LING 300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Language Death, Lexifier, Diglossia

• School: Concordia University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 300
• Professor: Jacqueline Peters

Document Summary

Pidgins and creoles: result of high-intensity language contact, during slavery : high-intensity contact, inability to maintain ancestral language or acquire colonial language resulted in creation of a lingua franca. 1st theory: second generation of slaves naturally developed pidgins in order to communicate with each other, their children then turned those pidgins into creoles. 2nd theory: adults expanded their pidgins into creoles, which their children learned as their first language. It is believed that slave drivers made sure slaves were with people they did not share a language with to avoid uprisings. Creole formation: superstrate lexifier + substrate grammar: superstrate lexifier: vocabulary coming from the dominant, substrate grammar: grammar coming from the dominated, plantation creoles: Multilingualism: vernaculars, well-defined non-standard varieties which are used regularly in specific areas, by specific groups either social or ethnic. Topics brought up in class but not lecture material.