West African Pidgin: world language against the grain

West African Pidgin ("Pidgin") is a cluster of related, mutually intelligible, restructured Englishes with up to 140 million speakers in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, and The Gambia. Spoken by just few thousand people two centuries ago, "modernisation" and "shallow social entrenchment" have driven the transformation of Pidgin into a "super-central" world language. Demographic growth, migration, the expansion of West African cultural industries and economies, and people-to-people contacts are likely to expand Pidgin further. Already the largest language of West Africa, Pidgin may be spoken by 400 million people by 2100. The rise of Pidgin goes against the grain. World languages like English, French, Chinese, or Arabic mostly spread through colonisation, elite engineering, and state intervention. The trajectory of Pidgin, therefore, holds great potential for exploring the dynamics of large-scale natural language evolution in the twenty-first century

A grammar of Pichi

Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. It is an offshoot of 19th century Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with West African relatives like Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English, as well as with the English-lexifier creoles of the insular and continental Caribbean. This comprehensive description presents a detailed analysis of the grammar and phonology of Pichi. It also includes a collection of texts and wordlists. Pichi features a nominative-accusative alignment, SVO word order, adjective-noun order, prenominal determiners, and prepositions. The language has a seven-vowel system and twenty-two consonant phonemes. Pichi has a two-tone system with tonal minimal pairs, morphological tone, and tonal processes. The morphological structure is largely isolating. Pichi has a rich system of tense-aspect-mood marking, an indicative-subjunctive opposition, and a complex copular system with several suppletive forms. Many features align Pichi with the Atlantic-Congo languages spoken in the West African littoral zone. At the same time, characteristics like the prenominal position of adjectives and determiners show a typological overlap with its lexifier English, while extensive contact with Spanish has left an imprint on the lexicon and grammar as well

Jacques Rongier, Dictionnaire éwé-français

Ewe has been the subject of some of the earliest work in African linguistics, it is one of the major languages along the West African littoral zone between Senegal and Nigeria, an important regional language in Ghana, and the most widely spoken language of Togo. Jacques Rongier’s monumental and comprehensive Dictionnaire éwé-français narrows an existing gap. The only comprehensive Ewe dictionary to-date was Westermann’s Ewe-Deutsches Wörterbuch written in German. We can only hope that the ga..

Interview mit Dr. Kofi Yakpo, Associate Professor an der University of Hong Kong, alias "Linguist"

Kofi Yakpo ist Insidern auch bekannt als „Linguist“ der HipHop-Formation „Advanced Chemistry“. In dieser Ausgabe von „Sprachreport“, dem Magazin des Instituts für deutsche Sprache beantwortet er Fragen zur sprachlichen Diskurswelt des HipHop. Kofi Yakpo alias „Linguist“ gründete 1987 mit Torch und Toni-L die HipHop Band „Advanced Chemistry“. Die Single „Fremd im eigenen Land“ und die B-Seite „Ich zerstöre meinen Feind“ gelten heute als Meilensteine der deutschen Musikgeschichte. Kofi Yakpo studierte in Köln und Port Vila (Vanuatu) Linguistik, Ethnologie und Politik, sowie Management und Jura in Genf und London. Er promovierte an der Universität Nijmegen (Niederlande) und forscht und lehrt heute als Professor für Linguistik an der Universität Hongkong

A grammar of Pichi

Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole spoken on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. It is an offshoot of 19th century Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with West African relatives like Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin English, as well as with the English-lexifier creoles of the insular and continental Caribbean. This comprehensive description presents a detailed analysis of the grammar and phonology of Pichi. It also includes a collection of texts and wordlists. Pichi features a nominative-accusative alignment, SVO word order, adjective-noun order, prenominal determiners, and prepositions. The language has a seven-vowel system and twenty-two consonant phonemes. Pichi has a two-tone system with tonal minimal pairs, morphological tone, and tonal processes. The morphological structure is largely isolating

Transatlantic patterns: The relexification of locative constructions in Sranan

Spatial relations in Sranan are expressed through a broad range of constructions. Some of these reflect the influence of the Dutch superstrate, others clearly reflect the influence of the substrate languages of Sranan. These “Niger-Congo” structures are markedly different from equivalent “Indo-European” ones. Pattern relexification is held responsible for the wholesale carry-over of substrate semantics plus morpho-syntactic specifications into Sranan locative constructions. The synchronic variation in Sranan is partially explained by the equally broad variety of constructions found within and across the African languages and language families that participated in the creation of Sranan. However, much of the apparent diversity is superficial in nature, for it chiefly concerns constituent order. In contrast, morphosyntactic features like the nature of dependency, as well as the semantic structure of spatial descriptions remain highly similar in Sranan and the substrates

Chapter 12 The tense-mood-aspect systems of the languages of Suriname

This chapter deals with tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) marking in the languages of Suriname, focusing on the stability of forms, meanings, and structural pat-terns. Despite its prominent position in the creolization debate and occasional mentions in the literature on linguistic areas, studies on TMA in (non creoliza-tion) contact settings in Suriname are relatively few. TMA has been studied in detail in the world’s languages, however, in terms of: - typology (Dahl 1985, 2000; Boland 2006; Dahl and Velupillai 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d; Dryer 2011; Velupillai 2012); - creolization (Singler 1990; Bakker et al. 1994; Winford 2001; Velupillai 2015: 391–403); and - historical development & grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994

A Meta-Analytic Study of the Neural Systems for Auditory Processing of Lexical Tones

The neural systems of lexical tone processing have been studied for many years. However, previous findings have been mixed with regard to the hemispheric specialization for the perception of linguistic pitch patterns in native speakers of tonal language. In this study, we performed two activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses, one on neuroimaging studies of auditory processing of lexical tones in tonal languages (17 studies), and the other on auditory processing of lexical information in non-tonal languages as a control analysis for comparison (15 studies). The lexical tone ALE analysis showed significant brain activations in bilateral inferior prefrontal regions, bilateral superior temporal regions and the right caudate, while the control ALE analysis showed significant cortical activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus and left temporo-parietal regions. However, we failed to obtain significant differences from the contrast analysis between two auditory conditions, which might be caused by the limited number of studies available for comparison. Although the current study lacks evidence to argue for a lexical tone specific activation pattern, our results provide clues and directions for future investigations on this topic, more sophisticated methods are needed to explore this question in more depth as well