Finding the source: Creole substrate research in the 21st century
Silvia Kouwenberg (University of the West Indies)
During the early 1980s, the substratist view of creole genesis gained a wide following among creolists; it holds that Africans were the primary agents in creole formation, and that many if not most of the properties of creole languages can be traced to their substrates as a result of L1 transfer.
Today, much more is known of individual cases of substrate transfer. Nonetheless, the broad statements in favor of substrate transfer made by scholars in the 1980s are seriously challenged.
In this paper, I will consider cases which have been put forward in the past as providing substantial support for the substratist view, but which, on closer inspection, are easily challenged. The first case study draws on my work on the relation between Berbice Dutch and Eastern Ijo. Despite the unique Eastern Ijo contribution to Berbice Dutch basic lexicon and the resemblances in isolated grammatical patterns, real grammatical parallels between the two languages are lacking.
The second case study draws on my recent work on substrate sources of Jamaican Creole grammar. Since at least the 1970s, it has been assumed that Akan is the dominant substrate in the formation of Jamaican Creole. It turns out that this view is not supported by the historical record, and that, furthermore, no single dominant substrate can be identified for what may be considered the formative period of Jamaican Creole.
The third case study pertains to reduplication in Caribbean creole languages. In collaborative work with Darlene LaCharité, we found that clear parallels with reduplicative processes in substrate sources cannot be established; this includes several such processes in the Suriname creoles-languages for which substrate parallels have been established with certainty in other areas of grammar.
Finally, I will argue that the nature of substrate transfer as assumed by creolists is not compatible with what is known of L1 transfer in contact situations which lead to interlanguage formation rather than creole formation. Differences exist both in the quality and in the quantity of known cases of transfer.
In short, finding the sources of what are thought to be substrate-derived properties of creole languages remains challenging, and so does providing an account of how such properties may have entered the creole. I propose that establishing the typological alignment in all modules of a creole’s grammar with branches of Niger-Congo may provide a way out of the dilemma at least as it pertains to the genesis histories of individual creole languages. However, whether this will allow us to return to the broad generalizations of the 1980s remains to be seen.