6 - Pidgins and creoles genesis: an anthropological offering

Summary

… speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.

(Foucault 1977: 53)

Among the various fields of contemporary linguistics that anthropologists recognize as potentially relevant for their own discipline, pidgin and creole studies figure prominently. Why? For three essential reasons. First, pidgins and creoles have arisen in sociocultural situations that have proved to be of great interest to anthropologists since the 1950s, namely situations of cultural contacts often fostered, but not necessarily so, by European colonization. Second, pidgins and creoles have developed concomitantly with new cultural worlds, thus comforting anthropologists in their understanding of language as part of culture and of language as culture. Part of this approach has its intellectual roots in the works of the German philosopher Herder, and has been instrumental in shaping much of North American cultural anthropology (see Leavitt, this volume). Third, the cultural processes linked to pidginization and creolization show that “enlanguagement,” defined here as the process by which sociocultural groups create for themselves the language that becomes the medium of their new cultural life, is a cultural process as much as it is a cognitive one. But overall, the question of the birth conditions of these new languages is what has caught the attention of anthropologists. And the stories are fascinating, not only because of the human drama that has set the stage for the birthing process (colonization, slavery, indentured labour), but because of what this birth reveals about human agency.