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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 พ.ย. 2024
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Umberto Ansaldo's presentation on "Creole Exceptionalism is White - A Decolonised Framework for Creole Studies" at the 2022 ISLE summer school
Abstract
In approaching any field of inquiry, it is inevitable to bring to it a lens of a particular colour. That colour represents the total sum of our beliefs, shaped by history, ideology, and personality. And that colour influences the way in which we approach the research question.
One of the leading questions in Creole Studies has been ‘how did Creole languages develop’? Until recently, most approaches to that question have been coloured by an exceptional hue. I dare say that hue is white, for reasons that will become clear below.
Creole languages developed by and large in colonial settings among enslaved populations. The first eyes that were cast on such languages where the eyes of white, mostly male, colonists. In their eyes, speakers of these languages were less than human, the very belief that justified colonisation in the first place. Among the abilities that slaves were expected to lack in was intelligence. Whether African, Asian, Meso-American or Oceanic, the non-whites were not deemed capable of learning in the same way as white, usually male, colonists. This led to the development of theories of failure in acquiring the colonial languages. Known under different labels, such as ‘broken transmission’, ‘simplification’, and ‘imperfect acquisition’, what these ideas had in common was the fundamental assumption that slaves lacked the intellectual ability to fully learn a language.
Thanks to developments in our understanding of non-European languages, combined with advances in the field of multilingual transmission, we now know better. We know that what was happening was, instead, substrate transfer, i.e. the transfer of grammatical categories of the mother and father tongues of the slaves in appropriating elements of the colonial language for their own usage. This understanding was not available to white colonialists as they mostly had no knowledge of the languages of the enslaved populations. As scholars enlightened by the need to decolonise all forms of knowledge, it is now time to reject theories of exceptionalism, stop using racist terminology, and embrace the era of decolonised Creole Studies.
Recommended readings
Blasi, D. E., Michaelis, S. M. and Haspelmath, M. 2017. ‘Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages’. Nature Human Behaviour 1: 723-729.
DeGraff, M. 2004. ‘Against Creole exceptionalism’. Language 80: 834-839.
