Is English a "creole language"?
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The first two panels of today's SMBC:
The rest of the strip:
The AfterComic:
The mouseover title: "Hoping the Welsh isn't lol."
The premise seems to be that King Arthur has arisen again, to deal with socio-economic crises in today's Britain. I'll leave interpretation of the Arthur legend to others, and focus on the description of English as "this weird French-German creole language".
We can discard the "weird" part as a humorous invocation of what all 6th-century inhabitants of the British Isles might have thought about its now-dominant language.
The introduction of French into the English stew was of course several centuries after Arthur's (fictional) time — but the question of whether English should be described as a "French-German creole language" is a small part of a larger controversy over what a "creole language" is, whether it is a category with sharp boundaries, which languages belong in the category (or belong where on a spectrum of creole-ness), and even whether the whole category is problematic.
The Wikipedia article starts with this definition:
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period.
For a carefully-reasoned argument against Middle English (the French-German hybrid) belonging in the creole-language category, we can cite Manfred Görlach's 1986 chapter "Middle English – a creole?":
Among various new approaches creolistics, the investigation and description of pidgin and Creole languages, has proved to be a most stimulating, if to many scholars controversial, discipline. […]
The attraction that pidgin and Creole languages have held for many scholars has prompted historical linguists to look for earlier language states or situations comparable to those that led to the formation of pidgins and Creoles in post-Renaissance societies. Most Romance languages, Yiddish, Middle English, Bulgarian, or even the Germanic languages as a group within the Indo-European family of languages, have all been compared with, or even claimed to be, creole languages. […]
Unless simplification and language mixture are thought to be sufficient criteria for the definition of a Creole or creoloid (and I do not think they are, since this would make most languages of the world Creoles, and the term would consequently lose its distinctiveness), then Middle English does not appear to be a creole.
The Wikipedia article's section on Controversy offers a useful sketch of the issues. A sketch of the sketch:
Creoleness is at the heart of the controversy with John McWhorter and Mikael Parkvall opposing Henri Wittmann and Michel DeGraff. In McWhorter's definition, creoleness is a matter of degree, in that prototypical creoles exhibit all of the three traits he proposes to diagnose creoleness: little or no inflection, little or no tone, and transparent derivation. In McWhorter's view, less prototypical creoles depart somewhat from this prototype. […] Objections to the McWhorter-Parkvall hypotheses point out that these typological parameters of creoleness can be found in languages such as Manding, Sooninke, and Magoua French which are not considered creoles. Wittmann and DeGraff come to the conclusion that efforts to conceive a yardstick for measuring creoleness in any scientifically meaningful way have failed so far. […] Mufwene (2000) and Wittmann (2001) have argued further that Creole languages are structurally no different from any other language, and that Creole is in fact a sociohistoric concept (and not a linguistic one), encompassing displaced population and slavery. DeGraff & Walicek (2005) discuss creolistics in relation to colonialist ideologies, rejecting the notion that Creoles can be responsibly defined in terms of specific grammatical characteristics. […]
On the other hand, McWhorter points out that in languages such as Bambara, essentially a dialect of Manding, there is ample non-transparent derivation, and that there is no reason to suppose that this would be absent in close relatives such as Mandinka itself. Moreover, he also observes that Soninke has what all linguists would analyze as inflections, and that current lexicography of Soninke is too elementary for it to be stated with authority that it does not have non-transparent derivation.
Update– Although many of the commenters must know the traditional theory of creole-language origins, some of them clearly don't. That traditional idea is that things start with a pidgin, which Wikipedia describes as "a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages". And as the article goes on to say,
A pidgin differs from a creole, which is the first language of a speech community of native speakers that at one point arose from a pidgin. Unlike pidgins, creoles have fully developed vocabulary and patterned grammar. Most linguists believe that a creole develops through a process of nativization of a pidgin when children of speakers of an acquired pidgin learn it and use it as their native language.
John McWhorter's ideas about the properties of "prototypical creoles" are obviously related to this traditional characterization of the relevant histories, which is different from the other ways in which language contact historically leads to a mixture of influences.
Update #2– A comment thread at ycombinator…
Cervantes said,
September 28, 2024 @ 1:03 pm
This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true.
jin defang said,
September 28, 2024 @ 2:29 pm
I agree with Dr. Cervantes. And beyond the hybrid of 'modern'—what year should be regarded as the standard for that?—'modern' English has absorbed so many words from its former colonies. Tiffin and curry from India; bundok/boondocks from Malay. And then there are the variants of whatever one deems to be standard English—"Amlish," Aussie strine, Singapore and Indian variants. I once heard an eminent German scholar announce at the beginning of a multinational symposium that "the language of this conference will be the universal lingua franca–bad English."
The French have tried to hold the line on their language since the 1630s with less than perfect success.
Simon W. said,
September 28, 2024 @ 3:51 pm
As a French Canadian, I would not consider English to be a creole, but it often becomes one when used by numerous journalists, foreign correspondents or content creators to interview a non-native English speaker. And when these interviewers themselves have a limited vocabulary or an informal language, it is no longer a creole, not even a pidgin, it is just gibberish. I was listening recently to an American interview of an Iranian activist. The poor woman had 200 words of broken English, and they were torturing her to express her thoughts on geopolitics and the existence of God in them. I felt tortured just listening! I’m old enough to remember the era when French was the «lingua franca» (after all, it’s not called «franca» without reason). Back then, people always spoke formally, quoted authors like Voltaire and Hugo effortlessly, and possessed a vocabulary of thousands and thousands of French words (you can listen to interviews of the past on ina.fr). Every time these conditions were not met, the talent of a translator was hired.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 28, 2024 @ 4:39 pm
The cartoon skips over McWhorter's more specific and controversial idea which that English-as-we-know it is in part creole-like because the ways in which its syntax deviates from other West Germanic languages are hypothesized to be due to Brythonic substrate-type influence, with the influx of Norman-French lexemes being frankly a less interesting phenomenon. (I've frankly never quite understood how McWhorter gets past the obvious timeline problem that even if modern English "periphrastic do" is strikingly similar to constructions in Welsh/Cornish/Breton, it only became as widespread in English as it now is when Middle English was transitioning into Early Modern,* many many centuries after the sort of contact or language-shift phenomena the theory implies would have had to have happened.
*See, e.g., https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/courses/lx310/handouts/do_handout_2001_word.pdf
Peter Taylor said,
September 28, 2024 @ 4:40 pm
It's surely anachronistic to talk about French in the context of Arthur's perceptions: Latin-Saxon creole would be more appropriate. But then that raises further questions of his reaction. One interpretation of the Arthur legend paints him as trying to preserve the legacy of civilisation which Roman occupation had left and which was decaying after Roman withdrawal.
AntC said,
September 28, 2024 @ 11:43 pm
@Cervantes English … was greatly simplified.
This claim is about as meaningless and unprovable as claiming English is a creole. Would you like to define 'simple' wrt languages? You're probably prejudiced against inflection and agglutination, being an English speaker.
David Marjanović said,
September 29, 2024 @ 9:03 am
That is very much disputable. McWhorter himself has been emphasizing for years that much of the simplification of inflection should be attributed to compromise with the Norse adstrate, not to influence from the French superstrate that came in later.
The loss of gender for example makes perfect sense this way: Old English and Old Norse had the same three genders, but very often different ones for obviously cognate words.
This is a quite misleading ellipsis. Shifting the complexity into syntax is not at all incompatible with what Cervantes actually wrote.
Nelson Goering said,
September 29, 2024 @ 10:41 am
Not just McWhorter, but anyone reasonably familiar with historical English data (especially the vague dumping ground of "early Middle English") will resist linking morphological changes in English to French influence. Things just don't line up. There is a real layer of early Norman loans in earlier Middle English, but most French vocabulary only enters English considerably later, in the 14th and 15th centuries, by which point some of the most significant morphological changes are old history. (Probably the most striking of these, though it's not usually emphasized so much, is the total loss of inflection in the article — even modern Dutch and Danish haven't gone as far as English had already in the thirteenth century.)
I blame the popular habit of illustrating the history of English by jumping straight from Beowulf to Chaucer. Never mind that this is a four-hundred-year leap in orthographic convention, and probably more like seven centuries in terms of linguistic substance, and also a sideways shift in dialect. But it gives the (pretty much just false) impression that Beowulf + Normans = Chaucer.
SusanC said,
September 29, 2024 @ 11:11 am
Also, what we know consider to be the Arthurian legend derives from French sources (e.g. Chrétien de Troyes) via, e.g, Thomas Mallory, as well as Welsh ones.
So it's not entirely clear a fictional king from a French book would be quite so hostile to the French.
Tom Dawkes said,
September 29, 2024 @ 3:37 pm
Arthur — if he was 4/5/6th century — would hardly have understood Modern Welsh in any case…
Josh R. said,
September 29, 2024 @ 8:04 pm
Nelson Goering said,
"I blame the popular habit of illustrating the history of English by jumping straight from Beowulf to Chaucer. Never mind that this is a four-hundred-year leap in orthographic convention, and probably more like seven centuries in terms of linguistic substance, and also a sideways shift in dialect. But it gives the (pretty much just false) impression that Beowulf + Normans = Chaucer."
Very much agreed! I get the impression that people get exposed to "Old English" (i.e., possibly normalized West Saxon), "Middle English" (i.e., Canterbury Tales), and then "Modern English" (i.e., Shakespeare at best), and want to find some explanation for the vast differences. (This is not helped by dictionaries, which will list a Middle English etymology and then tie it back to a West Saxon word.)
But if you read more widely and across times, you see much more of the flow of English's development. Beowulf to Chaucer is a huge jump, but Beowulf to Ælfric to 12th century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries to Gawain is a series for much smaller, easier-to-follow jumps, and that's not even accounting for the Mercian dialect of Old English, the forgotten ancestor of Modern English.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 30, 2024 @ 8:27 am
Sure. McWhorter's support for the argument that Old Norse influence was more important than Norman-French influence on changes in English syntax is a more mainstream POV than his support for the argument that Brythonic substrate effects generated changes in English syntax. A single scholar need not be either right about everything or wrong about everything and I'm not even claiming that he's definitely wrong about the less mainstream claim, only saying that he hasn't convinced me.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 30, 2024 @ 6:08 pm
The idea that "creoles" can be identified just by reference to diagnostic synchronic features — e.g., no or little inflection / non-transparent derivation — is to me doubtful because one has to add "no tone" to the list so as to ad hoc exclude (most of) Mainland Southeast Asia. Can the "creole" scenario not exist in this region? Surely it can/does, and the resultant languages will certainly be tonal. (The alternative not-great way out here is proposing in light of typology that [all?] MSEA languages are somehow creoles…)
It makes more sense to refer to the process of *creolization*: rapid language shift among a predominantly adult population > > "pidgin" in which inflection/derivation are largely broken > > "creole" reconstituted by the kids. The end results of this process might reasonably be expected to possess certain features without requiring that they are in a vacuum reliably distinguishable from typologically similar languages without "creole" histories.
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October 6, 2024 @ 5:36 am
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