June 15, 2021
In
Hello little Hummingbird,
In this article, we will focus on another element that characterizes the Caribbean islands: Creole.
The term "Creole" is said to be of Portuguese origin (" Creole ") and originally designated one "who was raised in the domestic hearth". From Portuguese, the term passed to Spanish ("crollo") with the colonization of the Americas and designated a "person of pure white race born in the colonies".
It primarily refers to people who were born in the colonies and grew up there. They may have a father and mother who were colonists (i.e. white), or a father who was a colonist and a mother who was Amerindian or African (i.e. mixed race). Slaves born on the plantations were also called "Creoles".
Very quickly, the term extended to objects, animals, cuisine, music and everything that results from what is called a process of creolization. Then, by extension, it designates the language born on the plantations.
The definition of what a creole language is varies depending on the author and the target audience. Linguists have not yet arrived at a definition that satisfies all specialists. They just agree that they are "new languages that are distinct from the languages from which they draw the bulk of their lexicon or grammar", and that they are born "from the influence of unusually significant contact between languages during particular social circumstances". It is based in the majority of cases on a European lexical field, and has an African structure and Amerindian (sometimes Indian) influences.
Creole languages were formed and have managed to survive in all the territories identified as "Afro-Central America", with the exception of the territories of Spanish colonization. In the so-called insular Caribbean (the islands of the Caribbean and the adjacent continental territories considered by the United Nations Development Programme as small island developing states: Belize, Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana), the current creole-speaking area corresponds broadly to Belize, Jamaica, Haiti, part of the Lesser Antilles (the arc of small islands that extends from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad), the so-called "ABC" islands (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao) as well as Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The following are therefore excluded from the Creole-speaking Caribbean: the Cayman Islands (where Jamaican Creole is, however, widely spoken by migrant workers from the neighboring island), the Bahamas (where Bahamian Creole is now spoken only in mesolectal form), the Spanish-speaking territories (Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico), the Turks and Caicos Islands (where the many Haitian and Jamaican migrants imported their Creole), and certain islands of the Lesser Antilles which are experiencing or have experienced decreolization.
The creole languages spoken in different territories can vary considerably: while speakers of Saint Vincent, Trinidad, the Bahamas and Jamaica can understand each other despite the notable differences in their creoles (see discussion in Part 3), speakers of sranan tongo (literally “language of Suriname”), from patwa (name given to their language by Jamaican Creole speakers) and ayisian creole (Haitian Creole), cannot understand each other at all.
A creole language is a language that is grammatically as elaborate as any other. In other words, "Creole is neither a simple language, nor a simplified language, nor an incomplete language. It is a language in its own right that is in fact linguistically unexceptional" (De Graaf, 2003). Many linguists claim that creole languages are an evolved version of pidgins - pidgin being a simplified and essentially spoken language, which is not the mother tongue of anyone, because it is used exclusively as a contact language between two groups that do not speak the same idiom. The big difference between pidgin and creole is that the latter is the mother tongue of a group of individuals.
At the time, it was used by slaves, who came from different African linguistic groups, to understand each other. The European (planter, missionary, etc.) was convinced that he was drawing his slaves towards his culture (he "civilized") through what he considered a good compromise: the " Negro-English " (Or - Negro-French, etc.). However, Caribbean researchers have known since the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz that deculturation (abandoning one's culture for another) does not exist. On the contrary, these situations create "transculturation".
Decreolization affects, or has affected, the spaces of Afro-French Creoles in Martinique and Guadeloupe, as well as the spaces of Afro-British Creoles that were formerly spoken in Trinidad, Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, Dominica and the Bahamas in particular. It often has political reasons: Creole has been fought, in particular by schools and by families who have sought, since the middle of the 19th century, to xx e century, to give their children an education in the colonial language.
In recent years, Martinique Creole has experienced a resurgence in vitality and the territory has seen a re-creolization that has taken four distinct forms: a reconquest (rather oral) of the territory by a Martinique Creole largely tinged with French (increasingly better accepted), the teaching of Creole in schools (a Creole master's degree has for example been opened), a creolization of the spoken French language ("j'achète dans ses mains" instead of "j'achète chez lui", etc.) and a distinct re-creolization process that has seen the birth of a literary French language specific to Martinique, under the pen of renowned authors such as the writer Patrick Chamoiseau.
The process of international diffusion of Creole is found in densely populated areas with strong cultural appeal, notably Jamaica (more than three million speakers of Jamaican Creole) and Haiti (more than eleven million speakers).
This diffusion occurs, on the one hand, through the different flows of migration, but also through music (let's take the example of Haitian compas for Haiti, or reggae and dancehall for Jamaica).
Ultimately, Jamaican Creole is spoken today in Jamaica, as well as in pockets corresponding to migrant communities (first, second and third generation) located along the coast of Central America, in the Caribbean (Saint Martin, Virgin Islands, Trinidad, etc.) and in many large North American (Miami, Atlanta, Washington, New York, Toronto, etc.) and British (London in particular) metropolises.
Haitian Creole has now spread to the diaspora and is now present everywhere where there are pockets of Haitian migrants of varying sizes: Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Saint-Martin, Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos Islands, Bahamas, United States, Canada, France, etc.
I'll stop there for today. There are plenty of interesting articles to discover on the subject.
I will cite the three that inspired this article.
https://www.caraibes-mamanthe.org/culture-creole/langue
https://www.cairn.info/revue-espace-geographique-2015-1-page-1.htm
https://www.bellemartinique.com/la-martinique/culture/lexique-creole/
Don't hesitate to tell me what you thought of it in the comments.
And as the Creole proverb says: long pep is named after him (the language of a people is its soul)
Lina
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