creole language, or simply creole, is a stable form of contact language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable form of contact language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable form of contact language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized more narrowly by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar (e.g., by eliminating irregularities). Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist. The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or documented. About one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500. These are predominantly based on European languages such as English and French due to the colonization and the Atlantic slave trade that arose at that time. With the improvements in ship-building and navigation, traders had to learn to communicate with people around the world, and the quickest way to do this was to develop a pidgin; in turn, full creole lan A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable form of contact language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized more narrowly by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar (e.g., by eliminating irregularities). Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist. The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or documented. About one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500. These are predominantly based on European languages such as English and French due to the colonization and the Atlantic slave trade that arose at that time. With the improvements in ship-building and navigation, traders had to learn to communicate with people around the world, and the quickest way to do this was to develop a pidgin; in turn, full creole languages developed from these pidgins. In addition to creoles that have European languages as their base, there are, for example, creoles based on Arabic, Chinese, and Malay. The lexicon of a creole language is largely supplied by the parent languages, particularly that of the most dominant group in the social context of the creole's construction. However, there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts. On the other hand, the grammar that has evolved often has new or unique features that differ substantially from those of the parent languages. Theories focusing on European input Theories focusing on non-European input Gradualist and developmental hypotheses Universalist approaches In addition to the precise mechanism of creole genesis, a more general debate has developed whether creole languages are characterized by different mechanisms than traditional languages (which is McWhorter's 2018 main point) or whether in that regard creole languages develop by the same mechanisms as any other languages (e.g. DeGraff 2001). a lack of contextual inflection, that is, a lack of inflection that marks only agreement in case or gender (as opposed to inherent inflection that marks tense, mood or number); a lack of functional tone marking, that is, a lack of tone that serves to distinguish lexical items (e.g. Mandarin Chinese mā 'mother' vs. mǎ 'horse') or to encode grammatical features; and a lack of semantically opaque word formation, that is, a lack of words like "understand" or "make up", the meaning of which is not Henri Wittmann (1999) and David Gil (2001) argue that languages such as Manding, Soninke, Magoua French and Riau Indonesian have all these three features but show none of the sociohistoric traits of creole languages. McWhorter (2011, 2018) disagrees: for instance, he points out that Soninke has "a goodly amount" of inherent (i.e. non-contextual) inflection, that Magoua "retains ample marking of gender, person and number distinctions on verbs as well as conjugational classes" and therefore that these languages should not be considered creoles. Others (see overview in Muysken & Law (2001)) have claimed the existence of creoles that serve as counterexamples to McWhorter's hypothesis – the existence of inflectional morphology in Berbice Dutch Creole, for example, or tone in Papiamentu. Again, McWhorter (2018) disagrees. For instance, he points out that the use of tone in Papiamentu to distinguish participial verb forms from base ones appeared only after extensive contact with native Spanish speakers.

In this work, we analyze aspects of the phonology, morpho-syntax and lexico-semantics of the Afro-Atlantic Creoles to show how, by taking advantage of formal, structural, and functional convergence between and among African languages, European languages, a Proto Atlantic Portuguese lexifier Creole, and universals of language use, speakers of the Atlantic Creoles have shaped and deployed their creolized languages as instruments of double and multiple voicing (Du Bois 1903; Bakhtin 1930). This pluri-voicing has allowed Atlantic Creole speakers to equip themselves with a linguistic repertoire tha

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contac ✉ * E-mail: tria@isi.it 15 4 2015 10 4 e0120771 e0120771 21 4 2015 © 2015 Tria et al This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. Abstract Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. Even when the social conditions were different from the ones just depicted, one refers to a creole language variety as a language, or vernacular, that emerged in a specific contact ecology hosting two or more languages, a lexifier and one or more substrates [ 9 , 10 ]. The relevance of the study of creole languages to that of other languages [ 11 , 12 ] has perhaps been underestimated so far [ 10 , 13 ], also in relation to the fact that the genetic classification of creoles goes beyond the tree models often used in genetic linguistics [ 14 – 17 ], calling for methods that are able to account more adequately for varieties produced by language mixing. In this essay, we model this aspect of their emergence, hoping to shed light on some specific ecological conditions that favored them. We model the process of language restructuring with divergence, which applies also to non-creole language varieties, in contact ecologies involving especially European colonists and African slaves in the Within this framework, we superimpose to this simple modeling scheme a specific contact ecology, to address the question of which population structure favors or disfavors the emergence of a creole language. We know that the cradle of creole language formation is a segregated population, in which Whites and non-Whites lived separately and did not socialize together, though they met at the work place. Therefore, oversimplifying the scenario somewhat, we consider three different sets of populations: Free Whites, Free Blacks, i.e., mainly Creole Mulattos, and Bozal slaves, and we adopt an interaction topology by assuming a segregation regime. More specifically, Europeans are treated in a simplified way as an endless and unchangeable source of the European lexifier E , never changing their language (the cases where the Europeans who interacted regularly with non- Europeans also learned to speak creole as the only or other vernacular [ 26 ] is not considered here for sake of simplicity). Moreover, Europeans are supposed to preferentially communicate with Free Blacks and to have only few direct interactions with Bozal Slaves. As noted above, we cannot yet get in the multitude of languages spoken by the Bozal slaves and simply represent the set of languages as a unique language A . However, to model in a coarse grained fashion the African multilingualism, we introduce a parameter δ that accounts for the possibility that a Bozal slave would success to communicate with another in an African language (refer to the Materials and Methods section for details). Detailed model definition We consider a population of N individuals divided in three subpopulations: Free Whites (or Europeans, Eu ), Free Blacks, i.e., mainly Creole Mulattos ( M ), and Bozal slaves ( B ). Since we are interested in the emergence of a new hybrid language, we introduce the additional rule by which if, after the interaction, H has in her repertoire both languages A and E (or the three languages A , E and C ), with probability γ , she will retain only the new language C (creole). The contact ecology is modeled in the following way that: (i) Europeans can only act as S; (ii) Europeans interact with Bozals only with probability ε (as shown in Fig 2 ). In the framework of our modeling scheme, we can study how the languages spoken by Mulattos and Bozal evolve in time, and which language will ultimately be adopted by the two populations. Similar arguments could be made for Alabama and for Louisiana (whose history of double colonization, first by the French and later by the Americans, makes the evolutionary picture more complex). A detailed discussion of the model’s results for individual States is provided in the S1 Supporting Information . Discussion In summary, we introduced a modeling scheme to investigate the emergence of creole languages in ecologies where language mixing occurred through the interactions of colonizers with slaves, and among the latter, with the Mulattoes/Creoles typically playing an important role in seasoning the Bozal slaves.