Language Speciation: Lessons from Genetic Creolistics

Salikoko S. Mufwene

The University of Chicago

Since the late 19th century, the emergence of creole language varieties has been explained traditionally as exceptional relative to typical cases of language speciation. Some creolists have invoked a break in the transmission of their lexifiers to deny them membership in the family of Indo-European languages. By contrast, heeding Hugo Schuchardt, a few other creolists (myself included) have recently subscribed to uniformitarianism and grounded their research on the emergence of creoles in the economic histories of their respective contact ecologies. They have underscored the significance of the socio-economic structures in which these new vernaculars emerged to explain why their structures have diverged more significantly from their lexifiers’ than those of non-creole colonial varieties that evolved from the same lexifiers during the same period. In my ecological approach, I have, by comparison, highlighted the actuating role of similar population movements and language contact, concurrent with the emergence of new population structures, in the histories of languages such as English and the Romance and Bantu languages, which are all outcomes of language speciation. From the point of view of actuation of change, including language endangerment and loss (which are concomitants of the relevant evolutionary processes), these same ecological factors, among others, answer the question of what triggered the changes. We still have to bear in mind that history does not repeat itself faithfully, as the variables of the relevant language structuring equations vary from one contact ecology to another, even in the case of creoles.