Continuing Contact: Life after Creolisation

Abstract

Creole languages are never born into the stillness of a monolingual community, but always — necessarily — amid the hubbub of a multilingual one. As we have seen, language contact can take several forms, and when the conditions of contact are present for a creole to appear, we can be sure that several other phenomena of language contact — pidginisation, foreigner talk, borrowing, code switching — are there as well. What is more, this situation is likely to last for a long time. In theory a creole could emerge as the sole language of a community within a generation or two, and there would be an end of language contact: but in practice, there does not seem to be a single case of this in recent history. Language contact is a pervasive phenomenon, and contacts which are intense enough to give rise to a new language altogether, tend to endure.