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Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages: Online-First Articles

Empiricism against imperialism

Science, dogma and the neocolonial heritage of creole studies. Reflections on Meakins (2022)

ORCID logo | Aarhus University
Large scale typological studies have been criticized for being unscientific, biased, methodologically unsound and as perpetrating neocolonial attitudes. Meakins (2022) echoes these views in her first JPCL column. The conclusions of all studies using large typological datasets, however, point in the direction that creoles do have structural properties that distinguish them from their lexifiers and the languages of the world, including a dozen not mentioned in Meakins’ column. Opponents use data that are a factor of thousand less extensive, yet apparently more credible. Creoles developed in adverse circumstances, and the flexibility of human genius led to new structural properties, apparently shared across the world. The opposite view, that creoles are continuations of their lexifiers, runs the risk of justifying colonialism, as if forced deportation, blackbirding, slavery, imperialism and colonialism could not have had catastrophic consequences for the continuation of languages. Devastating sociohistorical circumstances led to the creation of new societies, and human ingenuity created their fully-fledged natural languages.
Keywords: creole languages, neocolonialism, methodology, typology, dogmatism, empiricism, grammar, development
Article outline
  • Creoles are normal languages
  • Creoles are a socio-historical category indeed – But with linguistic consequences
  • Language change and development
  • Cognitive unity: Creoles and their linguistic properties
    • Meakins’ column
    • Errors in data?
    • Is scoring easy?
  • Creoles as the result of coercion and displacement of people or of peaceful continuity?
  • Is there anything wrong with analytic languages?
  • Do people want to learn the language of their colonizers?
  • Creativity in creole creation
  • Race against the tide
  • Simplicity and complexity
  • Massive datasets or one creole as example?
  • Others with the same results
    • Is Bakker unscientific and are the others good scientists?
  • Dogmatism
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00119.bak
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