BRIDGING THE GAP: CHILDHOOD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND CREOLE GENESIS

in Journal of the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea (2017)

This article presents two cases of specific language ecologies that emerged in the South Pacific at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century: Palmerston English, spoken on a ... [more ▼]

This article presents two cases of specific language ecologies that emerged in the South Pacific at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century: Palmerston English, spoken on a remote atoll in the Cook Islands, and Tayo, a school creole from the Catholic mission of Saint-Louis in New Caledonia. Both are still spoken and even expanding at present. Findings from these creoles with English and French lexifiers may be of interest to studies of German-based contact languages with similar initial ecologies. Based on the description of the environment where those two contact languages emerged, we would like to start a discussion about the parameters that influence the creation of new languages in specific contexts, such as these languages and Unserdeutsch. [less ▲]