ABSTRACTS
Celia Brown-Blake, University of the West Indies at Mona
Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles in Legal Translation Contexts
Authors:
Hubert Devonish, University of the West Indies
Celia Brown-Blake, University of the West Indies
Doreen Preston
Background
Caribbean Creoles have traditionally not been regarded by their speakers as discrete languages from their European lexifiers. This is particularly true when the Creole language exists alongside its European superstrate as, for example, in Guyana and Jamaica. In these territories, English-lexicon Creoles, Guyanese and Jamaican respectively, co-exist with English which performs official language functions. The orthodox language ideology that these and other Caribbean English Creoles are merely forms of English persists despite linguistic studies, such as Bailey (1966), Alleyne (1980), Rickford (1987), which indicate significant structural distinctions between them and varieties of English, and despite more recent language attitudinal changes regarding the languagehood of these Creoles (JLU (2005); Beckford Wassink (1999)).
A probable consequence of this orthodox ideology is that Guyanese Creole (GC) and Jamaican Creole (JC) have generally not been officially recognised in these countries in the discharge of governmental functions in domains such as legal system. The failure to accord such recognition and, concomitantly, the failure to deliver public services in these Creole languages is problematic. This is because in both Guyana and Jamaica there are large portions of the respective populations who are Creole monolingual or Creole-dominant speakers and thus not functionally competent in the official language. The result is a communication breakdown in the delivery of public services, including services within the legal system, to these speakers, instances of which have been reported in the literature for example in Blake & Devonish (1994), and the consequential social exclusion which they arguably experience (Devonish 2007).
This language problem has been, to a large extent, glossed over or managed informally in the legal system within the home territory of particular Caribbean English Creole languages. With increased travel and migration over the last two decades particularly to the US and the UK by Caribbean nationals, the problem has surfaced in these and other international jurisdictions where Creole-dominant speakers have had to confront, for various reasons, the legal system of these overseas territories. While English is the official and dominant language in the jurisdictions to which mass travel or migration by Caribbean English Creole speakers has been directed, language communication difficulties have arisen between public officials in the legal systems of these host countries and immigrant Caribbean Creole speakers (Brown-Blake & Chambers 2007). These communication problems have urged, indeed demanded, the intervention of language professionals, whether as translators/interpreters or as language experts capable of providing reliable linguistic evidence upon which a tribunal may rely to arrive at a decision in its adjudicative process. Several issues have arisen as a result of this linguistic professional intervention which will be the focus of this article.
Aim
Drawing on practical situations, the article will provide insights for applied linguists concerned with issues in translation, interpretation and discourse involving Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles in both international and local legal settings. It highlights the emerging translation needs which have been triggered by a rapidly proceeding process of language formation at the conscious level of Creole language speakers themselves.
Content
The request for, and presentation of expert linguistic evidence in a US criminal case involving a GC-speaking defendant in 2010 have raised a variety of issues which will be examined and discussed as follows:
References
Alleyne, M. 1980. Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor: Karoma
Beckford Wassink, A. 1999. Historic low prestige and seeds of change: Attitudes towards Jamaican Creole. Language in Society 28:57-92.
Bailey, B. 1966. Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach. Cambridge: CUP.
Blake C. and Devonish, H. 1994. Developing technical vocabulary for Jamaican Creole. In Language Reform: History and Future, vol. 6, ed. István Fodor and Claude Hagège, 149-161. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Brown-Blake, C. and Chambers, P. 2007. The Jamaican Creole speaker in the UK criminal justice system. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 14:2, 269-294.
Devonish, H. 2007. Language and Liberation. Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak.
JLU (Jamaican Language Unit). 2005. Language attitude survey of Jamaica. http://mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/projects/Report%20for%20Language%20Attitude%20Survey%20of%20Jamaica.pdf
Rickford, J. 1987. Dimensions of a Creole Continuum. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Creoles and Multiethnolects in Public Discourse
Philipp Krämer, Potsdam University
Previous research (Krämer, to appear) has shown considerable similarities between public perceptions of Creole in Mauritius and new urban vernacular varieties such as Kiezdeutsch in Germany (cf. also Wiese 2013, Wiese/Krämer 2013). Recent developments in German youth language have been described by critics as a step towards a “pidginisation” or “creolisation” of German. Given these discursive links, I would like to broaden the scope in relation to the geographical areas and the speech communities in order to get a better picture of the arguments that are made in both cases: As far as the Caribbean is concerned, mainly the public debate in Jamaica has attracted close attention (Farquharson 2007). I would therefore suggest an analysis of public debates across the Creole-speaking countries and territories of the Caribbean, from the Anglocreole and the Francocreole sphere to the ABC islands. On the European side, the study could encompass chiefly those cases where multiethnolects have had most media coverage, i.e. Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the Nordic Countries (see, e.g., Svendsen 2010, Kulbrandstad 2004 for the case of Norway).
The analysis focuses on statements made in the media by both journalists and readers. Through a qualitative method, rather than a quantitative one, I hope to get responses that freely reproduce or contradict argument structures. This way, I hope to minimise the risk of preconceiving statements as they would have been necessarily phrased in e.g. a questionnaire.. Articles, features and, above all, online comments by internet users, are easily available to be scrutinised and systematically deconstructed. The aim is to verify the conclusions drawn from the Mauritian/Kiezdeutsch case: Can we identify the same discursive patterns such as the idea of a lack of historical legitimacy, cognitive or expressive deficiencies and uselessness of linguistic research in the light of language decay? Can positive judgements equally be classified along the lines of exemplary arguments like e.g. the idea of a special potential for innovation or an extraordinarily picturesque and poetical character?
If media coverage is extensive enough to allow for a broad analysis, I may try to arrive at a conclusion about the decisive factors for the argument structures: How do the patterns of public discourse relate to the degree of official recognition of a language, to sociopolitical circumstances, or to the historical background of the countries in question?
References
Farquharson, Joseph T. (2007): Folk Linguistics and Post-colonial Language Politricks in Jamaica. In: Anchimbe, Eric. A (Hg.): Linguistic Identity in Postcolonial Multilingual Spaces. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 248-264.
Krämer, Philipp (to appear): Die französische Kreolistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Rassismus und Determinismus in der kolonialen Philologie. Hamburg: Buske. (Kreolische Bibliothek, Vol. 25).
Kulbrandstad, Lars Anders (2004): «Kebabnorsk», «perkerdansk» og «gebrokken» – ord om innvandreres måte å snakke majoritetsspråket på. In: Sandøy, Helge / Endre Brunstad / Jon Erik Hagen / Kari Tenfjord (Ed.): Den fleirspråklege utfordringa. Oslo:
Novus. 108-130.
Svendsen, Bente Ailin (2010): Linguistic Practices in Multilingual Urban Contexts in Norway: An Overview. In: Pia Quist / Bente Ailin Svendsen (Ed.): Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. New Linguistic Practices. Bristol et al.: Multilingual Matters. 12-16.
Wiese, Heike (2013): Voices of linguistic outrage – Standard language constructs and the discourse on new urban dialects. Research paper of SFB 632 (“information structure”).
Wiese, Heike /Krämer, Philipp (2013): Muss Kiezdeutsch therapiert werden? In: Patholink. Zeitschrift des Vereins für Patholinguistik 22 (2013): 6-10.
Nadjah Ríos, UPR-Río Piedras
My research uses film and ethnography to document cultural practices that resulted from constant migration flows between Vieques, an island municipality located to the northeast of Puerto Rico's main land mass, and the US Virgin Islands, particularly Saint Croix. In general, I would like to register the cultural expressions within the context of carnival, a festivity that takes place every year in the third week of July. Emphasis will be placed in the history of calypso and the origin of local steel bands in Vieques. I propose that the history of this music and its instruments is seminal to promotion of a Pan-Caribbean identity that connects Puerto Rico with the West Indies and the rest of the Caribbean.
Nasalization, the Syllable Rhyme, and Creole Typology
Yolanda Rivera, UPR-Río Piedras
I propose that constraints and constraint ranking on the distribution of the feature [±nasal] in Creoles correspond to those found in other non-Creole languages. Klein (2006: 48) indicates that, typologically, African Creoles fall within “what is considered typical for non-Creole languages.” We claim the same applies to a set of Atlantic Creoles regarding nasality.
The distribution of nasal properties in the syllable rhyme provides evidence that there is not a single parameter dominating nasal features among Creoles. This paper argues that [±nasal] is a prosodic feature (Leben 1973) that affects the syllabic domain differently in each Creole. We study its distribution in rhymes with a coda, which follows these patterns:
(1) Restricted to the syllable nuclei (moraic) if lexically distinctive (Haitian Creole).
(2) Agreement regarding [±nasal] required between coda and nuclear element (Papiamentu, Saramaccan, Ndjuka, and Jamaican Creole).
(3) Nasal codas have restricted distribution according to [±ATR] values in the nuclear vowel (Ndjuka and Saramaccan).
(4) Obligatory contour in feature distribution: either a nasal consonant (with an oral vowel) or a nasalized vowel (a loss of nasal consonant).
(5) Voicing (Palenquero and Papiamentu), sonority (Haitian), and place restrictions (Haitian, Jamaican Creole) between nasal and adjacent consonants.
Creoles are typologically split between those with nasal vowels (lexically determined feature) and those with “nasalized” vowels (often a postlexical feature). But they are also typologically split between those with OCP restrictions and those without these. These restrictions show interactions with vowels as well as consonants in the rhyme in some Creoles (Nikiema and Bhatt 2003).
Proposed language family affiliation does not determine typological affiliation in Creoles. Creoles with an Iberian lexifier show different degrees of vowel nasalization, and, in some (Palenquero), nasal consonant deletion. English-based Creoles also show this latter feature. Ndjuka has nasal spreading in the rhyme, vowels become nasalized, and there is also consonant deletion (Huttar and Huttar 1972:1-2):
(6) gaanda ~ gããnda ~ gããda, ‘grandfather’; santi ~ sãnti ~ sãti, ‘sand’; wah ~ wãh ~ wã, ‘one’.
Following Piggott (2003), Walker (1998 & 2000), Cohn (1990), Maddieson (1984), and Ferguson (1963), I propose a formal analysis of nasalization based on a set of constraints on the co-occurrence of nasality, voicing, sonority, and place features (correspondence constraints) as well as linearity constraints on the distribution of the feature [+nasal] among Creoles. We provide phonetic data to support this analysis. This paper contributes to Creole typological studies and to the typology of nasalization in general.
References
Ferguson, C. A. 1963. Some Assumptions about Nasals: A sample study of phonological universals. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of Language, pp. 53-60. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Huttar, G. L. and Huttar, M. L. 1972 . Notes on Djuka Phonology. The Phonological Structure of Stems in Saramaccan. In Joseph Grimes (ed.), Languages of the Guianas. pp. 1-11. Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Klein, Thomas. 2006. Segmental Typology of African Creole Languages: Examining uniformity, simplification and simplicity. Selected Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, pp. 42-50. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Leben, William. 1973. Suprasegmental Phonology. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nikiema, Emmanuel and Parth Bhatt. 2003. Two Types of R deletion in Haitian Creole. In Ingo Plag (Ed.), Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages, pp. 44-69. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Piggott, G. L. 2003. Theoretical Implications of Segment Neutrality in Nasal Harmony. Phonology 20: 375-424.
Walker, Rachel. 2000. Nasalization, Neutralization, and Opacity Effects. New York: Garland.
Language as Interface: Samaná English in Sociohistorical Context
Don E. Walicek -UPR-Río Piedras
This paper uses the notion of language as interface to better understand the social, historical, linguistic, and political circumstances surrounding the emergence, maintenance, and study of Samaná English (hereafter SE), a variety of English that has been spoken on a northern peninsula of the Dominican Republic for more than 150 years. Speakers of this language trace their ancestry to the migration a group of ancestors, some of whom were formerly enslaved, that migrated to Hispaniola when Haiti controlled the entire island in the nineteenth century. Linguists have frequently described this community as one that was inclined to preserve English because of its geographic isolation. But exactly how isolated was the community? And to what extent do sociohistory and linguistic analysis support the assertion that this variety emerged in isolation? Data from archival sources (e.g., transcriptions of oral histories, administrative documents, and newspaper articles) and ethnographic fieldwork will be used to contextualize and answer these two questions. Specific sociohistorical factors suggesting that twentieth-century SE reflects contact as well as ideological discourses about it will be identified and examined as forces that should be considered in understanding both the emergence of SE and how it has changed over time.
Celia Brown-Blake, University of the West Indies at Mona
Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles in Legal Translation Contexts
Authors:
Hubert Devonish, University of the West Indies
Celia Brown-Blake, University of the West Indies
Doreen Preston
Background
Caribbean Creoles have traditionally not been regarded by their speakers as discrete languages from their European lexifiers. This is particularly true when the Creole language exists alongside its European superstrate as, for example, in Guyana and Jamaica. In these territories, English-lexicon Creoles, Guyanese and Jamaican respectively, co-exist with English which performs official language functions. The orthodox language ideology that these and other Caribbean English Creoles are merely forms of English persists despite linguistic studies, such as Bailey (1966), Alleyne (1980), Rickford (1987), which indicate significant structural distinctions between them and varieties of English, and despite more recent language attitudinal changes regarding the languagehood of these Creoles (JLU (2005); Beckford Wassink (1999)).
A probable consequence of this orthodox ideology is that Guyanese Creole (GC) and Jamaican Creole (JC) have generally not been officially recognised in these countries in the discharge of governmental functions in domains such as legal system. The failure to accord such recognition and, concomitantly, the failure to deliver public services in these Creole languages is problematic. This is because in both Guyana and Jamaica there are large portions of the respective populations who are Creole monolingual or Creole-dominant speakers and thus not functionally competent in the official language. The result is a communication breakdown in the delivery of public services, including services within the legal system, to these speakers, instances of which have been reported in the literature for example in Blake & Devonish (1994), and the consequential social exclusion which they arguably experience (Devonish 2007).
This language problem has been, to a large extent, glossed over or managed informally in the legal system within the home territory of particular Caribbean English Creole languages. With increased travel and migration over the last two decades particularly to the US and the UK by Caribbean nationals, the problem has surfaced in these and other international jurisdictions where Creole-dominant speakers have had to confront, for various reasons, the legal system of these overseas territories. While English is the official and dominant language in the jurisdictions to which mass travel or migration by Caribbean English Creole speakers has been directed, language communication difficulties have arisen between public officials in the legal systems of these host countries and immigrant Caribbean Creole speakers (Brown-Blake & Chambers 2007). These communication problems have urged, indeed demanded, the intervention of language professionals, whether as translators/interpreters or as language experts capable of providing reliable linguistic evidence upon which a tribunal may rely to arrive at a decision in its adjudicative process. Several issues have arisen as a result of this linguistic professional intervention which will be the focus of this article.
Aim
Drawing on practical situations, the article will provide insights for applied linguists concerned with issues in translation, interpretation and discourse involving Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles in both international and local legal settings. It highlights the emerging translation needs which have been triggered by a rapidly proceeding process of language formation at the conscious level of Creole language speakers themselves.
Content
The request for, and presentation of expert linguistic evidence in a US criminal case involving a GC-speaking defendant in 2010 have raised a variety of issues which will be examined and discussed as follows:
- The absence of Creole language recognition and Creole language rights in the home country and the impact of this on the process of gaining recognition for Caribbean English-lexicon Creole languages as distinct languages from English in international fora, including in legal contexts, as languages worthy of being translated.
- The range of legal contexts in which Creole translation questions arise and the centrality of translation to outcomes. In this regard, particular reference will be made to three cases: (a)--the first involving a translation of music lyrics presumed to have been hate speech which led to the prohibition of certain Jamaican dancehall artistes from performing in Germany; (b) the second relating to translations of musical lyrics, composed by a JC-speaking criminal defendant in the British overseas territory of Bermuda, which were used to buttress an allegation that he had confessed to the crime charged; (c) the third, another criminal case in Bermuda, demonstrates the use and importance of context and innuendo in translating wiretapped recordings of JC speech.
- The demand for JC-English interpreters/translators and language facilitators who are professionally qualified to act as such for legal purposes. In this regard, the article addresses the steps taken for professional certification of interpreters for JC via the Diploma in Public Service Interpreting programme administered by the Institute of Linguists in the UK, indicating issues of JC language planning, teaching and assessment in Creole language interpreting which arose in the process.
- Translating legislation into JC. With reference to the recent exercise of translating provisions of Jamaica’s Constitution into JC, the authors comment on the challenges of capturing stylistic formality, technical legal concepts and precision in legal meaning in a Creole language for which there is little, if any, precedent.
- The discussion concludes by commenting on the significance of the issues examined for the prospects of Caribbean English-lexicon Creole language translation in legal contexts, both locally and internationally. It is expected that this article will inform subsequent practice and provide a foundation for theoretical development in the area of applied linguistics in the legal arena.
References
Alleyne, M. 1980. Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor: Karoma
Beckford Wassink, A. 1999. Historic low prestige and seeds of change: Attitudes towards Jamaican Creole. Language in Society 28:57-92.
Bailey, B. 1966. Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach. Cambridge: CUP.
Blake C. and Devonish, H. 1994. Developing technical vocabulary for Jamaican Creole. In Language Reform: History and Future, vol. 6, ed. István Fodor and Claude Hagège, 149-161. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Brown-Blake, C. and Chambers, P. 2007. The Jamaican Creole speaker in the UK criminal justice system. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 14:2, 269-294.
Devonish, H. 2007. Language and Liberation. Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak.
JLU (Jamaican Language Unit). 2005. Language attitude survey of Jamaica. http://mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/projects/Report%20for%20Language%20Attitude%20Survey%20of%20Jamaica.pdf
Rickford, J. 1987. Dimensions of a Creole Continuum. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Creoles and Multiethnolects in Public Discourse
Philipp Krämer, Potsdam University
Previous research (Krämer, to appear) has shown considerable similarities between public perceptions of Creole in Mauritius and new urban vernacular varieties such as Kiezdeutsch in Germany (cf. also Wiese 2013, Wiese/Krämer 2013). Recent developments in German youth language have been described by critics as a step towards a “pidginisation” or “creolisation” of German. Given these discursive links, I would like to broaden the scope in relation to the geographical areas and the speech communities in order to get a better picture of the arguments that are made in both cases: As far as the Caribbean is concerned, mainly the public debate in Jamaica has attracted close attention (Farquharson 2007). I would therefore suggest an analysis of public debates across the Creole-speaking countries and territories of the Caribbean, from the Anglocreole and the Francocreole sphere to the ABC islands. On the European side, the study could encompass chiefly those cases where multiethnolects have had most media coverage, i.e. Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the Nordic Countries (see, e.g., Svendsen 2010, Kulbrandstad 2004 for the case of Norway).
The analysis focuses on statements made in the media by both journalists and readers. Through a qualitative method, rather than a quantitative one, I hope to get responses that freely reproduce or contradict argument structures. This way, I hope to minimise the risk of preconceiving statements as they would have been necessarily phrased in e.g. a questionnaire.. Articles, features and, above all, online comments by internet users, are easily available to be scrutinised and systematically deconstructed. The aim is to verify the conclusions drawn from the Mauritian/Kiezdeutsch case: Can we identify the same discursive patterns such as the idea of a lack of historical legitimacy, cognitive or expressive deficiencies and uselessness of linguistic research in the light of language decay? Can positive judgements equally be classified along the lines of exemplary arguments like e.g. the idea of a special potential for innovation or an extraordinarily picturesque and poetical character?
If media coverage is extensive enough to allow for a broad analysis, I may try to arrive at a conclusion about the decisive factors for the argument structures: How do the patterns of public discourse relate to the degree of official recognition of a language, to sociopolitical circumstances, or to the historical background of the countries in question?
References
Farquharson, Joseph T. (2007): Folk Linguistics and Post-colonial Language Politricks in Jamaica. In: Anchimbe, Eric. A (Hg.): Linguistic Identity in Postcolonial Multilingual Spaces. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 248-264.
Krämer, Philipp (to appear): Die französische Kreolistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Rassismus und Determinismus in der kolonialen Philologie. Hamburg: Buske. (Kreolische Bibliothek, Vol. 25).
Kulbrandstad, Lars Anders (2004): «Kebabnorsk», «perkerdansk» og «gebrokken» – ord om innvandreres måte å snakke majoritetsspråket på. In: Sandøy, Helge / Endre Brunstad / Jon Erik Hagen / Kari Tenfjord (Ed.): Den fleirspråklege utfordringa. Oslo:
Novus. 108-130.
Svendsen, Bente Ailin (2010): Linguistic Practices in Multilingual Urban Contexts in Norway: An Overview. In: Pia Quist / Bente Ailin Svendsen (Ed.): Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. New Linguistic Practices. Bristol et al.: Multilingual Matters. 12-16.
Wiese, Heike (2013): Voices of linguistic outrage – Standard language constructs and the discourse on new urban dialects. Research paper of SFB 632 (“information structure”).
Wiese, Heike /Krämer, Philipp (2013): Muss Kiezdeutsch therapiert werden? In: Patholink. Zeitschrift des Vereins für Patholinguistik 22 (2013): 6-10.
Nadjah Ríos, UPR-Río Piedras
My research uses film and ethnography to document cultural practices that resulted from constant migration flows between Vieques, an island municipality located to the northeast of Puerto Rico's main land mass, and the US Virgin Islands, particularly Saint Croix. In general, I would like to register the cultural expressions within the context of carnival, a festivity that takes place every year in the third week of July. Emphasis will be placed in the history of calypso and the origin of local steel bands in Vieques. I propose that the history of this music and its instruments is seminal to promotion of a Pan-Caribbean identity that connects Puerto Rico with the West Indies and the rest of the Caribbean.
Nasalization, the Syllable Rhyme, and Creole Typology
Yolanda Rivera, UPR-Río Piedras
I propose that constraints and constraint ranking on the distribution of the feature [±nasal] in Creoles correspond to those found in other non-Creole languages. Klein (2006: 48) indicates that, typologically, African Creoles fall within “what is considered typical for non-Creole languages.” We claim the same applies to a set of Atlantic Creoles regarding nasality.
The distribution of nasal properties in the syllable rhyme provides evidence that there is not a single parameter dominating nasal features among Creoles. This paper argues that [±nasal] is a prosodic feature (Leben 1973) that affects the syllabic domain differently in each Creole. We study its distribution in rhymes with a coda, which follows these patterns:
(1) Restricted to the syllable nuclei (moraic) if lexically distinctive (Haitian Creole).
(2) Agreement regarding [±nasal] required between coda and nuclear element (Papiamentu, Saramaccan, Ndjuka, and Jamaican Creole).
(3) Nasal codas have restricted distribution according to [±ATR] values in the nuclear vowel (Ndjuka and Saramaccan).
(4) Obligatory contour in feature distribution: either a nasal consonant (with an oral vowel) or a nasalized vowel (a loss of nasal consonant).
(5) Voicing (Palenquero and Papiamentu), sonority (Haitian), and place restrictions (Haitian, Jamaican Creole) between nasal and adjacent consonants.
Creoles are typologically split between those with nasal vowels (lexically determined feature) and those with “nasalized” vowels (often a postlexical feature). But they are also typologically split between those with OCP restrictions and those without these. These restrictions show interactions with vowels as well as consonants in the rhyme in some Creoles (Nikiema and Bhatt 2003).
Proposed language family affiliation does not determine typological affiliation in Creoles. Creoles with an Iberian lexifier show different degrees of vowel nasalization, and, in some (Palenquero), nasal consonant deletion. English-based Creoles also show this latter feature. Ndjuka has nasal spreading in the rhyme, vowels become nasalized, and there is also consonant deletion (Huttar and Huttar 1972:1-2):
(6) gaanda ~ gããnda ~ gããda, ‘grandfather’; santi ~ sãnti ~ sãti, ‘sand’; wah ~ wãh ~ wã, ‘one’.
Following Piggott (2003), Walker (1998 & 2000), Cohn (1990), Maddieson (1984), and Ferguson (1963), I propose a formal analysis of nasalization based on a set of constraints on the co-occurrence of nasality, voicing, sonority, and place features (correspondence constraints) as well as linearity constraints on the distribution of the feature [+nasal] among Creoles. We provide phonetic data to support this analysis. This paper contributes to Creole typological studies and to the typology of nasalization in general.
References
Ferguson, C. A. 1963. Some Assumptions about Nasals: A sample study of phonological universals. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of Language, pp. 53-60. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Huttar, G. L. and Huttar, M. L. 1972 . Notes on Djuka Phonology. The Phonological Structure of Stems in Saramaccan. In Joseph Grimes (ed.), Languages of the Guianas. pp. 1-11. Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Klein, Thomas. 2006. Segmental Typology of African Creole Languages: Examining uniformity, simplification and simplicity. Selected Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, pp. 42-50. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Leben, William. 1973. Suprasegmental Phonology. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nikiema, Emmanuel and Parth Bhatt. 2003. Two Types of R deletion in Haitian Creole. In Ingo Plag (Ed.), Phonology and Morphology of Creole Languages, pp. 44-69. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Piggott, G. L. 2003. Theoretical Implications of Segment Neutrality in Nasal Harmony. Phonology 20: 375-424.
Walker, Rachel. 2000. Nasalization, Neutralization, and Opacity Effects. New York: Garland.
Language as Interface: Samaná English in Sociohistorical Context
Don E. Walicek -UPR-Río Piedras
This paper uses the notion of language as interface to better understand the social, historical, linguistic, and political circumstances surrounding the emergence, maintenance, and study of Samaná English (hereafter SE), a variety of English that has been spoken on a northern peninsula of the Dominican Republic for more than 150 years. Speakers of this language trace their ancestry to the migration a group of ancestors, some of whom were formerly enslaved, that migrated to Hispaniola when Haiti controlled the entire island in the nineteenth century. Linguists have frequently described this community as one that was inclined to preserve English because of its geographic isolation. But exactly how isolated was the community? And to what extent do sociohistory and linguistic analysis support the assertion that this variety emerged in isolation? Data from archival sources (e.g., transcriptions of oral histories, administrative documents, and newspaper articles) and ethnographic fieldwork will be used to contextualize and answer these two questions. Specific sociohistorical factors suggesting that twentieth-century SE reflects contact as well as ideological discourses about it will be identified and examined as forces that should be considered in understanding both the emergence of SE and how it has changed over time.