Pidgin and Creole Languages

This study provides a formal analysis of certain aspects of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) morphosyntax that are relevant to both hypotheses on the origins of the Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas (i.e., the Decreolization Hypothesis, Granda, 1968et seq) and theoretical proposals on the nature of cross-linguistic variation (i.e., Null Subject Parameter, NSP, Rizzi, 1982). Results suggest that the grammatical features under investigation can be conceived as the by-product of advanced second language acquisition processes, and do not necessarily imply any previous (de)creolization phase for ABS. In addition, the nature of our ABS data calls into question the validity of the NSP's universal predictions. For this reason, we account for the phenomena under study by adopting a theoretical framework that revisits the traditional notion of ‘‘parameter’’ in favor of a less rigid, minimalist model (Eguren et al., 2016), in which the locus of language variation is ascribed to lexical items and their clusters of features (Borer, 1984; Chomsky, 2001).© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Western Europe and what was the USSR (Limage), and Malaysia (Davey). The third section has six papers focusing on the official language campaign in California (Diamond, Nunberg, Woolard, Dyste) and Florida (Castro, Haun, and Roca). This section includes one paper on a broader topic, "Who Suggests Official English, and Why? The Influence of Social Variables and Questionnaire Methodology" (Zentella). Section 4 consists of seven papers of Southwestern perspectives in the United States, an overview of linguistic minorities in the Southwest (Adams); the profiles of the Navajo language today (Benally and McCarty); and American Indian language policy (Zepeda). The other four papers address issues related to official English and the learning of English (Amastae); the English proficiency act (Bingaman); the official English movement and the first languages (Brandt); and an insightful paper on the urge to legislate, with specific reference to the official English movement (Dubois). This paper is of special interest because, as the author says, "when Americans perceive a problem, their inclination is to turn to the law" (p. 229). The paper concludes with a wise note:

Since the slave population in New Netherland (1614–1664) was small compared to that of other Dutch Atlantic colonies such as Curaçao, Dutch Brazil, and Suriname, it has traditionally received little attention by scholars, including creolists. It is, therefore, not well known that traces of Iberian languages can be found among the black population of seventeenth-century Manhattan. While the paucity of sources does not allow us to make any decisive claims with regard to the importance of Spanish and Portuguese for the colony’s black community, this article attempts to reconstruct the language use of this population group on the basis of an analysis of historical sources from New Netherland in a broader Atlantic context.

This paper compares data from a Singaporean chit chat forum to informal spoken data. We first perform a qualitative analysis of text samples in a framework of indexicality. Then we present quantitative findings for two (sets of) features each of the contact variety Singlish (particles, the kena-passive) and spoken English in general (discourse markers, contractions). For the former some similarities are observed but we also find that the forum contributors tend to be creative and innovative in their choice of particles. In this connection we argue that they index specific subgroup identities and further point out that Singlish is a rather flexible set of resources. Our findings differ from those of previous research on Jamaican Creole as used in an internet forum, thus showing that the use of contact varieties in computer-mediated communication can take different forms. The general features of spoken English are used comparatively less in the forum data, indicating that using Singli...

Recent anthropological and socio-historical research on Maroon populations suggests that Maroon communities have undergone significant social change since the 1960s spurred by processes of urbanization. However, to date very little is known about how these social changes are impacting on the Maroon Creoles as there is very little sociolinguistic research being carried out in the region. The aim of this paper is to examine the sociolinguistic context of the Maroon Creoles in the light of data from two recent sociolinguistic surveys carried out in Suriname and French Guiana. The findings demonstrate that the sociolinguistic status of Maroon languages has undergone various changes. Several of them are now well represented in French Guiana and, as additional languages, are gaining speakers both in Suriname and French Guiana. While their speakers increasingly practice them together with other languages, thus displaying their multilingual repertoire, there is little indication that their survival is threatened because their speakers predominantly hold positive attitudes towards them.

This article analyzes some of the lexical semantic features of Barunga Kriol, an Australian creole language (Northern Territory, Australia), in comparison with Dalabon, one of the Australian Aboriginal languages replaced by Barunga Kriol. Focusing on the semantic domain of emotions, this study offers insights into how creole languages select and organize semantic meanings, and to what extent this results in lexical loss or retention. I spell out the exact nature of the lexical resemblances between the two languages, and highlight major differences as well. The conclusions of the study are twofold. Firstly, I show that the Barunga Kriol emotion lexicon shares a great many properties with the Dalabon emotion lexicon. As a result, speakers in Barunga Kriol and Dalabon respectively are often able to package meaning in very similar ways: the two languages offer comparable means of describing events in the world. From that point of view, language shift can be considered to have a lesser impact. Secondly, I show that the lexical resemblances between Barunga Kriol and Dalabon are not limited to simple cases where the lexemes in each language share the same forms and/or meanings. Instead, lexical resemblances relate to a number of other properties in semantics and combinatorics, and I devise a preliminary typology of these lexical resemblances. Beyond the comparison between Barunga Kriol and Dalabon, this typology may tentatively serve as a grid to evaluate lexical resemblances between languages more generally.

This article explores the correlations between linguistic figurative features and their corresponding conceptual representations, by considering their respective continuities and discontinuities in language shift. I compare the figurative encoding of emotions in Kriol, a creole of northern Australia, with those of Dalabon, one of the languages replaced by this creole, with a particular focus on evidence from metaphorical gestures. The conclusions are three-fold. Firstly, the prominent figurative association between the body and the emotions observed in Dalabon is, overall, not matched in Kriol. Secondly, although this association is not prominent in Kriol, it is not entirely absent. It surfaces where speakers are less constrained by linguistic conventions: in non-conventionalized tropes, and gestures in particular. Indeed, some of the verbal emotion metaphors that have disappeared with language shift are preserved as gestural metaphors. Thus, Kriol speakers endorse the conceptual association between emotions and the body, in spite of the lower linguistic incidence of this association. The third conclusion is that therefore, in language shift, conceptual figurative representations and linguistic figurative representations are independent of each other. The former can persist when the latter largely disappear. Conversely, the fact that speakers endorse a certain type of conceptual representation does not entail that they will use corresponding linguistic forms in the new language. The transfer of linguistic figurative representations seems to depend, instead, upon purely linguistic parameters.

The area of Bidau, in the East Timorese capital of Dili, was home to the only documented form of Creole Portuguese in Timor. Although Bidau Creole Portuguese is now extinct, by most accounts, a few scattered records allow a glimpse into what it must have been like, and reveal its clear relationship with other Southeast Asian Portuguese-based creoles; Baxter’s (1990a) study of Bidau Creole Portuguese was based mostly on a set of recordings made in the context of the Missão Antropológica de Timor [“Anthropological Mission to Timor”, 1953–1954]. In this article, Baxter (1990a: 3) mentions that “[s]o far, the earliest located reference to Bidau Creole Portuguese, and one which contains some impressionistic examples of conversations and the verse of a song, is Castro (1943: 56, 177)”. However, since the publication of this study, a few earlier references to what can be interpreted as Portuguese-based creole in Timor have been located in unpublished archival sources. These sources are letters sent to two important philologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, Hugo Schuchardt and José Leite de Vasconcelos, who were greatly interested in ascertaining whether a creole was spoken in Timor and what the local Portuguese was like. The present study introduces and contextualises these epistolary sources, discussing the linguistic and sociolinguistic material contained therein, and its relevance for the confirmation of different threads of language contact involving Portuguese.

In the literature on Caribbean creoles two descriptive models have dominated to explain the structures of linguistic codes, the relationships between them, and their distribution: diglossia and the creole continuum. Most Anglophone linguists have argued that it is most accurate to describe the linguistic contexts of Martinique and Guadeloupe as stable diglossic situations in which two recognizable linguistic varieties with specific functional assignments are spoken. They contrast the French Antilles with the Caribbean islands where an English-lexifer creole is spoken, described as examples of creole continua. This paper reconsiders the applicability of the diglossia model for describing the linguistic varieties in Guadeloupe and the patterns of their use. I explain why most Antillean scholars describe the French Antilles as examples of diglossia, yet also acknowledge a creole continuum with intermediate varieties of both French and Kréyòl. As a further point, I consider whether or not Guadeloupe’s linguistic situation is best described as a stable one. In doing so, I counter the argument of Meyjes (1995) that language shift is occurring in favor of French monolingualism. My goal in this paper is to foster dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone creolists and to clarify some of our basic assumptions about Caribbean creoles.

The study analyzes the traditional beliefs and practices concerning leprosy of the Limba people of Sierra Leone. It shows that this dialectally diverse ethnic group has two views of leprosy and its cause, and two varieties of stigma associated with the disease.

This article considers dialect contact and second-dialect acquisition by adult and child Barbadian
English speakers converging towards an East Anglian variety of English. We examine glottal variation
in word-final /t/, comparing the local dialect of Anglo (‘white’) speakers in Ipswich to that of
Barbados-born speakers living there, and to British English varieties more generally. We investigate
this variable using instrumental analysis and consider (i) whether its use by Ipswich Anglo urban
speakers indicates diffusion, (ii) whether its patterning among Barbadian immigrant speakers reflects
dialect acquisition and (iii) how methodologically secure the received wisdom is concerning one of
Britain’s most often-studied sociolinguistic variables of recent years. We briefly consider the social
context for the English and Barbadian varieties, review the literature on glottal variants of /t/ in British
urban dialects, and examine those environments most commonly studied for the variable, and the
usual explanation for its relative frequency across them. We then compare the Ipswich Anglo and
Barbadian data and reconcile the two patterns in an interpretation which finds both ethnicallyaligned
contrasts and agreement on norms local to Ipswich.

This paper discusses the origins of linguistic elements in three Northern Songhay languages of Niger and Mali: Tadaksahak, Tagdal and Tasawaq. Northern Songhay languages combine elements from Berber languages, principally Tuareg forms, and from Songhay; the latter provides inflectional morphology and much of the basic vocabulary, while the former is the source of most of the rest of the vocabulary, especially less basic elements. Subsets of features of Northern Songhay languages are compared with those of several stable mixed languages and mixed-lexicon creoles, and in accounting for the origin of these languages the kind of language mixing found in Northern Songhay languages is compared with that found in the (Algonquian) Montagnais dialect of Betsiamites, Quebec. The study shows that Tagdal and the other Northern Songhay languages could be construed as mixed languages, although the proportion of Berber and Songhay elements varieties somewhat between these languages, and also indic...

Aims and objectives: Social factors in language contact are not well understood. This study seeks to establish and explain the role of social entrenchment in the evolution of contact languages. It also aims to contribute to a broader perspective on areality that can account for social and linguistic factors in contact outcomes involving all languages present in multilingual ecologies, including contact languages. Methodology: The copula system was singled out for a detailed analysis. A corpus of primary data of the three African English-lexifier contact languages, Pichi, Cameroon Pidgin, and Ghanaian Pidgin, their ancestor Krio, and of their African adstrates (Bube, Mokpe, Akan) and European superstrates (Spanish, English) was investigated and compared. Data and analysis: Relevant features were selected for a dissimilarity matrix. A quantitative analysis was done with SplitsTree4. The resulting distance matrix and phylogenetic network were investigated for signals of genealogical transmission and areal diffusion and interpreted on their social background. Findings/conclusions: The copula systems of the three contact languages carry a genealogical signal of their ancestor Krio as well as an areal signal from the adstrates and superstrates spoken in their respective ecologies. The amount of areal borrowing increases in the order Pichi < Cameroon Pidgin < Ghanaian Pidgin, reflective of the depth of social entrenchment of each variety from left to right. Originality: Previous studies do not describe the copula systems of the English-lexifier contact languages of Africa and the Caribbean at a similar level of granularity and mostly focus on their emergence during creolization. This study attempts to explain their subsequent areal differentiation and links it to differences in social ecologies. Significance/implications: Areal borrowing can lead to significant departures from genealogically inherited structures within a short time if social entrenchment is shallow. Conversely, even languages of wider communication can remain remarkably stable if social entrenchment is deep.

Tayo, the Pacific's only documented French-based creole, is the community language of Saint-Louis, a village on the outskirts of Nouméa. Tayo has a short, yet very complex, history. Initially represented as a purely endogenous Melanesian creation by Corne and Ehrhart in their various publications throughout the 1990s, this view was challenged firstly on linguistic grounds by Chaudenson (1994) who saw similarities between Tayo and Réunionnais. Speedy's (2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2012) socio-historical studies demonstrated an extensive and hitherto unknown contact history between Saint-Louis and immigrants from Reunion which led to the conclusion that Réunionnais was one of the input languages into the emerging local creole. However, these are but two of the Tayo stories. This paper discusses different scenarios for the development of Tayo, including the parts the Marists, the mission school-educated girls and local pidgins had to play in its evolution, and considers the role of inside and outside influences as well as universals in the stories of its genesis.

The issue of linguistic distinctions in creole continua has been extensively debated. Are creole continua comprised of just an "acrolect" and a "basilect," or do they also comprise additional varieties? Studies of variation in creole continua have been typically based on directly observed linguistic data. This study argues that perceived sociolinguistic distinctions can offer one point of departure for establishing what linguistic components constitute creole continua. Following a protocol developed within "Perceptual Dialectology" (see, e.g., Preston 1999) this study describes perceived sociolinguistic distinctions via folk linguistic descriptors elicited by means of linguistic map-drawing and labeling tasks. The aim of this study is to investigate perceived language variation in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, where Standard English historically co-exists as an official language with creolized varieties of English, which the literature generally refers to as "Trinidadian Creole English." " The main finding of this study is that Standard English has a strong perceptual association with Trinidad's historic urban centers, while nonstandard varieties collectively referred to as "dialect" or "creole" are associated with the rest of the island. The study discusses indications that linguistic boundaries-largely parallel to ethnoracial boundaries-are perceived within the standard and non-standard part of the Trinidadian continuum. One major perceived linguistic criterion for differentiation within the non-standard part of the continuum is the presence or absence of Standard English elements. The saliency of "mixed" varieties suggests that a variety located halfway between Standard English and Trinidadian Creole English could be emerging. The study concludes that the urban-rural divide and ethnoracial distinctions constitute two salient social fault lines that future studies of language variation in Trinidad should take account of while searching the Trinidadian continuum for objectively verifiable linguistic boundaries.

This paper presents the first in-depth account of the bee copula form found in Belizean Kriol, which appears to be a copular development not found in other Caribbean English Creoles. Based on approximately 500 tokens of bee from Di Nyoo Testiment (2012), we argue that bee must appear in irrealis contexts. It is frequently used to mark a potential change of state, though this is not a conventional aspect of bee's meaning. We also show that while bee seems to be emphatic, this aspect of bee's meaning is best understood as derived via Gricean (1975) reasoning.

Although the Surinamese Creoles have figured prominently in discussions about Creole genesis, little is still known about the origin of their TMA system, a central area of grammar that has received much attention in this debate. In this paper we assess the relative contribution of the primary substrate input, varieties of Gbe, to the TMA system. Drawing on both contemporary data from several Surinamese Creoles and varieties of Gbe, and historical data from Sranan Tongo, we show that the substrate was clearly responsible for the emergence of some aspect and tense categories. However, in itself, substrate influence cannot explain the emergence of the entire Creole tense and aspect system. Other processes such as internal change, superstrate influence etc. also played an important role.

Unserdeutsch, also known as Rabaul Creole German, is the only known German-lexifier creole. This critically endangered language has its origins in an orphanage in German New Guinea for mixed-race children, where Standard German was taught by mission personnel. Unserdeutsch was creolised in one generation, and became the in-group language of a small mixed-race community. It is now spoken by around 100 elderly speakers, nearly all immigrants to Australia. The current project is only the second documentation based on actual fieldwork and has a specific focus on the use and vitality of the language as used by the last generation of speakers. It has the aim of producing an Unserdeutsch corpus that will facilitate both future linguistic research and contact with the language for the descendants of Unserdeutsch speakers. Preliminary findings show variation among speakers along a continuum from heavily creolised basilect to an almost European German acrolect. Most of the lexicon is derived from German, while a number of basilectal grammatical constructions are the result of the loss of marked features in German and possible imperfect second language learning as well as relexification of Tok Pisin, the presumed substrate language.

This paper presents and discusses the instances of synchronic variation attested in the personal pronoun paradigm of modern Sri Lanka Portuguese, an endangered Portuguese-based creole spoken by relatively small communities scattered across Eastern and Northern Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka Portuguese has a long history of documentation dating from, at least, the beginning of the 19 th century, only a few studies have explicitly reported cases of synchronic variation. This study aims, therefore, to fill that gap, by contributing to the description and explanation of patterns of variation relating to the personal pronoun paradigm as encountered in documentary data collected between 2015 and 2020, over several field trips to the districts of Ampara, Batticaloa, Jaffna, and Trincomalee. The nature of the variation observed in the data ranges from phonetic alternations to strategies of paradigm regularization and stylistic shrinkage, often revealing the effects of diachronic processes of variant competition and substitution. Combining the observed patterns of variation with surveyed linguistic trends of language shift, we propose that obsolescence may be responsible for some of the variability encountered in modern SLP personal pronouns, especially that associated with certain socially-or geographically-defined subsets of the speech community (viz. the younger generations and the speakers from Jaffna) characterized by advanced language loss.

Scholars of AAVE have typically assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in transcriptions of ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the transcribers. I argue that the use of invariant am in a great many literary sources written by black writers with sober intention, grammatical descriptions of black speech which note invariant am as a feature, and the use of invariant am in regional British dialects imported to the New World suggest that invariant am was a now extinct form in earlier AAVE, largely eclipsed by World War II but once common among black slaves and their immediate descendants. What have been interpreted in some second-pass edits of interview transcriptions as corrections of mistaken hearings of invariant am (Maynor 1988) were actually, I argue, prescriptive maskings of invariant am tokens actually uttered by the interviewees.

In January 2007 an interesting exchange took place on the WordReference.com language forums' website regarding the words deh pon in the Jamaican singer Sean Paul's song 'We'll be burning'. Someone asked 'how would you translate these lyrics of Sean Paul: We be earnin dollars turning cau' we mind deh pon we pay? What does "deh pon" mean please?' The exchanges that followed were of little help: I don't know, and the suggestions from the Urban Dictionary don't seem to fit. I think you are more likely to get useful replies in the English only forum. I've moved it here from the French-English forum. I honestly have no idea. I would guess he's trying to say 'we will be earning money …' Other than that, I have no idea. It seems to be Jamaican: Quote (from an online Jamaican dictionary): Depan (deh-pon)-On; on top of; upon. Although it still makes little sense to me in this context. My guess is, 'We are earning money selling because we're careful of the portion we pay'. However, I think 'deh pon' may have some meaning I am not aware of. Basically since none of us can figure it out, it's not something really necessary to know unless you're really into Sean Paul music. Music from him won't exactly be grammatically correct either. Even English speakers have to translate these lyrics. Oh! Well, then it would be '… ' cause our mind is upon our pay'. Yeah, that could make sense, but I still like it my way. The cool thing about lyrics is you can sing them as you like. In March 2010 a similar query was sent to the Everything Jamaican site: 'What does "ah wah you deh pon" mean? I have a Jamaican friend who said this, but I'm not sure what it stands for. Thank you very much for your help!!' It was clarified in the anonymous response 'it means 'what are you up to' .

The last decade has seen increasing attention paid to questions of grammatical complexity, in particular
regarding the extent to which some languages can be said to be more “complex” than others,
whether globally or with respect to particular subsystems. Creoles have featured prominently in
these debates, with various authors arguing that they are particularly simple when set against noncreoles,
with an apparent lack of overt morphology in creoles often cited as one of the ways in
which their grammars are especially simplified. This paper makes two contributions to this discussion.
First, it develops metrics of grammatical complexity that derive directly from a well-known
model of creole development, thus providing an explicit link between the sociohistorical circumstances
in which creoles formed and grammatical outcomes. Second, it applies these metrics to the
newly published dataset from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, setting this data against
that from the well-knownWorld Atlas of Language Structures, allowing for a more comprehensive
and rigorous quantitative comparison of complexity in contact and non-contact languages than has
been previously been possible. It will be seen that there is good evidence that contact languages
are simplified overall with respect to a class of complexities labelled paradigmatic here but that
this general conclusion nevertheless masks significant underlying variation among them.

Even though early works about Creole languages in the late 19th century frequently follow the patterns of the predominant racist discourse in contemporary philology, the texts by Volcy Focard from La Réunion are remarkable exceptions: his analysis of the emergence and structure of the local Creole language are based upon sociohistorical rather than biological explanations, avoiding the widespread idea of alleged racial differences. His article "Les origines du patois de l'île Bourbon" and his correspondence with Hugo Schuchardt display a notion of language which is both very classical and very progressive. Focard focuses on the lexicon and written language less than on spoken grammar while at the same time putting forward sociolectal variation as the most interesting field for linguistic research.

In this paper, we discuss the recent discovery of four letters written in 1783, one of which is written fully in Papiamentu, the other three comprising Papiamentu fragments. The data in these constitute one of the earliest written attestations of Papiamentu. We first provide a brief overview of the earliest attestations of Papiamentu and then present theLetters as Lootresearch programme, to which we owe the discovery of the 1783 letters. Following this, the article discusses the contents of the letters and the socio-historical context in which they were written. To close, we discuss the value of this new source for Papiamentu studies.

One of the things one does not want to hear when working on a large corpus, is that the content is very artificial, and should be ignored in your research because of the unnatural elements it contains. This is what happened with the Clarin-NEHOL-corpus of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole. The contents, mainly eighteenth-century missionary texts were considered by some people as 'just' a missionary variety which seemed very unlikely to have been used in daily life. Clearly, a theoretical basis was needed to analyse this variety in order to establish the authenticity of these texts. Unexpectedly, Bell's 1984 Audience Design Model, originally based on spoken language situations, turned out to be ideal for the treatment of older written material. One element of this model, referee design, seemed at first to stand somewhat separate from the other aspects of the theory. However, it enabled us to understand the communication situation which missionaries and their pupils participated in. This article focuses then on referee design as a tool to study eighteenth century Virgin Islands Dutch Creole in particular, and historical Creole texts in general.

Malacca Portuguese Creole (MPC) (ISO 639-3; code: mcm), popularly known as Malacca Portuguese or locally as
(Papiá) Cristang, belongs to the group of Portuguese-lexified creoles of (South)east Asia, which includes the extinct
varieties of Batavia/Tugu (Maurer 2013) and Bidau, East Timor (Baxter 1990), and the moribund variety of Macau
(Baxter 2009). MPC has its origins in the Portuguese presence in Malacca, and like the other creoles in this subset, it
is genetically related to the Portuguese Creoles of South Asia (Holm 1988, Cardoso, Baxter & Nunes 2012).

T oday, most people from Hawai'i speak Pidgin, Hawai'i English, or both. This paper presents a brief discussion of the history of both the creole (called Pidgin or Hawaiʻi Creole) and the variety of English spoken in Hawai'i referred to as Hawai'i English. The creation of Pidgin and the prevalence of English in Hawai'i have a complex history closely tied with various sociohistorical events in the islands, and the social hegemony established during the plantation days still persists today. While Pidgin is stigmatized and is deemed inappropriate for use in formal domains, it has important social functions, and the infl uence from diff erent languages is viewed as representative of the ethnic diversity found in the islands. This paper treats Pidgin and Hawaiʻi English as independent from one another while commenting on some of the linguistic forms that are found in both. Lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic structures of Pidgin and Hawai'i English are presented alongside a discussion of language attitudes and ideologies. Recent work that attempts to address the negative attitudes toward Pidgin is also discussed.

This paper presents a comparative study of two Indo-Portuguese creoles, Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) and Daman Creole Portuguese (DP). Using recently collected data, the phonology, pronominal systems, TMA markers, syntactic properties, and lexical items of KP and DP are compared and contrasted. The question of the common vs. independent origin of KP and DP is also discussed.

This paper reports on a set of language-attitude experiments undertaken in Belize in 2013-2014. The experiments tested attitudes toward Belizean Kriol in two different situational settings among 96 Belizean university students, exploring the extent to which experimental "setting" had an effect on survey results. We administered verbal-guise tests to 48 university students in classroom settings at the University of Belize campuses in Belize City and Punta Gorda. We then administered the same tests to 48 students in non-classroom settings in these same two cities. We found significant differences in both sets of results, with classroom participants registering stronger preferences for Belize City Kriol in status and solidarity traits. Our results add to a small but important body of literature in which setting is shown to influence language attitudes, and they provide support for an understanding of the quantitative survey as a meaning-making activity.

Our quantitative, variationist (Rbrul) analyses of subject-auxiliary inversion in question formation across three Caribbean creole Englishes (Guyanese, Jamaican, and Bajan, the mesolectal creole English of Barbados) and two North American vernacular Englishes (AAVE and Appalachian) combine with prior comparable (Varbrul) analyses of this variable in Samaná and African Nova Scotia English to illustrate the patterning of its variable constraints. Previously, canonical descriptions held that English-based creoles differ from standard and metropolitan colloquial Englishes by forming questions with rising intonation alone (e.g., Guyanese: Jaan de hoom “John is at home”), without subject-auxiliary inversion (Is John at home?). In practice, however, we find considerable, and substantially similar, constraint-based variation across the varieties studied, with YES/NO questions and auxiliary do favoring non-inversion. These and other cross-varietal similarities are significant for understanding this variable but suggest that question formation may not be fruitful for investigating the question of prior creolization in AAVE.

This study confirms the robustness of the finding in the literature on African American Vernacular English [AAVE] and creole English (especially in the Caribbean) that omission of copular and auxiliary be varies systematically according to predicate type. Verbal predicates are associated with the highest rates of copula absence and following NPs with the lowest rates;