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Borrowing, Pidgins, and Creoles
I. Introduction
Sociolinguistic is the study of the characteristics of
language varieties, the characteristics of their functions, and the
characteristics of their speakers as these three constantly interact, change
and change one another within a speech community.
The variety of language
is one of main points in study sociolinguistic. There are several types of
language variety, including languages, dialects, registers, standard languages,
diglosia, borrowing, pidgins and creoles.
In this paper, we only concern in
three varieties of languages namely borrowing, pidgin and Creole. Borrowing can
be defined as one language is using a word from another language. Borrowing is
a technical term for incorporation of an item from one language into another.
It is usually involves the adaptation of a word into the phonetic and
grammatical system of the other language.
Pidgin
language is nobody's native language; it may arise when two speakers of different languages with
no common language try to hold a conversation. Pidgin is a language developed
by people whose mother tongues are different in order to facilitate
communication between them. Lexicon usually comes from one language, structure
often from the other. It has a very simple structure and does not last for a
long period of time. Its complexity varies according to the communicative
demands placed on it. The more there are functional demands, the more powerful
and complex the pidgin is. It is used as a second language and within a very limited domain (trade).
A Creole is a variety
of language that developed from a pidgin and is used as a first language by a
population of native speakers. Creole is a
language that was originally a pidgin but has become nativized. A community of
speakers claims it as their first language. In the United States, there is a
very well known Creole, Louisiana Creole, which is derived from French and African Languages,
II. Discussion
A.
Borrowing
In another on which
different varieties may become mixed up with each other is through the process
of borrowing (a good brief survey Burling 1970:ch:12, and a longer one is Bynon
1977: ch : 16). It is abvious what is meant by “borrowing” when an item is
taken over lock stock and barrel from one variety into another, eg. When the
name of a French dish like boeuf
bourguignon is borrowed for use as an English term, complete with its
French pronunciation (with a uvular r,etc.).
English speakers who know that the item is the part of the foreign language
simply reclassify the item by changing its social description from French to
English (or more probably use of ‘Frenchmen’ to used by ‘me’). In contrast with
code-switching, this does not in fact involve any changeof variety when such an
item is use in English sentence. Like let’s have some boeuf bourguignon, since
now boeuf bourguignon is part of the
English language as far as the speaker is concerned. If on the other hand the
speaker said let’s have du boeuf
bourguignon he would have been code-switching since the word ’du ’ some is French but not English, and would only
occur with a French noun, so we might predict fairly safely that let’s
have du bread would never occur unless bread had been borrowed in English
into French and therefore counted as a French word.
In Sociolinguistics
'Borrowing' refers to 'copying'. It has four important characteristics:
1.
Borrowing of Easily Detachable Elements: Such
elements can easily be picked out of their parent language without carrying
over any additional properties along with them. For example, the names of the
food items like pizza, pudding, burger etc are much used in Urdu language also.
2. Borrowing
After Modification: A few items are borrowed after a little modification in
them in order to make them adjustable in the new language. For example, English
borrowed Urdu Orderly Lantern
3. Borrowing
of the compatible Items: Some times a dominant structure of a language is
borrowed. The borrowed structure is not new to the borrowing language either,
though only in limited use. Since the room for compatibility is already
present, the new structure gets easily assimilated in the borrowing language
e.g. French language unusually places Adj after the noun like: Un visage blanc
The face white. But the people living close to the border of Germany usually
place the Adjective in the pre modifying slot. This change occurred because in
French language the structure readily existed but in a very few expressions
like 'le petit garcon' (a small boy) ' la jollyie femme (the pretty woman)
4.
Minimal Adjustment: Two
neighboring languages usually influence each other. But this influence is not
established in a day. The mutual borrowing takes place only in small dozes. One
doze paves the way for a series of more dozes. But no 'big leap' ever occurs in
the borrowing process.
It is common for items
to be assimilated in some degree to the items already in the borrowing variety,
with foreign sound being replaced by native sound and so on. For instance, the
word restaurant lots its uvular r when it was borrowed from French into
English, so that it will occur with uvular r
in an English sentence only as an example of code-switching.
On the other hand.
Assimilation need not to be total, and in restaurant
many English speakers still have a nasal vowel at the end, which would not
have been there had the word not been borrowed from French. Words like this
make it very hard to draw a neat line round ‘English’ and ‘the English phoneme
system, since the English system gets mixed up with system fom other language.
On ather hand this an exteremely common phenomenon both in English with another
language.
What
these examples illustrate is that borrowing may involve the level of syntax and
semantic without involving pronunciation at all, which brings us back to the
areal features, and we saw that is particularly common for features of sytax to
be borrowed from one language into neighbouring ones. Via people who what in
bilingual in both. We now have three machanism which may help to explain how
this happens.
1. There
is a tendency to eliminate alternative in sytax.
2. There
is the existence of a spesific loan translation like those just quoted, which
may then act as model from which regular “native” instruction can be developed.
3. There
is conversational code switching which encourages the language concerned to
become more smilar in theirsyntax, so that items from each may be more easily
subtituted for one another within the same sentence.
Whether
there any aspects of language which cannot
from one language into another? The answer to be appears that there are not
(Bynon1977 : 255). Even the inflectional morphology of language maybe borrowed,
as witness a Tanzanian language called Mbugu which appears to have borrowed a
Bantu inflectional system from one or more Bantu Neigbours, although other
aspects of its grammar are non-Bantu. thus borrowing is the phenomenon which
may throw light on the internal organisation of language, and certainly on the
relations of language to the society once the right research has been done.
B.
Pidgins
A pidgin is a reduced
language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language
in common; Hudson (1987;61) defines that pidgins are varieties created for very
practical and immediate purpose for
communication between people who otherwise would have no common language
whatsoever, and learnt by one person from another within the communities
concerned as the accepted way of communicating within members of the other
community; it evolves when they need some means of verbal communication,
perhaps for trade but no group learns the native language of any other group
for social reasons that may include lack of trust or close contact. Usually
those with less power (speakers of substrate languages) are more accommodating
and use words from the language of those with more power (the superstrate),
although the meaning, form and use of these words may be influenced by the
substrate languages. When dealing with the other group, the superstrate
speakers adopt many of these changes to make themselves more readily understood
and no longer try to speak as they do within their own group. They cooperate
with the other groups to create a make-shift language to serve their needs,
simplifying by dropping unnecessary complications such as inflections and reducing the number of different words
they use but compensating by exending their meanings or using circumlocutions.
Since reasons for
wanting to communicate with members of the other communication is often trade,
a pidgin may be what is called a trade language, but not all pidgins are
restricted to be being used as trade languages, nor all the trade language
pidgins. Instead, the language of some community in the area may be used by all
the other communities as trade language. English and French are widely used as
trade languages in many parts of Africa. In contrast with language like this, a
pidgin is a variety specially created for the purpose of communicating with
some other group, and not used by any community for communication among
themselves.
The term ‘pidgin’ is
thought by many (though not by all) to come from the English Business, as
pronounced in the pidgin English which develop in China. There are a large
number of pidgin languages, spread through all the continents including Europe,
where migrant workers in countries like Germany have developed pidgins
varieties based on the local national language.
Another requirement of
a pidgin is that is be a simple to learn as possible, especially for those who
benefit least from learning it, and the consequence of this is that the
vocabulary is generally based on the vocabulary of the dominant group. For
instance, a group of migrant workers from Turkey living in Germany will not
benefit much from a pidgin whose vocabulary is based on Turkish, since few
Germans would be willing to make effort to learn it, consequently they make
their vocabulary from German. Similarly, in a colonial situation where
representatives of a foreign colonial power need to communicate with the local
population in matters of trade or administration, and if it is in the interest
of the local population to communicate, then the pidgin which develops will be
based on the vocabulary of the colonial power- hence the very large number of
pidgins spread round the globe based on English, French, Portuguese and Dutch.
The following is a text
of Melanesian Pidgin English, Tok Pisin used in Papua New Guinea. It is from
Hall (1966:149):
naw
mi stap rabawl. mi stap lɔng bglajn, mi katim kopra. naw
Then i stay Rabaul. I
was in workgroup, I cut copra. Then
wənfɛlə
mastər bilang kampani em i-kičm mi mi kʊk
long ɛm
A white man from
company he take me I cook from him
gɛn.
mastər king. mi stap. naw ol master i-kik
Again. Mister King, I
stay. The all white men were playing football.
i-
kikim ɛm. naw lɛg nilang ɛm i-swelap.
They kick him. Then leg
of him swell up,
One of the most
striking features of this text is the absences of complex phrase-level
structures such as embedding. However, this recording was made by Margaret mead
over sixty years ago, when Tok Pisin was not yet widely spoken in an expanded
form. Today embedded structures such as relative clauses are found not only in
the speech of Tok Pisin’s native speakers but also in the speech of adults who
are not native speakers.
C. Creoles
Creole is A language that
developed historically from a pidgin and came into
existence at a fairly precise point in time. Decreolization is the
process through which a creole language gradually becomes more like the
standard language of a region. Besides that, creole also defined as natural
language developed from he mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins (which are
believed by scholars to be necessary precedents of creoles) in that creoles
have been nativized by children as their primary language, with
the result that they have features of natural languages that are normally
missing from pidgins.
The vocabulary
of a creole language is largely supplied by the parent languages, particularly
that of the most dominant group in the social context of the creole's
construction, though there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts. On the
other hand, the grammar often has original features that may differ
substantially from those of the parent languages.
Creole can be found in a variety of areas, most
notably on the island of Haiti and in the southern United States, especially in
Louisiana. While the Haitian and Louisiana forms of Creole are both
French-based and generally recognized as the most prominent Creole languages,
other types of Creole do exist. The English-based Gullah language of the
Caribbean is technically considered a Creole language, as is the English-based
Jamaican Creole. Some Creole tongues are even influenced by multiple European
languages, such as the English-based Saramacca Creole of Suriname which is
greatly influenced by the Portuguese language.
Historical factors have greatly contributed to
the development of the Creole languages, which primarily emerged in areas where
colonial governments established economies utilizing immigrant or slave labor.
The need for communication between colonial powers and local laborers often
resulted in the development of a Creole language which combined elements of the
colonial language and the laborers’ local tongue.
Although the Creole language of one place is
likely to vary significantly from that of another place – such as Haitian
versus Louisiana Creole for example – there are some common characteristics considered
unique to the Creole language in general. For example, most Creole languages
make use of repeated adjectives or adverbs, used to indicate an increased
degree of intensity.
Another trait common to Creole languages is the
use solely of intonation to indicate that a question is being asked. Many
Creole languages also follow similar patterns of verb conjugation, even though
they may be based on different primary languages. For example, the
English-based Creole of Sierra Leone and French-based Creole of Guiana exhibit
very similar patterns of verb conjugation, both adding verb particles to
indicate tense.
The historical
evidence is consistent with the view that the structure of Creole arose without
significant borrowing from other languages. Bilingual or trilingual children of
school age need not (and usually do not) mix up the structural features of the
languages they speak, and there is no reason to support such crossovers were
common in Hawaii. The most compelling argument for the autonomous emergence of
Creole, however, is its observed uniformity. How, within a single generation,
did such a consistent and uniform language develop out of the linguistic
free-for-all that was pidgin in Hawaii? Even if all the children of various
immigrant groups had begun by learning the languages of their parents, and even
if the differences among the various pidgins had been smoothed by interaction
and contact among the children, the homogeneity of the language that developed
remains in need of explanation. Fifty years of contact among pidgin-speaking
adults were not enough to erase the differences among the national language
groups; the homogeneity must have resulted from the differences between
children and adults.
In Creole a grammatically neutral marker for
number can be employed on the noun "shirt" in order to avoid
specifying number: "I stay go da store for buy shirt" ("I am
going to the store to buy shirt"). Moreover, in Creole the addition of a
definite or an indefinite article to "shirt" changes the meaning of
the sentence. In saying "I stay go da store for buy one shirt" the
Creole speaker asserts the shirt is a specific one; in the sentence "I
stay go da store for buy da shirt" the speaker further presupposes that
the listener is already familiar with the shirt the speaker is going to buy.
One might still
suppose the structural uniformity of Creole is derived from certain structures
of one of the ancestral languages or perhaps from certain structures of
English, the language of the plantation owners. There are numerous differences,
however, between the structure of Creole and the structure of any of the
languages with which Creole speakers might have been in contact. In English,
for example, it is possible to refer to an object or a group of objects in a nonspecific
way, but English grammar forces the speaker to state in advance whether the
number of unspecified objects is one or many, singular or plural. One must say
either "I am going to the store to buy a shirt" or "I am going
to the store to buy shirts," even though one may not want to commit
oneself in advance to buying any particular number of shirts.
There are many
other features of Creole that distinguish it from English. Whereas in English
there is a past tense, which is usually marked with the suffix “-ed,” in Creole
there is a tense called the anterior tense, which is marked with
"bin" for older speakers and with "wen" for younger
speakers. The anterior tense is somewhat like the English past perfect:
"had walked" in English is "bin walk" in Creole, and
"walked" in English is simply "walk" in Creole. In order to
distinguish irreal, or possible, actions or processes from actual ones, English
employs the conditional or the future tense. In Creole all such irreal
circumstances are expressed by the particle "go," which is placed
before the main verb and marks what linguists call modality. For example, the
sentence "If I had a car, I would drive home" is rendered in Creole
as "If I bin get car, I go drive home."
There is also a Creole auxiliary verb that marks what linguists call aspect; it
too is placed before the main verb and indicates that the action expressed by
the verb is nonpunctual, or in other words repeated, habitual, continuing or
incomplete. In order to say "I run in Kapiolani Park every evening"
in Creole one must say "I stay run in Kapiolani Park every evening."
If the particle "stay" is omitted by the Creole speaker, the action
is understood to be completed on nonrepetitive.
English
|
Hawaaian
Creole English
|
The two of us had a hard time raising
dogs.
|
Us two bin get hard time
raising dog.
|
John and his friends are
stealing the food.
|
John-them stay cockroach the
kaukau.
|
He doesn't want to play because
he's lazy.
|
He lazy, 'a'swhy he no like
play.
|
It would have been better if
I'd gone to Honolulu to buy it.
|
More better I bin go Honolulu
for buy om.
|
The one falls first is the
loser.
|
Who go down first is loser.
|
The man who was going to lay
the vinyl had quoted me a price.
|
The guy gon' lay the vinyl bin
quote me price
|
There was a woman who had three
daughters.
|
Bin get one wahine she get
three daughter.
|
She can't go because she hasn't
any money.
|
She no can go, she no more
money, 'a'sway.
|
Most important, study of hundreds of
Hawaiian speakers has made it clear that Hawaiian Creole almost certainly
originated in Hawaii. We found no surviving immigrant who speaks anything
approximating a creole language; instead every immigrant we surveyed speaks
some variety of pidgin. If Hawaiian Creole was primarily an important language,
it would have been carried by immigrants, and presumably it would have been
learned by others among the immigrant population. One must therefore conclude
that Hawaiian Creole arose among the children of immigrants, where it is now
found. Moreover, if a creole language, could develop in Hawaii without
ancestry, it can arise anywhere else in a similar way.
III. Conclusion
In this paper, the writers have
explained briefly about three language varieties, namely borrowing, pidgins,
and creoles. The writers explained about the definition of borrowing, its
characteristics, and the examples of borrowing. The writers defined pidgins as reduced language that
results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in
common. The history of pidgins and
the example of it have explained briefly by the writers. In the last part of
discussion, the writer explained about the things related to the creoles. The
writers found some serious problems in delimiting one type
of variety from another-languages from
ordinary language from creoles, or creoles from pidgins. The writers hope the expanation about borrowing, pidgins,
and creoles in this paper can be understood by the reader.
References
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Languages. EMERGENCE OF
LANGUAGE: Development and Evolution, ed. W. S.-Y. Wang, New York: W.H.
Freeman, 1991. Retrieved on June 12,
2013, from www.ohio.edu
Hornberger, N.H., & McKay, L. Sandra. (1996).
Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Hudson, R.A.
(1980). Sociolinguistics.Cambrigde
University Press.
Nordquist,
Richard. (2013). Creoles; Definition and Example of Creoles. Retrieved on June 12, 2013,
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