Serious scholarly interest did not start till the mid-eighteen-hundreds when three scholars began studying pidgins and creoles: Adolfo Coelho, a Portuguese, Henri Gaidoz, a Frenchman, and Hugo Schuchardt, a German. Coelho held that there are psychological and physiological laws at work in the formation of all pidgins and creoles. He planned a grandiose program of research but unfortunately did not carry it through. However this came to Schuchardt's attention, who had already worked with Gaidoz' bibliography of French creoles, which he completed. Schuchardt continued over many years, corresponding widely with other scholars on the subject. We owe thanks to Glenn Gilbert for translating Schuchardt's pioneering work and presenting his voluminous notes and letters in usable order. Over the years Schuchardt, a thorough and imaginative scholar, broached most of the theories and problems that have preoccupied creolists in this century.

From 1900 to 1950, Pidgin-Creole studies were still in the pioneering phase. John Reinecke, for his doctoral dissertation at Yale (1932), compiled the compendious bibliography which later (1975) became the basis of the indispensable Bibliography of Pidgin and Creole Languages, jointly produced with Stanley Tsuzaki, David DeCamp, Ian Hancock, and Richard Wood. Reinecke and Tsuzaki also collected and glossed the Hawaiian loan words in English-based Hawaiian creole, popularly known as "the pidgin" (1967). Though his home base was so far from the Caribbean, Reinecke came to the Aruba meeting of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics in 1980, and gave it generous support.

The most influential pioneer in the early period was, however, Robert A. Hall, Jr. of Cornell University, a Romance linguist. From 1944, Hall was defending creole studies as deserving serious scholarly attention. His Haitian Creole (1953), with a grammar, texts and vocabulary, brought the francophone Caribbean to center stage. Hall also from the 1930s had studied Melanesian and Australian pidgins on the spot and later when the Pacific area became involved in the second World War, he was drawn in. After the war, in 1953, the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations condemned the use of Pidgin in the Territory of New Guinea and demanded that Pidgin be "abolished." Hall flew to the defense with his book Hands Off Pidgin English (1955). I well remember when this little book came into print with its pugnacious title. It brought the whole subject of pidgin and creole languages to the forefront. Hall put the question in scholarly focus and helped to scotch any movement to abolish Pidgin. Since then there has been some excellent work done on Papua-New Guinea and other Melanesian pidgins, not only descriptive and analytical, but theoretical, with Peter Muhlhausler's work outstanding. Hall certainly won his case: the Pacific pidgins are now widely recognized as useful, needed vernaculars.

Another Caribbean scholar deserving mention is Douglas Taylor of Dominica, working in the francophone area chiefly but also contributing to general questions of definition. He considered, as few others have done, Carib-Arawak Amerindian linguistic relations in the Caribbean. He emphasized the greater importance of morphology over the lexical for classification of creole languages.

Lorenzo Turner, of course, with his Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) established a benchmark for an English-based creole, Gullah, closely related to the Caribbean creoles. This book has become the Bible of those who contend that Afro-American Black English went through a creole stage of development. But its chief value, I think, lies in the documentation of Gullah features that are traceable to African languages. Turner had begun publishing on the subject as early as 1938. I knew him and admired his thoroughness and devotion.

Index

Early Studies
The Second Half-Century
The Mona Conferences
Founding of SCL and CP
Toward the Future

The Early PC Scene- Home

JPCL Archive at SIUC

 

ISSN 0920-9034 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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