**** Post-creole continuum

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William Stewart, David DeCamp, and Mervyn Alleyne, Beryl Bailey and otherts helped pioneer the concept of a post-creole continuum along an axis from basilect through mesolect to acrolect. As an alternative to models of eventual obsolescence through decreolization, a Labovian continuum was available to a speaker who acquired her language in an environment where access to both a creole and the European target language were available. Speakers negotiated a space, or perhaps spaces, along the continuum depending on social context and other factors. The continued viability of the original target language in the speech community precluded the creole from breaking off completely, but the creole forms took on their own social and linguistic meanings as well. Bailey claimed that both Jamaican and American speakers of VBE operated along a continuum that fell in a range between basilect and acrolect. While dismissive of the idea of prior creolization at first, Labov eventually came to support the idea.

• - How is the post-creole continuum organized? <[LINK]>
• - Labov, creolization and North American

Black English. ............................... <[LINK]>

-- Bickerton's extension: the dynamic wave model <[LINK]>

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See Holm 50-60, Labov vs Stewart, Stewart paper