BRIDGING THE GAP: CHILDHOOD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND CREOLE GENESIS

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.