I live in Cameroon, a country that has two English speaking provinces and eight French speaking ones.
The English in English speaking provinces is refered to as “Pidgin” and has it’s own vocabulary and grammer. When I hear people speaking pidgin, I often can’t even understand the general gist of what they are saying. For example “When you go to Limbe could you please bring me back some snack food?” You’d say something like (I’m not a Pidgin expert by any means) “When you go for Limbe I beg you dat small small chop.”
Even people speaking textbook English still use a grammer and vocab that can be quite different than what we are used to. I’ve spent plenty of time having conversations in my broken-French with Anglophone English teachers because we wern’t understanding each other.
However, in French speaking areas, the French is pretty standard and subject to only minor variations from French French.
As far as I know, the two areas were colonized around the same time and have pretty similiar histories. Why did one area develop a pidgin and the other didn’t?
Pidgins develop when you have an area where there are two languages, and where there is need for simple terms to get business done (The word “pidgin” is a pidgin corruption of the word “business”). Pidgins can develop into creoles – which start having more complex structures – and finally into languages of their own.
As for why, it may have something to do with the attitude of the foreign traders who took over. If the British were willing to use a pidgin to talk to those who don’t speak English, while the French were to say, “speak French or we don’t trade,” then a pidgin would develop in the English speaking area but not in the French. Considering the French have an organization (The French Academy) that oversees the purity of the French language, it would seem likely that they would not want French sullied by non-French words.
I understand France had a very different relationship with its colonies to that of Britain. I think this is reflected in the education system - colonies got schools that fell under the same Lycée system as France itself, so at least the educated classes got the full Académie française treatment, which I’m sure trickled down. This doesn’t count for pre-academy colonies like Acadia so you have creoles there and in Louisiana. But the second wave colonies in Africa and Asia, as well as other foreign countries, have a dedicated Education Department - I’m not sure that the English went to the same trouble - they might have, but I don’t think so.
Doesn’t Singapore use fairly standard English? A few years back I had opportunity to converse several times with a young woman in Singapore via a chat room, and her English (and that of the other people there from Singapore*) was really no different from what I’d see in any other English-language chat room. I was actually going to compliment her on her English skills before I caught myself and remembered that English is the official language there.
What is the term for somebody from Singapore, anyway? “Singaporese” sounds funny. So does “Singaporian”.
Yep, except there is no third step involved. Creoles are “languages of their own.”
As for the issue in the OP, perhaps the answer lies in the fact that there are only 2 English speaking provinces and 8 French. But also because, from wikipedia:
The “pidgen --> creole” step typically involves communities in which children grow up being exposed mainly to the pidgin (in other words, adults who learn pidgens don’t typically turn them into creoles – they just keep using the pidgen).
For that to happen, the children’s caregivers need to be speaking pidgen among themselves most of the time. Only certain social situations are likely to give rise to that scenario – if, for example, both parents speak the same language, why would they talk to each other in pidgen? If one parent speaks (for example) pidgen English and also speaks Language X, and the other parent speaks Language X and Language Y, both parents are likely to speak Language X around the child. Pidgens work, but they don’t work all that well. Home situations in which mainly pidgen is spoken tend to be ones in which the adults have only the pidgen as a common code for communication.
Exactly that type of situation has occurred a number of times as a result of colonialism and slavery – but it’s rare otherwise. Slavery resulted in speakers of numerous different languages being put in the same community, with no common language other than whatever pidgen was being used in the area. Colonial governments sometimes posted “free” workers from multiple different language groups to the same location as well. Most of the creoles around today are thus relics of colonialism.
One side note: You can’t always go by names – some languages that are named “So-and-so Pidgen English” are actually creoles, and some variants called creoles may be pidgens. Linguists tend to to keep the terms separate, but historically, people have mixed them.
Both areas are areas of extreme linguistic diversity- Cameroon is home to over 200 languages. I can understand why North Cameroon didn’t create a pidgin. Everyone up here speaks Fulfulde as the trade language and French is still today fairly rare. But the Anglophone provinces have a Francophone province right between them. The cultures and histories are the same.
It’s certainly not a distinction between French and English. The OP pointed out cases where the English became pidginized and the French didn’t. There are cases going the other way. The French in Haiti became pidginized (and then a full-blown creole language). The English in Singapore didn’t, as Phase42 points out.
It’s not easy to tell how pidginized the language has become in a country without extensive research into the language situation in the country. In Haiti the speakers of Haitian Creole French refer to Creole as a separate language derived from French. In the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, the speakers refer to the dialects of English spoken there (when they talk in public about them at all) as simply highly dialectal forms. But the Caribbean dialects of English are almost as far from Standard British English as Haitian Creole is from Parisian French. It’s possibly a political distinction, since Haiti broke from France by a slave revolt and has no need for a relationship from France since then, while the slaves in English-speaking Caribbean islands were freed by the British and maintain relationships with the U.K., including belong to the British Commonwealth.
I don’t think that there is any simple answer to your question.
It’s certainly an interesting question - perhaps it’s worth comparing the historical social structures in a country like Haiti - where a creole did develop, and the neighbouring Dominican Republic where it didn’t - and the key factor would seem to be that there was far less contact between the colonisers and slaves in Haiti than there was on the eastern side of the island, which became the Spanish-speaking DR. This is also evident in the racial mix - Dominicans are thoroughly blended whereas the black-mulatto-white distinctions are still strong in Haiti. This is combined with the point you make about Haiti distancing itself from France after independence in 1804, while the DR, like the English-speaking islands, has maintained its historical and cultural links with Spain, even with additional waves of migration from Spain throughout the 19th and 20th century.
(Bolding mine) I would have thought that Haitian Kreyol and French are further apart than English Caribbean patois and English. Many, in fact most, Haitian Kreyol speakers cannot speak or understand French at all, whereas English Caribbean patois speakers can switch to more standard English when necessary, and can understand standard English speakers. In my experience, anyway.
> (Bolding mine) I would have thought that Haitian Kreyol and French are further
> apart than English Caribbean patois and English. Many, in fact most, Haitian
> Kreyol speakers cannot speak or understand French at all, whereas English
> Caribbean patois speakers can switch to more standard English when
> necessary, and can understand standard English speakers. In my experience,
> anyway.
I don’t know. I’m not an expert on either Haitian Creole or Caribbean English patois. I had an impression that Haitian Creole is not quite as far from Parisian French as one might think and Caribbean English patois is not quite as close to Standard British English as one might think, but I think I have now passed my level of ignorance in this discussion.
However, creole is widely used in other french islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion), even thought they’re still french territory. Indeed, people living there will know french, if only because it’s taught at school (you mention this point regarding Haiti) but in any case, keeping a strong link with mainland France didn’t prevent a creole from appearing and being used in everyday’s life.
This may vary from island to island, but I spent some time in the Windward Islands (St Lucia and south) and the English spoken there was completely incomprehensible to me. In fact, I remember asking a guide we had one island what language he was speaking when he talked to the other islanders and he sort of laughed and said “English, but broken English”, which I think was just his way of saying it was their own form of English. I tried as hard as I could, and I couldn’t understand a single word.
Good point - so maybe the crucial factor is the lower level of interaction between slaves and colonists in the early days - would that apply to those islands?
To the extent that they couldn’t modify their speech to a more comprehensible form of English? I’ve visited St Vincent, St Lucia, Barbados and Guyana and spoke to a lot of ordinary, country people, not just the urban educated types, and I didn’t meet anyone who only spoke patois, although this does not prove that they don’t exist. In Haiti, though, millions of people only speak Kreyol and cannot even hold a basic conversation in French. Even though French is taught at schools, it remains the language of the educated and the elite (who also use Kreyol as their main informal language of communication).
I wouldn’t know. Even though it’s often said that there used to be much more interactions (at least in the form of promiscuity) in french and spanish colonies than in british ones.
The fact that someone can “modify their speech” to something close to Standard British English doesn’t mean that what they normally speak is just a dialect of English. The inhabitants of that location might all be speaking two languages which are different enough from each other that they are mutually incomprehensible. It’s common enough to have sections of countries where everyone grows up speaking language A, but everyone will speak language B by the time they are an adult, since they will listen to TV programs in language B, learn language B in school, and will have to interact with speakers of language B in their travels.
By the way, it migt be that, at least nowadays, creole has a higher status in former french colonies than in former british ones.
In this thread I’ve read several mentions of people refering to their own language as being a “patois” or even “broken english”, and I strongly doubt a Guaeloupean, for instance, would call creole “broken french”. At least, I never heard it referenced to in such a disparaging way by a native speaker (or whoever else, I think, for that matter).
I also remember having noted several years ago a thread about a document printed by the US government in some english-based creole, which caused a ruckus, a minor scandal and accusations of racism being thrown around, while french-based creoles, have a recognized written form, have been used in litterature, and have been an object of pride at least since the 50s-60s, when intellectuals with an african or caraibean heritage, like the Martiniquais Aimé Césaire, began to claim back their cultural heritage.
