ABSTRACT
be their hold and will become the first language of their children. Once a pidgin has acquired native speakers, it is referred to as a creole. The native language of many inhabitants of the Caribbean islands is a creole, for instance the English-based creole of Jamaica, the French-based creole of Haiti, and the Spanish-and/or Portuguese-based creole Papiamento (Papiamentu) of the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. At an even later stage, social improvements and education may bring the creole back into close contact with the European language that originally contributed much of its vocabulary. In this situation, the two languages may interact and the creole, or some of its varieties, may start approaching the standard language. This gives rise to the so-called post-creole continuum, in which one finds a continuous scale of varieties of speech from forms close to the original creole (basilect) through intermediate forms (mesolect) up to a slightly regionally coloured version of the standard language (acrolect). Jamaican English is a good example of a post-creole continuum. Even with hindsight, as we saw above, it would have been difficult to predict the
