Pidgins and Creoles (review)

The basic question for any reviewer is: How does this volume compare with the competition? Let me state at the outset that it seems as though the voracious pidgin-creole market cannot be satiated. The author explains in the preface that many of her students found much of the field’s literature either too introductory or too advanced (she writes ‘difficult’ [x]). Many of my students have expressed similar sentiments. While pidgin-creole textbooks by such notables as John Holm, Peter Mühlhäusler, Suzanne Romaine, M. Sebba, and Loreto Todd proliferate, this volume was written for undergraduates with little linguistic background. Singh notes that her work is an attempt ‘to bridge the gap: I have tried to move beyond introductory material, present salient theories and arguments in an accessible manner but yet not assume too much linguistic knowledge on the part of the reader’ (x). To this end and quite coincidentally, the present reviewer and coauthor Mauro Tosco have recently produced a work of similar scope with the same beginning student audience in mind (Pidgin and creole languages: A basic introduction, Munich: Lincom Europa, 2001); however, the two works have different emphases in that Kaye & Tosco 2001 focuses on non-European lexified languages, especially pidgin and creole varieties of Arabic (Juba Arabic of the southern Sudan and Ki-Nubi of Kenya and Uganda).

S’s short textbook of pidginistics and creolistics developed out of the author’s 12-week course on the topic for undergraduates at the University of Surrey Roehampton. A big plus for the book is that the author, a native speaker of Trinidadian English Creole (TEC), has included many fascinating examples from her mother tongue. In addition to an interesting section devoted to language planning in Trinidad, which makes for absorbing reading (96–109), there is an appendix consisting of texts in TEC from 1827 and 1845 (119–23).

Addressing now one of the author’s major theses, viz. that pidgins and creoles are ‘not unusual or atypical’ languages (xi), I believe that the former are, in many ways, atypical by the very nature of their grammatical and lexical reductions from superstrate languages. Sango, one of two official languages of the Central African Republic, will prove illustrative. William J. Samarin (‘The status of Sango in fact and fiction’, in John McWhorter, ed., Language change and language contact in pidgins and creoles, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000) recently hypothesized that all pidgin languages have reduced lexicons (2000:321). Sango has approximately 1,000 words (2000:319). This is very unusual in that no ‘normal’ language has so few words.

Turning to the controversial matter of the genetic classification of pidgins and creoles, in her discussion of West African Pidgin Portuguese (WAPP), she asks whether Proto-WAPP is Indo-European or Hamitic (29). ‘Hamitic’ is defined in the glossary as ‘the name of the language family that comprises the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Khordofanian (sic) and Khoisan languages of Africa’ (126). The label ‘Hamitic’ was thoroughly discredited years ago: there is no such family although there is a Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic phylum (= Afroasiatic). WAPP is best seen, in my view, as being related to its lexifier; however, other perspectives are entertained by Singh.

Finally, the book contains technical mistakes. Erroneous hyphens abound: re-thinking (24), non-genetic (29), re-defined (34); bi-lingual (34), etc. Mandarin Chinese mà is glossed as ‘abuse’; rather it means ‘scold’ (31).

Finally, I will answer the question posed at the beginning of this review. Although the volume does have shortcomings, an introductory student can still profit from the data and analyses presented. The same student will be richly rewarded by delving further into many of the items listed in the comprehensive bibliography (130–36).