue sociohistorique plutôt que structurel et je passe en revue la littérature qui explique comment ils se sont développés. Pendant cet exercice, j'explicite des problèmes qui émanent des définitions traditionnelles et ce dont les hypothèses courantes de genèse ne rendent pas compte et j'argue que la meilleure approche est la linguistique historique et génétique. Celle-ci est fondée dans les histoires socioéconomiques où se sont développés ces vernaculaires. elle reconnaît les différents dialectes des langues lexificatrices qui sont entrées en contact avec des langues non européennes et elle articule les principes qui régissent la sélection des traits intégrés dans le vernaculaire naissant à partir des variétés en compétition.Mots clefs : Mufwene. créole, substrat, superstrat. lexificatrice. relexificationABSTRACTCréoles : The State of the AnIn this article I define creole vernaculars sociohistorically. rather than strucrurally. and survey the literature that accounts for how they developed. In this exercise I explain the problems inherent to traditional definitions and what is not accounted for by current hypotheses of creole genesis. I argue that the best approach to theeeee subject matter is one that treats the development of creoles as a topic of historical and genetic linguistics. well grounded in the socio-economie histories in which these vernaculars developed. factoring in the relevant dialects of the lexifiers that came in contact with non-European languages. and articulating principles that govern the sélection of features from the competing varieties into the emerging vemacular.Key words: Mufwene. creole, substratum. superstratum. lexifier. relexificatio

Restructuring, Feature Selection, and Markedness: From Kimanyanga to Kituba

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Historical Issues in African Linguistics (1994

Modeling the emergence of contact languages

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena

Modeling the Emergence of Contact Languages

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.</p

The ecology of language: New imperatives in linguistics curricula

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

English in the Black diaspora: Development and Identity

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe