Featuring an international contributor list, this long-awaited and broad-ranging collection examines the key issues, topics and research in pidgin and creole studies. A comprehensive reference work exploring the treatment of core aspects of pidgins/creoles, focusing on the questions that animate creole studies Brings together newly-commissioned entries by an international contributor team Accessibly structured into four sections covering: the character of pidgins and creoles; the relation of pidgins/creoles to other language phenomena and other languages; issues in pidgin/creole genesis; and the role of pidgins/creoles in society Provides a valuable resource for students, scholars and researchers working across a number linguistic disciplines, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and the anthropology of language

This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

This volume offers a first survey of projects from around the world that seek to implement Creole languages in education. In contrast to previous works, this volume takes a holistic approach. Chapters discuss the sociolinguistic, educational and ideological context of projects, policy developments and project implementation, development and evaluation. It compares different kinds of educational activities focusing on Creoles and discusses a list of procedures that are necessary for successfully developing, evaluating and reforming educational activities that aim to integrate Creole languages in a viable and sustainable manner into formal education. The chapters are written by practitioners and academics involved in educational projects. They serve as a resource for practitioners, academics and persons wishing to devise or adapt educational initiatives. It is suitable for use in upper level undergraduate and post-graduate modules dealing with language and education with a focus on lesser used languages.

This book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistorical contact situation. The languages covered in the book are: Guiné-Bissau Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawai‘i Creole, Indo-Portuguese creoles, Jamaican Creole, Lingua Franca, North American French, Mauritian Creole, Santomense, Saramaccan, Seychelles Creole, Sranan, Surinamese Maroon creoles, Vincentian Creole, and Zamboangueño Chavacano.

Since creole languages draw their properties from both their substrate and superstrate sources, the typological classification of creoles has long been a major issue for creolists, typologists, and linguists in general. Several contradictory proposals have been put forward in the literature. For example, creole languages typologically pair with their superstrate languages (Chaudenson 2003), with their substrate languages (Lefebvre 1998), or even, creole languages are alike (Bickerton 1984) such that they constitute a “definable typological class” (McWhorter 1998). This book contains 25 chapters bearing on detailed comparisons of some 30 creoles and their substrate languages. As the substrate languages of these creoles are typologically different, the detailed investigation of substrate features in the creoles leads to a particular answer to the question of how creoles should be classified typologically. The bulk of the data show that creoles reproduce the typological features of their substrate languages. This argues that creoles cannot be claimed to constitute a definable typological class.

Starting in 1498, contact between Ibero-Romance and Asian languages has taken place along a vast stretch of the coastlines of continental and insular Asia, producing a string of contact varieties which are among the least visible in the field of Creole Studies. This volume, the first one dedicated to the Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified creoles of Asia, brings together comparative studies on various issues across the Ibero-Asian creoles and beyond, by specialists in these languages. This type of cross-linguistic analysis allows progress on many fronts, including the reconstruction of past stages of the languages, the explanation of observed similarities and differences, the identification and consolidation of typological/taxonomic clusters, or the assessment of the linguistic effects of different contact equations. The volume provides a timely window onto aspects of current research on the Ibero-Asian creoles, including unsettled debates and ways in which their study can contribute to advance several areas of linguistic enquiry.

The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages offers a state-of-the-art collection of original contributions in the area of Pidgin and Creole studies. Providing unique and equal coverage of nearly all parts of the world where such languages are found, as well as situating each area within a rich socio-historical context, this book presents fresh and diverse interdisciplinary perspectives from leading voices in the field. Divided into three sections, its analysis covers: Space and place – areal perspective on pidgin and creole languages Usage, function and power – sociolinguistic and artistic perspectives on pidgins and creoles, creoles as sociocultural phenomena Framing of the study of pidgin and creole languages – history of the field, interdisciplinary connections Demonstrating how fundamentally human and natural these communication systems are, how rich in expressive power and sophisticated in their complexity, The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in this area.

Since the publication of the first edition of the handbook Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik , the then young discipline has changed and developed considerably. The field has left behind its status as an interdiscipline between sociology and linguistics and is now a worldwide established field. Sociolinguistics continues to contribute to solving practical problems in areas such as language planning and standardization, language policy, as well as in language didactics and speech therapy. Moreover, new topics and areas of application have arisen from the autonomy of the discipline - these have been systematically and extensively included in the second edition of the handbook. The new overall concept depicts the regional and disciplinary representativity of sociolinguistic research while offering an encyclopedia-like useablitiy for all its readers. This includes theoretical depth and stringency for readers interested in theory, as well as methodical abundance and detail for empirical researchers. The descriptions of methods are so informative and precise that they can directly be used in the preparation of project planning. Similarly, the descriptions in the practice-oriented articles are so precise that users can accurately assess to what extent they can expect a certain sociolinguistic approach to help solve their problems. With an extensive description as its goal, the second edition of the handbook Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik takes into account the current standing of the discipline and the modified structure of the field.

The study of linguistic variation in the Caribbean has been central to the emergence of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics as an academic field. It has yielded influential theory, such as the (post-)creole continuum or the 'Acts of Identity' models, that has shaped sociolinguistics far beyond creole settings. This volume collects current work in the field and focuses on methodological and theoretical innovations that continue, expand, and update the dialog between Caribbean variation studies and general sociolinguistics.