Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
Languages In the World (38 page)
We, the authors, call European long-distance maritime colonization
Globalization 2.0
. We now take another look at the linguistic legacy of this colonialism. Only time will tell â namely, another couple of thousand years â whether English will come to make its own language family of the same depth and diversity of, say, the Romance languages. If it does, then the origins of this new Anglo family can be explained in two words: British Empire. There are two ways to look at the impact of English in the world today: first, by cataloguing vernacular universals or, for English, angloversals, and second, by highlighting the particular influence of substrate languages of the varieties of English spoken around the world. The variety we focus on here is Singlish.
Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann (2008) define an angloversal as a feature that tends to recur in vernacular varieties of the globalized language English.
15
In the many varieties of English around the globe, for instance, adverbs tend to have the same morphological form as adjectives. Other tendencies include: (i) conjugation regularization or leveling of irregular verb forms. In Chapter 7, we called this process
analogy
; (ii) further leveling in the lack of subjectâverb agreement:
they is
,
they was
, etc.; (iii) multiple negation of the type:
Ain't no cat can't get in no bin
; multiple negation has come and gone and come again in the history of English, and now it swirls around the globe; (iv) absence of copula:
She tall
; if one were to count up the languages with âto be' (copula) and the ones without âto be' (zero copula), the without-languages would win. Not even all Indo-European languages feel the necessity for âto be,' the Slavonic ones, for instance. These four features reach 100% in the Americas. However, since they appear only up to perhaps 75% elsewhere in the world, Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann call them areoversals.
The presence of English in Asia now looms large. Already, in 1997, an issue of the Chinese magazine known as âConsumption Guide' published an article entitled
ZájiÄo ZhÅngwén
âHybrid Chinese.' The article points out that this hybrid language is in fashion among Chinese professionals. The language is Mandarin, but it is mixed with English, Cantonese, and Taiwanese expressions. The article notes that: “For those who frequent office buildings of foreign and Sino-foreign business, even when dealing with local professionals, if they don't understand English, they look like country bumpkins” (quoted in Zhang 2005:431â432). Knowing English brings a person into the cosmopolitan world.
The presence of English in Asia is hardly new. Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a trade
pidgin
, called Chinese Pidgin English (CPE), once flourished in the port cities of China and is now extinct. A pidgin is a contact language that, by definition, has no native speakers, and the domain of its use is highly limited, either in trading transactions or on plantations. Although the exact etymology for this term is not known, one promising possibility is that the term
pidgin
came from the CPE pronunciation of the word
business
. Unsurprisingly, CPE had a strong substrate influence from Chinese, particularly Cantonese. Chinese specialist Stephen Matthews (2010:763) notes an unusual case of substrate influence in the use of
piece
as a numeral classifier in CPE, evidenced in the phrase
one piecee coolie
âa worker.' The phrase
long time no see
, common in American English, appears to have come through CPE and is a calque of the Cantonese phrase:
hou
2
loi
6
nou
5
gin
3
. The definition of a pidgin is usually contrasted with that of a
creole
, which is traditionally defined as a language whose speakers have only been exposed to a pidgin. By definition, then, a creole has native speakers. See the discussion of Haitian Creole, later in this chapter.
Turning to the many varieties of English currently spoken in this part of the world, one stands out: Singlish, which is spoken by a majority of Singaporeans as a first or second language.
16
It is also the only variety of English in Asia acquired as a primary
language by its speakers, and it is interesting in the way it combines both Sinitic and Malay grammatical elements into the language. Ansaldo (2010) outlines these elements, beginning with verbless structures and topic prominence. Cantonese has the structure:
| keoi 5 hou 2 leng 3 , |
and Malay has the structure:
| dia banyak cantik. |
They both translate word-for-word as:
S/he very pretty
. It is no wonder, then, that Standard Singlish has no copula in the presence of predicate nominals and adjectives, and accepts utterances such as
He doctor
and
He good
. Although Cantonese and Malay do not make a gender distinction in the third person singular pronoun, Singlish does.
We have already noted that Cantonese, in the Chinese family, has little inflectional morphology, as does Malay. Languages with little inflectional morphology tend to be topic prominent, that is, they put up front what the main idea of the utterance is, since they do not have inflectional morphology for the job.
17
Whatever is the main idea is put first, independent of grammatical status. Here are some Singlish examples â subject:
Today weather very hot wat
(Today's weather is very hot, as you know.); object:
Lionel met (him) already
(I have already met Lionel); or adjective:
Expensive the Durian here
. It is no surprise that both Cantonese and Malay are topic prominent as well.
When it comes to verbal marking, Singlish prefers aspect to tense. Cantonese and Malay similarly do not mark tense. In Singlish, the aspectual markers for perfective, durative, and habitual are derived from the English adverbs
already
,
still
, and
always
. Consider:
Oh, they go already ah?
(Oh, they have already left?),
They still give my hoping lah
(They still give me hope), and
Always seated at the cashier old lady you know
(You know, the old lady (who is) always seated at the cashier). Although it is the case that standard varieties of English do specify âtime when' (tense) of an action, the rise of aspectual distinctions, that is âspeaker's view of the character of the action,' has been occurring for the last 700 or 800 years. The progressive aspect is widespread in standard varieties of English, and an utterance such as
The house is being built
was considered unusual or even ungrammatical as recently as the eighteenth century, while the possibility of
we are being reasonable
(progressive with an adjective) did not exist until the twentieth century. Because Singlish makes little use of the progressive aspect of Standard English, it must be the case that Singlish is aligning itself with the aspectual distinctions available in the ambient languages of Cantonese and Malay.
Finally, you may have noticed several utterance final particles, such as
lah
and
wat
, which express a speaker's attitude or emotion about a situation or the speaker's belief about her interlocutor's state of mind. There are easily eight such particles in use in Singlish, all borrowed from Malay and Cantonese, and when they are borrowed from Cantonese, the complex tonal features are borrowed as well. Many more unique features of Singlish exist, in particular with respect to its vocabulary, but the few
grammatical features mentioned here suffice to exemplify once again how speakers continually and creatively weave together the linguistic resources they have at hand.
On the other side of the world from Vietnam, the French exercised a linguistic influence far different and greater in the New World than the one they had in Southeast Asia. In the Caribbean, the French and the Spanish were the two main contestants squabbling over who got which islands.
18
One island, Hispaniola, ended in a draw. In 1697, the Spanish took the lion's share and called it the Dominican Republic. The French took a smaller, western part and called it Haiti. Haiti is the only country founded after a successful slave revolt, which occurred in 1804, making it second only to the United States in claiming nationhood in the Western Hemisphere. Its official languages are French and Haitian French Creole, known locally as Kreyòl Ayisyen. The country's motto should be familiar to you from Chapter 4:
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
.
For Haitian French Creole, the
lexifier language
is French, which means that the vocabulary and structural base of Kreyòl Ayisyen come from French. However, it also has influences from West African languages, notably Wolof, Fon, and Ewe, and from the Native Caribbean language Taino. It also has Spanish and Portuguese touches. In terms of phonology, Haitian Creole is much like Standard French, in that it has the four nasal vowels exemplified in the classic phrase
un bon vin blanc
âa good white wine,' the successive vowels being [Å©] [õ] [
] [ã]. It also has the fronted rounded vowel [y], but it does not have the Standard French uvular [Ê]. Kreyòl Ayisyen also looks very different from Standard French, which spells the language
créole haïtien
. It comes as no surprise that the spelling of Haitian Creole has caused controversy for looking too English with its plentiful use of
y
and
w
and for not looking like Standard French with all its historical spellings and many silent letters.
Creoles are particularly controversial in the linguistic community. The bone of contention is over exactly how much contact the pidgin-speaking community has with the lexifying standard language as the pidgin becomes a creole. Some linguists maintain that there are strong breaks in the transmission of the lexifying language, making creole grammars nearly
de novo
creations. A strong break seems plausible, given that many of the world's recent creoles arose on coasts or islands. In Hawaii, for instance, speakers of many different languages â Malay, Japanese, Tagalog, native Hawaiian â were brought in to work on pineapple plantations more or less as slaves, and they used the language of the English-speaking owners to communicate among themselves. However, they lived apart from the English-speaking owners, and so their children who creolized the pidgin did not have extensive contact with the standard variety. It is also true that creoles such as Hawaiian Creole English and Haitian Creole French have a particular structural profile, and it is one shared by all creoles; for instance, they are all SVO. The structural profile suggests that something special happens in the transition from a pidgin to a creole. We will enlarge on the subject of the structure of creoles in Chapters 10 and 11.
Other linguists maintain that the notion of a break with the lexifying language is exaggerated, and they deny that creoles have any kind of unusual status as language
qua language. They maintain that some of the features of creoles are found in the varieties spoken by the colonizers, and these features are different from those varieties spoken in the metropole, be it London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, or Madrid. We, the authors, take no position on how much contact acquiring creole speakers have with the native speakers of the lexifying language. However, we can say that there is always a strong break with the resources of the various layers of the lexifying language loop, as described in Chapter 2. Early-generation creole speakers do not have access to the links to the landscape in which the lexifying language took shape, nor do they have access to the customary cultural routines, behaviors, phraseology, and implications speakers of the lexifying language have worked out over centuries and sometimes millennia.
In any case, it can be said that when speakers turn a pidgin into a creole, the rate at which native speakers speak is naturally faster than that of the pidgin, and this speed creates phonological changes, which engender morphological changes, which in turn causes irregular forms to crop up. For instance, in Haitian Creole the definite article
-la
follows the noun:
lakay-la
âthe house'
pitit-la
âthe child.' After nasal consonants,
-la
becomes
-nã
:
nõm-nã
âthe man,'
mach
n-nã
âthe machine.' The regular phonological process of nasal assimilation creates a morphological alternation in the definite article. Such a complication is not found in the pidgin.
As a pidgin becomes a creole, the vocabulary expands to fill the expressive needs of the speakers, and its functional use extends to all areas of life. Then, inevitably, the creolized native language, like all native languages, comes to index both individual and group identity.