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Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches
Edited by Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen and Eeva M. Sippola
[Not in series 211] 2017
► pp. 175–191

Chapter 8
The typology and classification of French-based creoles

A global perspective

| Aarhus University

The main aim of this chapter is to examine the internal relationships of several French-based creoles and to provide a classification of these languages, a problem that has been left unsolved (or only partially solved) by creolists so far. We show that the issue can be tackled with a phylogenetic approach based on a selection of lexical and structural features, resulting in suggestive patterns on the connections between the various creoles in the sample. An advantage in using phylogenetic methods is that it also allows us to assess the relative degree of divergence of a creole from its lexifier. Therefore, French was added to the sample of French-based creoles. The results obtained using this method are largely in accordance with previous attempts from various scholars and show that the application of phylogenetic tools to the study of contact languages can complement traditional methods.

Article outline
  • 8.1Introduction
  • 8.2Previous work on the classification of French-based creoles
  • 8.3Methods and sample
  • 8.4Classifying French-based creoles
  • 8.5Measuring radicalness
  • 8.6Discussion
  • 8.7Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 31 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.211.08dav
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