This edited collection celebrates Albert Valdman's contribution to research on creoles. Its 14 articles grouped into three broad themes provide a good overview of the diversity of current research and research perspectives on French creoles. The introduction outlines Valdman's career and achievements as an academic and teacher, and summarizes each article.
Section 1, “History,” begins with T. A. Klingler & Nathalie Dajko's article on the documentation of Louisiana Creole in areas cut off from the current center of its usage. Investigating three currently rare features, they demonstrate that the data from the periphery support 19th-century patterns and the hypothesis that French-like features in current Louisiana Creole arose later due to contact with varieties of Louisiana French. Marie-Christine Hazaël-Masieux explores the challenges and insights of historical documents written in a creole. First, despite being scarce and sketchy, they provide evidence that creoles are continuously changing and emerged gradually. Second, despite uncertainty about their origin, they record obsolete forms and processes of development. Finally, despite a fair amount of variation, they attest to the relative grammatical stability of creoles. The article does not discuss what variation may tell us about the sociolinguistic structure of (early) creoles and the relative importance of language-internal and contact-induced change, both topics of current interest. Pierre Rézeau investigates the lexical entries in a Languedocien-French dictionary punctuated with “numerous lengthy digressions about the language, flora, fauna, and customs of the West Indies, and especially of Saint-Domingue.” (p. 47). Focusing on new creations, regionalisms, and borrowings, he demonstrates how an analysis of such sources provides a unique insight into life and language usage in the colonies. Clancy Clements's paper argues that we need to posit a grammaticalization–lexicalization continuum because there is sufficient evidence that while lexical elements can grammaticalize, grammatical forms may also lexicalize. The latter process is less frequently attested, but like grammaticalization it is essentially unpredictable and involves different stages. Elements do not have to pass through all stages, and for reasons still unknown, some stages are still unattested while others are very frequent. The final article in this section, by John McWhorter, argues that creoles emerged only where pidgins had formerly existed. He maintains that a current view that sees creoles as local creations whose nature was crucially shaped by the social and linguistic conditions of each plantation colony is a fiction of a liberal academic ideology.
The section on society opens with Derek Bickerton's defense of his currently much contested claim that creole genesis involved a break in language transmission. Unlike McWhorter, he argues that language transmission was generally made impossible by demographic factors such as the ratio of new to old slaves and social factors like the progressive dilution of the original contact language (OCL) owing to its learning by new slaves, processes of mutual adaptation between new and old slaves, and the necessity for communication. If interactions took place mostly between new slaves, the OCL was reduced to a rudimentary pidgin and only then expanded to a creole. Robert Chaudenson discusses the structure and origin of a micro-system of coded language based on numbers 1 to 40 and 71 among the urban population frequenting gambling parlors in Mauritius. He demonstrates that it is not related to Bingo numbers used in La Réunion but is unable to propose its true origin. Jean Bernabé's programmatic article about the interdialectal teaching certification, Certificat d'Aptitude pour l'Enseignement Secondaire (CAPES), informs us that it was conceived to create a “coherent” pan-(French) creole identity, to encourage exchange among the French creolophone populations in the Antilles and Indian Ocean and to direct future developments toward a more normative creole to meet the increasing communication needs in education. Linguistically, this involves drawing on these creoles' close lexical and structural similarities, inter-creole borrowings, borrowings from French, and neologisms. He does not make it clear, however, if there is popular demand for such a supralocal normative identity outside of academia. While there are close connections between Martinique and Guadeloupe, the links between the former and Guyane and La Réunion in particular are tangible – they are French overseas administrative units. It seems to me that local integration is currently a more pressing issue. Créole Guyanais, for instance, is only one among several mother tongues and lingua francas in highly multilingual Guyane. To promote social harmony and economic development, it is vital for its speakers and other Guyanais to forge links and to exchange with one another and its neighboring countries rather than to create artificial ties based on former (post)colonial commonalities. The section's last article examines the nature of Haitian French. Analyzing semi-guided interviews with bilingual Haitian Creole and French speakers resident in Haiti and the United States, Corinne Etienne demonstrates that while all speakers confirm the existence of features specific to Haitian French, only half of them would see this fact as indicative of the existence of a distinct variety of Haitian French. Local practices are felt to be problematic because they reflect negatively on a person's social status and competence in French. Adherence to European French norms is believed to be necessary because Haitians do not consider themselves to be rightful owners of French. Etienne suggests that participants' efforts not to use and to identify with Haitian French “might be a way to preserve their individual identity” as members of the Haitian elite and to oppose recent social changes “that have created a new linguistic national identity in which Creole has more weight and value than before.” (p. 198).
The final section, “Variation,” starts with an article by Salikoko Mufwene discussing two of Valdman's positions on creole genesis that are currently of interest. He demonstrates that Valdman already suggested in 1977 that varieties of regional popular rather than standard French functioned as inputs to French-lexified creoles. The variable nature of this input is still reflected in contemporary creoles that preserve many such regionalisms. Valdman also showed the untenability of the stereotypical pidgin–creole–decreolization developmental path for creoles. From the beginning, settings involved a range of varieties that emerged owing to different contact patterns and transplantation of varieties. Annegret Bollée & Pamela Nembach's contribution revisits the dialectal differences in Haitian Creole posited by Valdman on the basis of Fattier's extensive linguistic atlas of Haiti. While their analysis of lexical data does not support the existence of three distinct dialects, their investigation of morphosyntactic data is “well suited to give support to the speakers' impression that the speech of people from the North or the South is different from that in the Center” (232–33). Kevin Rottet investigates the distribution of interrogative pronouns in Louisiana Creole. He shows that in both the Mississippi and Teche varieties, subject interrogative forms are distinguished from object forms by the presence of final ki. Moreover, the Mississippi variety differs in that it has a minor form ki moun (ki) ‘who’ which, unlike all other forms, is used only for [+ human] reference. Rottet argues that it emerged in the Mississippi variety as a result of the importation of slaves from Haiti around 1809–1810 and thus supports Klingler's theory of a common origin for the two varieties of Louisiana Creole. Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh examines the expression of gender in French creoles. Defining gender as a property of the noun phrase, her survey of gender marking on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and determiners demonstrates that “these languages have only elementary gender distinctions based on animacy and sex differences” (260–61). This is due to the interplay of functional factors such as their low communicative load, and acquisitional factors such as the relative absence of gender in spoken French. The final article investigates the “typical” ordering pattern of tense, mood, and aspect markers in creoles. Anand Syea proposes that the position of tense in relation to modality and aspect is determined by principles also used in other grammatical subsystems. It “is a consequence of a Deictic Ordering Principle according to which where a deictic and a non-deictic element co-exist, the deictic element takes linear precedence or asymmetrically c-commands the non-deictic one” (294). The ordering of aspect in relation to modality is determined by the fact that the former has to be adjacent to the VP.
Despite the wide range of subjects treated, this collection is very stimulating and is a must for those who wish to do research on (French) creoles and those already engaged in work in this area.
