19) Creolization-- prototypical definition

Creolization is the process of forming a native language from mutually unintelligible sources. It is the acquisition of a complete and adequate native set (ie, language, culture...) from input that immigrant members considered inadequate.

Creolization defined

In some instances the children of the speakers of a pidgin will grow up using the pidgin as a first, or native, language. In these cases the reduced contact language must expand in its role to function as a complete language, a process called creolization. Vocabulary is expanded, phonology and syntax are regularized, and the language is used in all situations rather than just in the limited context of trade or labor relations. At this point it has become a creole. Bickerton, "Creole Languages," 118-120; Wardaugh, 59. }

45) standardization

They may stabilize and become the standard, as in the case of Afrikaans; or become diglossic, as in Haiti, where the creole is spoken in everyday usage while standard French is used for government and formal purposes.

46) decreolization--post-creole continuum

Or they may slowly be lost, as seems to be the case with Gullah as it merges with standard English. This last process is called decreolization, and is usually attended by a phenomenon called a post-creole continuum, whereby speakers cover the gamut from full creole to standard. Most speakers will be able to shift through a range of this gamut but not the whole length of it. Some speakers may have two small ranges--one closer to standard, and one nearer to creole--instead of one large one. Bickerton claims that this post-creole continuum, a synchronic phenomenon, reflects to a degree the diachronic situation, with those speaking the lect closer to the creole representing an older form of the language than those creole speakers who speak a lect closer to the standard.{ Bickerton, Dynamics, 1-19, 169-175; ________, "Creole," 120; Wardaugh, 77-89. }

47) {<[LINK]> recreolization and criticisms of decreolization}

18) cultural understanding--negotiation vs acquisition

Pidginization entailed a culture-transfering process where negotiation and compromise had to take place as a prerequisite for the possibility, not ensured, of either shared cultural understanding or sense of community arising among any ethnically diverse population consisting largely of first generation immigrants. Individuals' identities remain intact and perhaps at odds. Only in creole, that is native born, acquirers of the culture would the process ensure shared understandings and sense of community--but it would not be a process of negotiation and compromise of competing cultural identities, but rather the acquisition of base identities in a shared context.

Creolization--three points of view

In the context of Atlantic slavery, this ability, often labelled creolization or assimilation, was manifested along three axes in the contact between African slaves in the Americas and their European masters. The most commonly discussed is that of African acculturation into a "mainstream" European-American society as determined by slavery. The second involves the introduction of African culture into the realm of European society. A third process underlay the other two, however: slaves from diverse African ethnic backgrounds were negotiating a more unified African identity along with their American one.

pan-African identity--Africa and America 'borderlands'

In West and Central Africa, the tools were available to carry out this third process, the creation of a pan-African identity, but as an option rather than as the necessity it became under American slavery. Never before had so many diverse African nationalities been forced to communicate across so many ethnic and cultural boundaries as they were in the Americas. According to Sterling Stuckey, therein lay the roots of pan-African nationalism as it was to take shape in the United States many years later. In the Americas, the negotiation and re-invention of a shared culture became a matter of survival. In South Carolina and Georgia rice districts, Africans were able to perform this creolization to produce new cultures certainly informed by European society, but also distinct from it.{For the roots of pan-Africanism, see Sterling Stuckey Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America Oxford University Press, 1987, passim.}