Full Description
Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas brings together the original research of nineteen leading scholars on language contact and pidgin/creole genesis. In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid to the role of historical, cultural and demographic factors in language contact situations. John Victor Singler's body of work, a model of what such a research paradigm should look like, strikes a careful balance between sociohistorical and linguistic analysis. The case studies in this volume present investigations into the sociohistorical matrix of language contact and critical insights into the sociolinguistic consequences of language contact within Africa and the African Diaspora. Additionally, they contribute to ongoing debates about pidgin/creole genesis and language contact by examining and comparing analyses and linguistic outcomes of particular sociohistorical and cultural contexts, and considering less-studied factors such as speaker agency and identity in the emergence, nativization, and stabilization of contact varieties.
Contents
1. Acknowledgments; 2. Introduction (by Angermeyer, Philipp S.); 3. Part 1. The sociohistorical matrix of language contact; 4. Population factors, multilingualism and the emergence of grammar (by Aboh, Enoch O.); 5. The African diaspora in Latin America: Linguistic contact and consequences (by Guy, Gregory R.); 6. The sociohistorical matrix of creolization and the role children played in this process (by Kouwenberg, Silvia); 7. Creole as necessity? Creole as choice?: Evidence from Afrikaans historical sociolinguistics (by Deumert, Ana); 8. Bahamian Creole English: Yesterday, today and tomorrow (by Seymour, Chanti); 9. Linguistic commonality in English of the African diaspora: Evidence from lesser-known varieties of English (by Wolfram, Walt); 10. Historical separations: Race, class and language in Barbados (by Blake, Renee); 11. Part 2. Sources of grammar and processes of language contact; 12. Some observations on the sources of AAVE structure: Re-examining the creole connection (by Winford, Donald); 13. Unity in diversity: The homogeneity of the substrate and the grammar of space in the African and Caribbean English-lexifier creoles (by Yakpo, Kofi); 14. Krio as the Western Maroon Creole language of Jamaica, and the /na/ isogloss (by Smith, Norval); 15. Number marking in Jamaican Patwa (by Patrick, Peter L.); 16. Variationist creolistics, with a phonological focus (by Rickford, John R.); 17. Pidginization versus second language acquisition: Insights from basilang and mesolang varieties of Zulu as a second language (by Mesthrie, Rajend); 18. Crosslinguistic effects in adjectivization strategies in Suriname, Ghana and Togo (by Berg, Margot van den)
