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Language Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew
Edited by Edit Doron, Malka Rappaport Hovav, Yael Reshef and Moshe Taube
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 256] 2019
► pp. 287–320

Our creolized tongues

| University of Amsterdam

It is often assumed that creole languages represent ‘exceptional’ language development in which a contact language or a variety largely spoken by late L2 learners nativizes and becomes the main language of a community. It is therefore not uncommon that scholars of contact languages or revitalized languages (e.g., Hebrew) ask whether such languages are creoles or not. The common assumption is that so-called creoles exhibit certain specific linguistic features which distinguish them from other non-creolized languages, and which could be used as a yardstick to evaluate the status of other languages as creoles. But, what if any given language is a creolized form of a pre-existing language spoken by previous generations? In this paper, I argue that language acquisition always happens in a situation of contact comparable to creole contexts, in which learners are faced with heterogeneous inputs and recombine competing linguistic features into new linguistic items. Under this view, all natural languages involve a hybrid grammar. I further discuss how recombination leads to linguistic variation both at the learner’s and population level.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Everyone speaks a creolized language
  • 3.Language acquisition and creolization: Linguistic hybridism
  • 4.Recombination of syntactic features
  • 5.Capturing variation and constrains on variation during recombination
  • 6.Recombination within CP: The case of Saramaccan
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.256.11abo
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