Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages: Online-First Articles

The early Baba Malay continuum

| National University of Singapore

Baba Malay today is an endangered creole perceived to be a less flexible, easily identifiable language entity with static ascribed qualities. An investigation of resources from the late 1800s and early 1900s shows that such a characterization of early Baba Malay is not possible. Three novels and twenty letters demonstrate a wide range of variation, lexically and grammatically, emphasizing a wide creole continuum that plausibly existed in the heydays of the language. The wide range of variation can be understood to be detracting from, and aligning with the creole’s substrate and lexifier languages, or with the language that was gaining dominance during that time, English. The linguistic ideologies of early Baba Malay speakers and competing pressures in their group identities explain the considerable variation found.

Keywords: Baba Malay, creole, continuum, lexicon, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sociohistorical context of Baba Malay before and after the 1800s
  • 3.The data: Chrita dulu kala and fan letters
  • 4.Variation along a continuum
    • 4.1The lexical continuum
    • 4.2The grammatical continuum
      • 4.2.1 Ter- prefix
      • 4.2.2MeN- prefix
      • 4.2.3English
  • 5.Findings and implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • The list of abbreviations utilized are as follows, in the order of their appearance
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00129.nal
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