4u ,Research ReportIs Afrikaans a Creolized Language?W. W. SchuhmacherInstitute of Germanic Philology, University of CopenhagenPIDGIN AND CREOLE LANGUAGESThe study of language behaviour generallyassumes the existence of the normal com-munication act where speaker Sx uses languageL his mother-tongue, when communicating tohearer H (with mother-tongue L ). However,this normal situation is far from being theonly one. In the following, the situation isanalysed which arises when speakers or hearersof two heterogeneous language systems haveto communicate with each other. Given acommunity, where language L the dominantlanguage, is opposed to language Ly, the lowerLanguage:Figure 1xxHxSY Ly HYA pidgin language L_._. results as a modifica-tion of the dominant language L through im-perfect replication of speakers of the lowerlanguage Ly:Figure 2STEP ONESTEP TWOH.xX(Y)X(Y)X(Y)-> ŁY105Pidgin languages, such as Melanesian Pidgin(with English and Melanesian as dominant andlower language respectively), are mostly 'tradelanguages', where Sy and S have to use pidginwhen communicating with H and Hrespectively.A Creole (creolized) language results whena pidgin language comes to be employed asa first language:y *-V -.Figure 3STEP ONEH,STEP TWOX(Y)X(Y)X(Y)X(Y)H.X(Y)H,'Haitian Creole is a creolized language, basedon a reduced or pidginized variety of French,originally spoken in the contact situation be-tween masters and slaves in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries with considerableborrowing of morphological and syntacticfeatures from the West African languages ofthe slave population.'1 It is spoken by the entirepopulation of the Republic of Haiti; that is'Step One' is followed by 'Step Two' (cf. Figure3).THE MAKING OF AFRIKAANSThough not calling Afrikaans a creole lan-guage, Marius F. Valkhoff concludes that itcontains quite a number of creolisms, such asnasalised vowels and double negation for in-stance.2 On the other hand, the changes leadingto the development of Afrikaans can be viewedas innovations in the grammar(s) of the Dutchdialects of the colonists at the Cape, with ruleswhich are innovations in the phonologicalcomponent, and rules which may be regardedas changes in the morpheme inventory. Thus,instead of suggesting that the Dutch at theCape underwent a 'partial creolization', onesimply states that it underwent changes bythe addition of rules to the grammar.The lexicon of a grammar is probably mostamenable to external influences; the phonolo-gical component and the morpheme inventorycannot be adduced as easily as evidence forinfluence such as pidginization or creolization.For two reasons the making of Afrikaans ons[3: s] (We us; cf. Dutch ons [ons], us) repre-sents a test case in this connection. Firstly, theexistence of nasalised vowels (viz. [ I, 5, «])is regarded as supporting the theory of thecreole character of today's Afrikaans. As, how-ever, a well-known change similar to the be-haviour in Afrikaans is found in a NorthernWest Germanic innovation (cf. Old English[u : s] from [» : s]?, as opposed to Old HighGerman [uns]), the vocalic nasalization ofAfrikaans may be defined as a belated Ger-manic innovation and not as a creolism.Secondly, in Afrikaans, the replacementNominative > Accusative in the personalpronoun, as in ons versus Dutch wij (we), isusually regarded as a creole feature. A parallelhowever, can be discovered in today's popularor vulgar Danish where the replacement iseffective in all cases; therefore, one might in-stead propose the term 'Germanic vulgarism'.From this, the complexity of the linguisticnature of pidginization and creolization isevident. Therefore, before using a convenient106I.J J,notion such as 'creolization', one rather shouldbegin with the neutral statements proposedabove.A NEW APPROACHThe following cybernetic approach is pro-posed. The 'simplified' structure of today'sAfrikaans may be interpreted as a result of aspecial adaptive manoeuvre, initiated by theDutch colonists for use with hearers who didnot have full understanding of Cape Dutch,namely the slaves and others from differentparts of the East Indies and of Africa withtheir Portuguese lingua franca. In other words,in order to paralyse the influence of the coexist-ing (lower) language, that is to prevent the(dominant) Dutch language from undergoingpidginization and, later, creolization (cf.Figures 2 and 3), the internal structuralchanges towards simplification have takenplace. Consequently, Afrikaans as originatingfrom Cape Dutch 'foreigner talk'3 would notcontain any pidgin or Creole feature at all.REFERENCES>R. A. Hall, Haitian Creole: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary, The American Anthropological Association, MemoirNo. 74 (Supplement No. 2, Part 2 to American Anthropologist, 55,), 1953, p.12.^Studies in Portuguese and Creole with Special Reference to South Africa, Johannesburg, Witwatersrand Univ.Press, 1966.^Discussed in detail in C.A. Ferguson, 'An Investigation into "Simplified Speech" as Used with Hearers WhoDo not Have Full Understanding of the Language', delivered at the 3rd International Congress of AppliedLinguistics, Copenhagen, August 1972.107