Creolization in West Africa: the big picture

Abstract

A peculiarity of the European-lexifier contact languages (ECLs) of West Africa is that they primarily evolved through “classical” processes of genealogical differentiation: migration from linguistic homelands, founder populations, acquisition and (partial) shift by neighbouring populations, interlectal cross-diffusion, and contact with African adstrate languages. Most languages spoken today that arose from a known history of Afro-European contact in continental West Africa are therefore not typical exponents of “creoles”. For one, particular social conditions associated with creole genesis were not encountered, e.g. extreme socio-economic inequality and racialized systems of oppression, the abandonment of ancestral languages, demographic disparities between the lexifier- and the substrate-speaking groups, etc. Through the study of particular functional areas, and based on generous amounts of primary data, I explore the development of the ECLs in their areal context. On the one hand, they undergo adstratal contact with, and transfer from African ancestral languages. On the other hand, the ECLs undergo influence from transplanted European colonial languages that are profoundly engineered and normalized by linguistic agents exogenous to West Africa. Researching the evolution of creoles in West Africa allows us to move beyond an enduring preoccupation with the genesis of creoles. An areal creolistics of West Africa also has the potential to contribute to a refinement of the tools for the analysis of language contact and change in typologically diverse, multilingual ecologies in general.