Conclusion

In the past, pidgins and creoles with lexical affinities to European languages were often misunderstood and disparaged. Because they were associated with populations which had been enslaved or with peoples whose cultures differed radically from those of western Europe, they were regarded as inferior languages, the use of which was often seen as a reflection of mental inferiority. Nor are such feelings entirely dead, though their expression is, today, more muted. 1971 could still produce a remark like: ‘I feel that modern linguists have been dangerously sentimental about creole languages, which, with only a few notable exceptions, constitute in most communities a distinct handicap to the social mobility of the individual and may also constitute a handicap to the creole speaker’s personal intellectual development’ (Whinnom, p. 110). In multilingual communities it is clear that geographical mobility is increased rather than sacrificed by the acquisition of a pidgin or a creole, though if a person speaks only a creole he may certainly be hampered if he wishes to be internationally mobile. There seems much less justification, however, for the suggestion that a creole may be detrimental to a creole speaker’s ‘intellectual development’, for how can such an abstraction be measured? And even if it could be measured, from whose point of view would it be considered a handicap? It is perhaps plausible that if a group were limited to the use of a restricted pidgin their communicative powers might be impaired; but no group of people has ever, apparently, allowed itself to be so hampered. The Africans taken to the Americas expanded and developed their pidgins, utilizing many sources until their creoles became capable of expressing all their linguistic needs. That certain Europeans found the languages restricting is hardly surprising if they did not learn them properly. An English schoolboy may find it inhibiting to express his needs in French but the ‘fault’ lies not in the language but in the boy’s ability to manipulate it. This fact was realized as early as 1869 when Thomas remarked that if a person wished to use the French-based Trinidadian creole, he ‘must, for the while, forget his French, and believe (for it is a fact) that he is using a dialect fully capable of expressing all ordinary thoughts, provided the speaker is master of, and understands how to manage, its resources’ (1869, p. 105). The previous chapters show that pidgins and creoles are not intrinsically different from other languages. No single feature exhibited by pidgins and creoles is unique to these languages, though the co-occurence of features such as lack of inflection, rigidity of word order, loss or reduction of distinctions relating to number, gender and agreement, may be indicative of prior pidginization. But, as has been suggested, pidginization or language simplification and adjustment is common to all situations where people speaking different languages have come into contact. Furthermore, it is clear that widely used pidgins and creoles are

capable of serving all the needs of the community, including, should it prove necessary or useful, their educational and literary needs. Such a possibility ceases to be merely theoretical when we consider the role, position and achievements of Afrikaans. The sociological documentation provided by Valkhoff in 1966 and 1972 indicates that Dutch was being pidginized in the Cape Province by non-Dutch speakers in the latter half of the seventeenth century and creolized in racially mixed domestic households. Valkhoff quotes the following extract from van Rheede’s 1685 report (1972, pp. 40-1):

There is a custom here among all our people that when these natives [i.e. the Hottentots] learn the Dutch language and speak it, in their manner very badly and hardly intelligibly, our people imitate them in this so that, as the children of our Dutchmen also fall into the habit, a broken language is founded which it will be impossible to overcome later on.