The influence of socio-economic status, age, gender, and level of literacy on language attitudes

This study investigated the relationship between socio-economic status, age, gender, and literacy level and Haitian Gonâviens‘ attitudes towards Haitian Creole or Kreyòl and French. Most studies that investigated language attitudes of Creolophones have found that they have negative attitudes towards Kreyòl. Nevertheless, previous studies often included participants who are affiliated with education such as students, teachers, and language policy makers, or those from higher social classes. The current study, however, utilized a language attitudes questionnaire to collect data from 78 adult informants from diverse backgrounds. These participants included 21 highly literate, 51 partially literate and 6 illiterate Haitians. Findings revealed that participants of higher socio-economic status have more positive attitudes towards French than those from lower socio-economic status. Results also showed that there is a tendency for age, gender, and literacy level to affect language attitudes. For instance, positive attitudes towards Kreyòl were found to be more prevalent among older participants than younger respondents. Similarly, male participants had more negative attitudes towards French than female informants. Moreover, respondents of lower literacy levels had more negative attitudes towards French than those who were highly literate.

The discourse marker ale in Bislama oral narratives

This study takes us to the South Pacific and concentrates on Bislama, one of the dialects of Melanesian pidgin (Siegel 2008: 4) and one of the official languages of Vanuatu. We take a discourse analysis perspective to map out the functions of ale, a conspicuous discourse marker in conversations and narratives. Using Labov & Waletzky (1967) model, we analyze the use of ale in narratives from the book Big Wok: Storian blong Wol Wo Tu long Vanuatu (Lindstrom & Gwero 1998) and determine that ale is a discourse marker which indicates temporal sequence and consequence, frames speech reports and closes a digression. We conclude our study by considering a possible historical development of ale. We map out how French allez could have become Bislama ale using imposition and functional transfer (Siegel 2008; Winford 2013a) of vernacular discourse markers (such as go in Nguna).

‘Broken English’, ‘dialect’ or ‘Bahamianese’?

The study investigates language attitudes in The Bahamas, addressing the current status of the local creole in society as well as attitudinal indicators of endonormative reorientation and stabilization. At the heart of the study is a verbal guise test which investigates covert language attitudes among educated Bahamians, mostly current and former university students; this was supplemented by a selection of acceptance rating scales and other direct question formats. The research instrument was specifically designed to look into the complex relationships between Bahamian Creole and local as well as non-local accents of standard English and to test associated solidarity and status effects in informal settings. The results show that the situation in The Bahamas mirrors what is found for other creole-speaking Caribbean countries in that the local vernacular continues to be ‘the language of solidarity, national identity, emotion and humour, and Standard the language of education, religion, and officialdom’ (Youssef 2004: 44). Notably, the study also finds that standard Bahamian English outranks the other metropolitan standards with regard to status traits, suggesting an increase in endonormativity.

‘Fact type’ complementizer in Guadeloupean Creole

This paper aims to give account of the distribution in Guadeloupean Creole of the form of the complementizer kè. It claims that it has a specific distribution, as it seems to appear in opposition to the zero form. Besides a sociolinguistic component, the presence of kè is associable with the fact type semantics of the completive event (Dixon 2006), and so do other grammatical functions and markers that are featured in the completive clauses when kè is present, such as independent TAM markers on the verb and the obligatory featuring of a subject form in case of subject coreference.

Convergence in the Malabar

The Indo-Portuguese creole languages that formed along the former Malabar Coast of southwestern India, currently seriously endangered, are arguably the oldest of all Asian-Portuguese creoles. Recent documentation efforts in Cannanore and the Cochin area have revealed a language that is strikingly similar to its substrate/adstrate Malayalam in several fundamental domains of grammar, often contradicting previous records from the late 19th-century and the input of its main lexifier, Portuguese. In this article, this is shown by comparing Malabar Indo-Portuguese with both Malayalam and Portuguese with respect to features in the domains of word order (head-final syntax and harmonic syntactic patterns) and case-marking (the distribution of the oblique case). Based on older records and certain synchronic linguistic features of the Malabar Creoles, this article proposes that the observed isomorphism between modern Malabar Indo-Portuguese and Malayalam has to be explained as the product of either a gradual process of convergence, or the resolution of historical competition between Dravidian-like and Portuguese-like features.