More Tolerance of Creole Languages

[0.42@632]

Traditionally, creole languages were considered corrupted versions of their lexifiers and rarely written down, if only in the colonizer's orthography (Chinese Pidgin English and Papiamento). What could increase tolerance of creole languages?

 

[0.42@632]

Would a successful anticolonial uprising combined with an earlier end to scientific racism help?

 

[OwenM]

Would a successful anticolonial uprising combined with an earlier end to scientific racism help?

I think you can have specific creoles be more accepted if a former colony adopts them as a nationalist thing but a general higher tolerance seems... very difficult.
And I suspect even the former would be more at the expense of the former language of the colonised than that of the coloniser.

 

[rfmcdonald]

The problem with the idea of creoles gaining official status is that the languages of the colonizers remain prestigious and useful. Even the Haitian Creole that gained official status two centuries ago after a successful revolution, the language of ten million people, has to share status with French; even Sranan Tongo remains relatively marginalized in Surinam, notwithstanding the relatively minor importance of Dutch on the world stage; even Jamaican Creole is far from challenging English, notwithstanding a globally influential pop culture.

 

[0.42@632]

The problem with the idea of creoles gaining official status is that the languages of the colonizers remain prestigious and useful. Even the Haitian Creole that gained official status two centuries ago after a successful revolution, the language of ten million people, has to share status with French; even Sranan Tongo remains relatively marginalized in Surinam, notwithstanding the relatively minor importance of Dutch on the world stage; even Jamaican Creole is far from challenging English, notwithstanding a globally influential pop culture.

And the populous Asian/African former colonies where creoles might have (or in the case of Nigeria, have formed) either use colonizer languages or native ones for formal purposes.

Note that Naija has up to 100 million speakers total, depending on how one counts speakers

 

[rfmcdonald]

For this to work, I think you might need a two-step process, with the creole society making a complete break with the colonizer and with the colonizer's language going into eclipse. The situations in Haiti and Surinam seem to come closest to this scenario, but even there, ties with the former metropole remain importance. Creoles related to English and French and Portuguese, meanwhile, have to compete directly with those world languages. Even ones with very large numbers of speaker face intense pressure.

 

[0.42@632]

For this to work, I think you might need a two-step process, with the creole society making a complete break with the colonizer and with the colonizer's language going into eclipse. The situations in Haiti and Surinam seem to come closest to this scenario, but even there, ties with the former metropole remain importance. Creoles related to English and French and Portuguese, meanwhile, have to compete directly with those world languages. Even ones with very large numbers of speaker face intense pressure.

Supplanting them may be impossible, but some sort of defacto equilibrium (certainly not dejure) as with Singlish isn't

 

[0.42@632]

Or something like Basic English which is meant to 'simplify' the language goes the full way (pronounciation, grammar, loans from major languages and Scientific Latin) so you get Besik Ingilish sentences like Kwiki braun wulpa salta oba lanlan doga [kwɪki brawn wʊ lpə sæltə owbə lænlæn dowgə]. so you get something like a creole as a state language, so you get something that :English::Novalatina:Spanish

 

[Alex Richards]

The problem with this is the framing of the question. Creoles are just a member of the same dialect continuum as their parent language, but languages aren't surrounded by insurmountable barriers except those formed by nationalism. If you know Jamaican Creole or Naija, it's relatively effortless to learn standard English, and it's much easier for schools to teach standard English than it would be to develop a standard written form that everyone in Jamaica or Nigeria could agree on. In the case of non-settler colonies like Nigeria, a hypothetical standardized form of Naija, even if one existed, wouldn't actually be worth learning compared to the benefits of learning English. It doesn't make creoles not a valid language just because it's easy to teach creole speakers the parent dialect in school, but there's no particular reason to try to flash back to the 19th century and develop constructed ethnolinguistic identities like Finnish and Bulgarian.

Also there's the issue that the people who might have the most vested interest in having everything standardised to the Creole- the poorer communities for whom lack of standard English is a barrier to advancement- are also the ones with the lowest levels of literacy so the least able to actually try and promote the use of the Creole language in official business.

Arguably Haitian Creole only actually got official status because the revolution in Haiti was at that exact moment where nationalism was becoming a thing.

 

[Indicus]

There is an example of a creole language gaining a considerable status to such an extent as to completely exclude its parent language - Afrikaans. It originated in the Dutch Cape Colony as a Dutch-based lingua franca between the Khoikhoi people, the Malays (and other slaves imported from the Indian Ocean slave trade), and Dutch colonists, becoming common among Afrikaners and Cape Coloureds. For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it had a very low status, being derisively called “Hottentot Bastard Dutch”, “Cape Malay”, or “Kitchen Dutch”, and it was a solely spoken dialect in contrast to the formal Dutch that was written. A language movement around it only formed in the late nineteenth century, but by the early twentieth century it was able to entirely displace Dutch in status in South Africa.

I think there are a few reasons Afrikaans was able to achieve such a status. First, it was associated with white people, the Afrikaners, and it lost its association with the Cape Coloureds who also speak it, which allowed it to acquire recognition rather than being considered a “mere coloured dialect” playing second fiddle to the language spoken by the white elite. Second, it gets the vast majority of its words from Dutch, which enabled the language movement to claim it to be a “pure” language. And finally, because South Africa was entirely cut off from the Dutch by 1806, which allowed it to slowly supplant Dutch in status decades after it was cut off, and also it meant Dutch was of increasingly minor use afterwards.

 

[rfmcdonald]

That does suggest scenarios where the handover of a creole-speaking population from one power to another might create situations where the creole will end up displacing the original colonizer's language.

I wonder if there are analogies with the situation of Maltese. I know that language is not a creole, but before British rule began Italian was the language of high culture in the Maltese archipelago. If not for the displacement of the formerly dominant language, I wonder if there would have been much space for Maltese to develop.