Development

The Development of Creoles

The central question here is: how did Creoles develop? The following hypotheses are the major ones competing today: the substrate, the superstrate, and the universalist hypotheses.

Substratist positions are historically related to the `baby talk hypothesis,' which I have traced back to nineteenth-century French creolists (e.g., Adam 1883). Putatively, the languages previously spoken by the Africans enslaved on New World and Indian Ocean plantations were the primary reason why the European lexifiers which they appropriated were restructured into Creoles. These French creolists assumed African languages to be `primitive,' `instinctive,' in `natural' state, and simpler than the `cultivated' European languages with which they came in contact. Creoles' systems were considered to be reflections of those non- European languages. The baby-talk connection is that, in order to be understood, the Europeans supposedly had to speak to the Africans like to babies, their interpretation of foreigner talk.

The revival of the substrate hypothesis (without its racist component) has been attributed to Sylvain (1936). Although she recognizes influence from French dialects, she argues that African linguistic influence, especially from the Ewe group of languages, is very significant in HC. Unfortunately, she states in the last sentence of her conclusions that this Creole is Ewe spoken with a French vocabulary. Over two decades later, Turner (1949) disputed American dialectologists' claim that there was virtually no trace of African languages in AAE and showed phonological and morphosyntactic similarities between Gullah and some West-African (especially Kwa) languages. He concluded that `Gullah is indebted to African sources'.

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