creoles.
The third phase begins when the interlingual contact increases. At
this stage, the vocabulary is extended by borrowing lexical items
from the dominant source language, but the contact with the source
language might either be withdrawn or there may not be any effective
contact persists, the pidgin becomes more and more influenced by the
standard language in phonology, lexicon and syntax until one finds a
considerable influence on the dominant source language. This stage
is designated as depidginization, leading to the death of a pidgin.
A pindgin could also die out, when the need for which it arose
ceases.
In the course of time, owing to the extensive use of a pidgin in
different domains, the pidgin may displace the ancestral language of
the pidgin speaking community, when it becomes an inadequate and
unfeasible means of communication for the children. Thus the
communicational needs of the children is said to cause a change in
the role of a pidgin from a second language to that of the first
language. The process involved is known as creolization leading to a
creole. The starting point of creolization need not be a pidgin but
may be a pre-pidgin continuu. Once formed, a creole acquires all the
characteristic features of a natural language, viz. expanded
vocabulary, wider range of syntactic possibilities, an increased
syntactic repertoire and usage in a full range of social situations.
Some of the well known creole based on English are : Jamaican creole
in West Indians, Guyanese creole, Sranam in the coastal areas of
Surinam (Dutch Guiana), Neo-Melanesian in New Guinea, Hawaiian
creole English in Hawaii, etc. The Haitian creole in Haiti is the
most important French-based creole. Some of the other French-based
creole are spoken in the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and
Seychelles and in Trinidad and Grenada in Caribbean. Sadari along
with its dialects like: Lariya, Panch pargania, Nagpuria and Halbi
are the two major Hindi based pidgins, both spoken in the heartland
of the Hindi belt. The Hindi based pidgins spoken outside the Hindi
belt in the country are known by the common nomenclature Bazzari
Hindi. Outside the country, the Hindi based pidgins are spoken in
Mauitius, Trinidad and Fiji islands. Desi based on Oriya, spoken in
the Koraput district of Orissa and Telangi1
based on Telugu on Andhra-Orissa border are the two other pidgins
based on Indian languages. A variety of Naga Pidgin is spoken in the
two districts of Arunachal Pradesh adjoining Nagaland. This variety
is occasionally called Nefamese, i.e., the language of NEFA-North
East Frontier Agency. An important feature for the maintenance and
stabilization of a creole is the extent of the contact,
communication and solidarity among the speakers of the creole
speaking communication and solidarity among the speakers of the
creole speaking communities which earlier consisted of speakers of
different mutually unintelligible languages.
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1Personal communication by Prof. Peri
bhaskar Rao, Deccan College, Poona.
2-449 CIIL/Mysore/84
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course of the history of creole speaking communities, if the
dominant external source language is reintroduced as an official
language or as the language of education, as in the case of Jamaica
or Hawaii, the sharp distinction between the creole and the standard
form of the source language gets blurred, with the creole gradually
merging with the standard variety of the source language over a
period of time, by acquiring many features of the standard veriety.
This process is known as decreolization.
Decreolization leads to post-creole continua a term defined by De
Camp (1971). Two typical exampels are : Jamaican and Guyanese
creoles. The post-creole continua as elaborated by Bickerton (1973
and 1975) are regarded as dynamic models incorporating both the
polar ends of the continuum, i.e., Basilect and Acrolect and all the
intermediate varieties, viz., lower mesolect, mid-mesolect and upper
mesolect. These terms of Bickerton divides Guyanese creole continua
into three phases which are indicative of the diachronic stages of
Guyanese creole. Basiect is the variety of English which shows
variation from village to village and is furthest from standard
English and coversely the Acrolect is closest to the English of the
educated ones with the different types of mesolects making up all
the intermediate varieties.
Just as an act of speech which is a continuum is egmented and
designed as consisting of different phonemes, this three-way
segmentation of the post Creole continua is mainly reference point.
In reality the different points of the continua is mainly reference
point. In reality the different points of the continua blend into
one another, with no clear-cut division. Bickerton assigns certain
features to Basileets and certain other features to Acrolects. He
then assigns to the two polar ends the speakers who use either of
these feature with high frequency.
With regard to the process of decreolization, Bailey (1973)
claims that it consists of recreolizing the basilect implying that
fully creolized end of the continuum, is being lost, as
simultaneously the mesolectal or the intermediate varieties are
expanding in the direction of the standard variety. Bailey views the
process of creolization as actually one of new creoles being
constantly formed from the old creole. The result of this continual
recreolization is a post-creole continuum though he designates this
process as ‘decreolizing gradation’. Day (1974) prefers to call
this process as ‘a series of co-existent overlapping systems which
exhibit constrained mixing’.
The features of a pidgin including the views of the western
scholars on pidgins and creoles discussed so far can be categorised
into three sub-classes, viz., (i) life cycles. Each of these
sub-classes is discussed below followed by the comparable Indian
situation which in many cases defies the western hypotheses and the
norms of the true pidgin.
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