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Palgrave Macmillan

Inheritance and Innovation in a Colonial Language

Towards a Usage-Based Account of French Guianese Creole

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. William Jennings

    1. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

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  2. Stefan Pfänder

    1. Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

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  • Takes an dual approach to French Guianese Creole to formulate a theory of how the language arose

  • Contributes to the debate on creole origins and serves as a template for investigations of other creoles

  • Combines social history and linguistic analysis to examine creole origins

  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (4 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
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  2. Introduction: A Dual Approach

    • William Jennings, Stefan Pfänder
    Pages 1-5

  3. History: The Creation of French Guianese Creole

    • William Jennings, Stefan Pfänder
    Pages 7-81

  4. Linguistics: Inheritance and Innovation in French Guianese Creole

    • William Jennings, Stefan Pfänder
    Pages 83-176Open Access

  5. Conclusion

    • William Jennings, Stefan Pfänder
    Pages 177-179

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 181-240
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Keywords

About this book

This book takes a fresh approach to analysing how new languages are created, combining in-depth colonial history and empirical, usage-based linguistics. Focusing on a rarely studied language, the authors employ this dual methodology to reconstruct how multilingual individuals drew on their perception of Romance and West African languages to form French Guianese Creole. In doing so, they facilitate the application of a usage-based approach to language while simultaneously contributing significantly to the debate on creole origins. This innovative volume is sure to appeal to students and scholars of language history, creolisation and languages in contact.
Chapter 3 is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Reviews

“The book is well written, the argumentation is usually clear, the authors have a clear theorical framework, they present a great deal of linguistic data … . This book is probably its best test to date. … In short, this is an interesting book, more historically informed than most works of its kind.” (Peter Bakker, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Vol. 36 (2), 2021) “This ground-breaking book blends original sociohistorical research with detailed linguistic analysis to illuminate the development of a previously little known contact language: French Guianese Creole. The authors make a valuable contribution to the field of contact linguistics by clearly demonstrating what linguistic resources were available in the contact environment and how speakers used these to create a new language combining both inherited and innovated features.” (Jeff Siegel, Professor of Linguistics, University of New England, Australia)

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    William Jennings

  • Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Stefan Pfänder

About the authors

William Jennings is Senior Lecturer in French language, linguistics and culture at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research interests lie primarily within French colonial and encounter history, with a particular focus on the emergence of creole languages and societies.

Stefan Pfänder is Full Professor of Romance linguistics at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitäts Freiburg, Germany. His teaching focuses on French, Spanish, Italian and Creole, while his research centres around the emergence of grammatical constructions in interaction, and usage-based models of language variation and change.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Inheritance and Innovation in a Colonial Language

  • Book Subtitle: Towards a Usage-Based Account of French Guianese Creole

  • Authors: William Jennings, Stefan Pfänder

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61952-1

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-61951-4Published: 11 January 2018

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87197-4Published: 04 June 2019

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-61952-1Published: 21 December 2017

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIV, 240

  • Topics: Language Change, African Languages, Historical Linguistics, Language History, Romance Languages, Sociolinguistics

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