1

Author Accepted Manuscript. Published as: Speedy, Karin. 2014. "Reflections on creole

genesis in New Caledonia". Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Journal of

Linguistics. Full text available:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03740463.2014.897817#abstract

REFLECTIONS ON CREOLE GENESIS IN NEW CALEDONIA

Karin Speedy

Macquarie University, Sydney

Abstract 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.

1. Introduction

As Annegret Bollée so appositely put it in her 2007 publication on the history of Reunion

Creole, “chaque créole a son histoire à lui” (133).1 Taking this idea further, I would argue

that each creole story is in fact made up of many different stories and it is the layering or

weaving of these stories that form the creole’s history. For those interested in how creole

languages emerge, it is essential to unravel and retell these stories to gain greater

understanding of what linguistic processes were at work in each language contact situation.

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the Tayo stories. Tayo is the only

documented French-based creole in the Pacific. It is spoken in the village of Saint-Louis, a

former Marist réduction, situated about 17 kilometres from Noumea in New Caledonia. A

réduction was an important nineteenth-century instrument in the civilising mission, a place

where Marist missionaries settled Melanesian or Kanak converts, separating them from their

families, to train them as catechists or school them in European ways (Corne 1999, 19).2

The Saint-Louis réduction, unlike most other missions in New Caledonia, had a

strong agricultural focus. The Marists cultivated numerous food crops, built a saw mill and a

grain mill and even moved into large-scale sugar production, constructing a sugar mill and

rum distillery (Brou 1982; Speedy 2007a). In order for the réduction to remain self-sufficient,

the Kanak neophytes were required to spend many hours per day toiling in the fields (Brou

1982). Work, along with schooling in the French language and religious instruction were the

foundation blocks the Marists used to ‘civilise’ their Kanak converts. Father Rougeyron, one

of the founders of Saint-Louis, took his cue from Marist activities among the French

peasantry when he gave the réduction the double vocation of Model Farm and technical

1 Every creole has its own story. This and all subsequent translations are my own.

2 There is no English equivalent of the French réduction so I will use the French terminology in this article. See

Speedy (2013) for a description of conditions at the Saint-Louis réduction.

2

training centre for young Melanesians (Delbos 1993: 119). In 1867, Rougeyron wrote with

delight to his niece of the ‘progress’ made by the indigenous neophytes at the réduction:

What we are doing here is what monks used to do back in France. We group people

around us and get them to clear the land. We teach them how to work and be good

Christians. You really should see them – how happy they are!3

2. Corne and Ehrhart’s Tayo Stories

What, then, are the Tayo stories that have been told thus far? Chris Corne and Sabine Ehrhart

in their various publications in the 1990s (Corne 1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1991, 1993, 1994,

1995a, 1995b, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000a, 2000b; Ehrhart 1992, 1993, 1994) were the first

creolists to bring this language to the attention of scholars. They argued that, like other

plantation creoles in the Caribbean and Indian Oceans, Tayo had formed due to the existence

of plantation-like conditions at Saint-Louis in the second half of the nineteenth century.4

Moreover, they claimed that Tayo developed endogenously, created by the Kanaks of Saint-

Louis to solve problems of communication between neophytes of differing linguistic

backgrounds. Over the space of three generations, an internally-formed pidgin or

interlanguage gradually nativised and became the language of intra-village communication.

Corne demonstrated in his analyses of a variety of grammatical structures (the

pronominal system, relativisation and thematisation strategies, the TMA system, causatives,

imperatives and interrogatives, for instance) that Tayo has an important substrate influence,

or influence from the Melanesian languages, particularly Cèmuhî and Drubea, spoken by the

“founding” (cf. Mufwene 1996, 2001, 2002) Saint-Louis converts.

This substrate influence is not a case of straight relexification of a given ancestral

language. Rather, shared salient Melanesian structures, demonstrating what Corne (1999, 41)

refers to as the “highest common factor” between Cèmuhî, Drubea and to some extent

Xârâcùù, were simplified and transferred to the new community language. Many of the

Melanesian-inspired grammatical features also show congruence with varieties of French

spoken in Saint-Louis. Nonetheless, they tend to work very much along Melanesian lines,

demonstrating the underlying “Melanesianness” of Tayo (Corne 1999).

3. Chaudenson and the Reunion Creole hypothesis

Robert Chaudenson was the first to challenge Corne and Ehrhart’s account of the genesis of

Tayo – a creole created in situ and in isolation by the Kanak converts of Saint-Louis. In his

review of Ehrhart’s 1993 book on Tayo, Chaudenson identified a number of phonological,

lexical and grammatical features that Tayo shares with Reunion Creole. Aware that in the late

1860s the Marists of Saint-Louis had employed a group of Malabars (Indian coolies) from

Reunion to work their sugar plantation, he postulated that Tayo might have been a “second

generation” creole, a continuation of Reunion Creole that may have been imported into New

Caledonia during the sugar industry years (Chaudenson 1994).5

3 My translation of a letter from Father Rougeyron to his niece dated 2 July, 1867. Copie de la correspondance

du Père Rougeyron Nouvelle-Calédonie à sa famille 1843-1900, MSS 525/9. I consulted Father Rougeyron’s

correspondence at the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer in Paris in 2008. 4 Cf. Robert Chaudenson’s homestead society and plantation society model. According to Chaudenson, slaves in

the sugar colonies were, in the homestead phase, targeting versions of the coloniser’s language. As slave

numbers increased and the economy moved from small-scale farming to large plantations, their access to the

language of the masters decreased significantly and therefore their approximations of this language moved

structurally further away from the European varieties (Chaudenson, 1992, 2003). Alain Kihm (1995) also

describes Tayo as a plantation creole. 5 See Speedy (2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2012; Delathière 2009) for details on the New Caledonian sugar

industry (c. 1865-1900) in which immigrants from Reunion Island played a leading role.

3

Both Corne and Ehrhart roundly rejected this alternative thesis on the grounds that,

according to their research, there were very few Réunionnais in New Caledonia in the

nineteenth century. Ehrhart (1994) estimated that the immigrants from Reunion Island

comprised approximately fifty rich sugar planters who had arrived in the colony accompanied

by a group of Malabar indentured workers. She claimed that these people had settled far from

Saint-Louis, making any contact with the Saint-Louis neophytes unlikely.6 While Corne and

Ehrhart acknowledged the presence of Malabar sugar workers at Saint-Louis, they dismissed

them as largely unimportant and they reiterated their story that Tayo was a purely

endogenous Kanak creation.

However, as subsequent research has shown (cf. Speedy 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009,

2012, 2013), this view was based on an incomplete socio-historical picture. In an attempt to

create a single Tayo story, Corne and Ehrhart failed to recognise that the linguistic ecology at

Saint-Louis was more complex than they had portrayed it. Aside from the French of the

Marists and the Kanak languages spoken by the neophytes, it appears that there were likely to

be other ingredients or input languages into Tayo.

4. Speedy and the story of Réunionnais migration to New Caledonia

In my research into the nineteenth-century migration of Reunion Islanders to New Caledonia,

I have shown that, rather than it constituting a minor phenomenon as Ehrhart (1994) has

argued, many of New Caledonia’s founding population hailed from Reunion (Speedy 2007a,

2008, 2012). Several thousand Reunionese from all walks of life migrated to New Caledonia

in the wake of the sugar industry crisis in Reunion in the 1860s and 1870s (Speedy 2008,

2012).7 While rich planters and Malabars were among the Reunionese to arrive in the colony,

they did not form the majority of arrivals. In Speedy (2012), I highlight the stories of two

socially disadvantaged creolophone groups, the Affranchis (freed slaves and their

descendants) and the Petits Blancs (poor ‘whites’), who dominated the Réunionnais

migration to New Caledonia.

6 In her most recent book, Ehrhart (2012) has modified her position slightly in light of the socio-historical

research on the Réunionnais population in Speedy (2007a, 2007b, 2008). 7 From 1863, a total of 615 “Malabars” or coolies arrived in New Caledonia to work in the sugar industry (see

Speedy 2007 and 2009 for details). Of these, approximately half were either born in Reunion or hailed from one

of the French comptoirs in India. The other half, most of whom arrived from 1869, were British subjects.

However, all of the coolies were recruited in Reunion after having had at least one (often more) period of

indenture and thus all would have had some command of a variety of the créole des Bas, the creole spoken in

the coastal, lowland, sugar-growing areas of Reunion. This command would have varied from L1 to L2 to the

competence of an unguided second language learner, depending on the origin and/or length of time spent in

Reunion. In addition to these arrivals, my archival research (19th

century registers of births, deaths and

marriages, ships lists, newspapers and other archival or printed sources) uncovered 256 surnames of free

Reunionese migrants who arrived in New Caledonia in the 1860s and 1870s (Speedy 2007a, 2012). This list is

incomplete as I only consulted the État Civil (births, deaths and marriages) from southern New Caledonia (in the

vicinity of Saint-Louis). Moreover, due to their state of disrepair, many of the registers from Nouméa were

unavailable for viewing. In addition, registers of the État Civil did not commence in Païta, Dumbéa and Mont-

d’Or until 1870, 1875 and 1879 respectively. As many of the Réunionese arrived in family groups – parents,

children, brothers, sisters etc. and many of these families were very large, a conservative estimate of actual

numbers would be at least two thousand arrivals over the fifteen to twenty-year period. To put this figure into

perspective, the free population of New Caledonia numbered 1331 in 1869 (CAOM, FM SG NCL/172) and

2752 in 1877 (Gascher 1975). Most of the Reunionese migrants were creolophone Petits Blancs and Affranchis.

The Grands Blancs, who were very much the minority, would have been bilingual in Reunion French and creole

(see Speedy 2007b for a creole text written by one of the Grands Blancs in New Caledonia). While not all of the

arrivals stayed in New Caledonia after the collapse of the sugar industry, my research shows that many,

particularly the Petits Blancs and Affranchis, did put down roots in the Pacific (Speedy 2007a, 2012).

4

Through detailed archival work as well as genealogical research,8 I demonstrate that

the non-Indian indentured sugar workers who were brought into New Caledonia were of

freed slave descent and that this group, along with the ethnically-mixed Petits Blancs also

formed the bulk of the free emigration from the Indian Ocean.

Their stories had been obfuscated by a combination of factors. Firstly, following the

1848 abolition of slavery in Reunion, all people born on the island, regardless of social or

ethnic origins, were listed as ‘French’ in the censuses. The Reunionese migrants of all

ethnic/social backgrounds (white, black, métis and Indian) were able to blend into the general

‘free and therefore white’ Caldoche population of New Caledonia over the generations.9

While historical sources contain some clues to the fact that Reunionese immigrants were not

all rich and white, the tradition of the ‘non-dit’ (that which remains unsaid) in New

Caledonia, a former penal colony, is strong and people tended not to talk about their

ancestors’ origins, particularly if they were convicts or non-white.10

In addition to demonstrating the numerical dominance of creolophone Réunionnais in

New Caledonia at the time Tayo was developing, I have also shown that there was some

contact with the Kanaks of Saint-Louis.11

There were a number of Reunionese families living

in close proximity to Saint-Louis (some were even on the Saint-Louis mission lands), where

they grew sugar cane and had it processed at the Saint-Louis sugar mill. The Saint-Louis

neophytes came into contact with both free and indentured Reunionese of all ethnic

backgrounds in the fields, at the mill, in the context of technical exchange (agricultural and in

their interaction with tradesmen who the Marists employed to help with building projects at

Saint-Louis), in their dealings with the administration (local administrators were Reunionese)

and in the community, as the Kanaks sold their produce to local settlers.12

4. Reunion Creole, Tayo and creole typology

On the basis of socio-historical and some linguistic evidence,13

I have argued that, following

Salikoko Mufwene’s feature pool model (2001, 2002, 2005), Reunion Creole was most likely

one of the (many) input languages into Tayo.

8 Much archival work was carried out in the CAOM in Aix-en-Provence and in the Académie des Sciences

d’Outre-Mer in Paris. I consulted the Reunionese freed slave lists (Patronymes attribués aux anciens esclaves

affranchis 1832-1848) published online by the Cercle généalogique de Bourbon and additional genealogical

information was supplied by Mrs Pearl Montrose, descendant of one of the African/Malagasy/Creole sugar

workers in New Caledonia. 9 Interestingly, in both Reunion and New Caledonia, people were classified by their social status rather than the

colour of their skin. Essentially, in Reunion, distinction was made between free and servile groups while in New

Caledonia, it was between free, convict and indigenous groups (for details see Speedy 2012). 10

For details on the phenomenon of the ‘non-dit’ in the New Caledonian context, a reticence on the part of

society to talk about what was seen as a shameful past, see Barbançon (1992). 11

See Speedy (2007a: 167-183) for details. 12

Letter from Father Rougeyron , 13 October, 1872. Copie de la correspondance du Père Rougeyron Nouvelle-

Calédonie à sa famille 1843-1900, MSS 525/9. 13

In Speedy (2007a: 183-191; 2007b), I compared linguistic traits present in two texts published in New

Caledonia representing the Reunion Creole that was spoken in the nineteenth-century in the colony with Tayo.

There were a number of phonological, lexical and grammatical similarities. While some of these are also present

in other French-based creoles and may be attributed to universals in creolisation (lexical items, zero copula,

optional indefinite articles, invariable adjectives, agglutination etc.), others, such as the possible reanalysis of

the Reunion Creole copula ‘le’ (written ‘l’est’ in the old texts) as the dependent pronoun in Tayo when used for

thematisation (cf. Speedy 2007a: 184-185) and the use of ‘na’ and ‘napa’ as presenters introducing adverbs

(Speedy 2007b: 222) strongly suggest influence from Reunion Creole. Tayo also shares some lexical items with

Reunion Creole which are absent from New Caledonian French, including akos ke/akoz k ‘parce que’ (because),

siskakan/ziskakan ‘jusqu’à ce que’ (until), sufer/sufer ‘souffrir’ (suffer), ser/ser ‘sœur’ (sister) as opposed to

laser/laser ‘religieuse’ (nun) (Corne 2000a: 73). However, no extensive comparative work between the two

creoles has been done. Whether future research will uncover more convergence or not is irrelevant to my

5

Yet, while I maintain that Reunion Creole had some influence on the development of

Tayo, I do not dispute the grandes lignes of Corne and Ehrhart’s story. I believe that the

communication needs of the Kanaks of Saint-Louis were one of the main factors behind the

creation of Tayo (although I argue below that things were more complex than Corne and

Ehrhart have described them) and I am not convinced that Tayo can be classed as a “second

generation creole” or a continuation of Reunion Creole. Nonetheless, its contribution should

not be ignored for the sake of ideological or political sensibilities.14

Acknowledging that

Reunion Creole was an input language into Tayo adds another layer to our understanding of

what happened at Saint-Louis and highlights the complexity of the language contact situation.

Interestingly, recent linguistic typological research has added weight to my claims of

Reunion Creole input into Tayo. Aymeric Daval-Markussen’s 2011 thesis on linguistic

typology and genetic relationships between French creoles places Tayo and Reunion Creole

closely together on a phylogenetic tree. Daval-Markussen notes, “according to this network,

the influence of Reunion Creole on the development of Tayo as suggested by Speedy (2007a,

2007b) appears to have been stronger than previously assumed” (2011: 34).

This may be interpreted in several ways; the first is that it strengthens my claim that

Reunion Creole was one of the input languages into Tayo. As well as some direct input, this

input was most likely indirect as well. Given the socio-historical facts that I have brought to

light on the importance of Réunionnais migrants in New Caledonia’s founding population, I

suspect that Reunion Creole may well have influenced the emergent New Caledonian variety

of French more than has been acknowledged to date. New Caledonian French (NCF), existing

and indeed developing alongside Tayo, has certainly had an influence on Tayo, particularly in

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as many Saint-Louis are bilingual in Tayo and NCF

(cf. Ehrhart 1993: 74-75). In the context of the ‘feature pool’ model, grammatical features of

Reunion Creole that had congruence with Drubea and/or Cèmuhî were the most likely

candidates for reanalysis along Melanesian lines and transfer into the emerging Tayo.15

This finding also raises the issue of universals in creole languages and the question of

the validity of classifying creoles as a typological class. Whether or not we can consider

creoles as a distinct typological class is, of course, the subject of intense debate in the

creolistics literature (cf. Bakker, Daval-Markussen, Parkvall and Plag, 2011). On the one

hand, some creolists argue that ‘creole’ is a valid synchronic term, with creole languages

representing a break in transmission from their lexifier and sharing certain features that

derive from their development from pidgins (cf. McWhorter 1998, 2001, 2011, for instance).

On the other hand, some maintain that creoles are no different from ‘ordinary’ languages and

their evolution did not come about through a break in transmission. Rather, they developed

from gradual transformations of their lexifier (cf. Mufwene 1996, Chaudenson 1992, for

example). For these researchers, ‘creole’ constitutes a socio-historical term, not a linguistic

one. Others dispute the notion of ‘creole exceptionalism’, arguing that it is an inheritance

from nineteenth-century racist ideologies (cf. DeGraff 2005).

In the case of Tayo, while we can (and do) argue for some input of Reunion Creole

into the nascent community language, neither socio-historical nor linguistic evidence

supports the theory that Tayo derives from or is a continuation of Reunion Creole. The fact

that the two creoles share some grammatical features despite the quite different substrate

languages involved in their development might suggest that there is an argument for

argument as I do not advocate that Reunion Creole was the source of Tayo or the impetus for its evolution. I see

it as just one among many other input languages in a very complex linguistic ecology. 14

See Speedy (2007a: 29-31) for a discussion on these points. 15

See Siegel, Sandeman and Corne (2000) and Sandeman (2011) for a discussion substrate influence in Tayo

and Meyerhoff (2008: 340) who notes convergence between one of the possessive structures in Drubea and

Reunion Creole.

6

classifying creoles as a typological class.16

Alternatively, as some would argue, this

convergence could simply be the result of Reunion Creole and Tayo developing separately

from gradual transformations of French.17

From a socio-historical perspective, it could be that, despite the differing substrates

and the seemingly quite diverse histories of Reunion and Saint-Louis, there are certain socio-

historical parallels that have affected the direction in which the two creoles developed. The

fact that in Reunion the homestead society and the plantation society coexisted (Chaudenson

2003; Bollée 2007), is mirrored in the Saint-Louis social structure, with the mission school-

educated girls having relatively good exposure to French as guided second language learners.

The boys and the adults, however, spent more time in the fields and were thus only partially

guided (in the case of the boys) or unguided (in the case of the adults) second language

learners. Moreover, in the fields, Kanak workers were more exposed to non-standard and

contact varieties of French from convicts, Malabars and other Reunionese and New

Hebridean workers, all of whom the Marists had brought to Saint-Louis to help with sugar

production (Brou 1992; Corne 1999; Speedy 2007a). Saint-Louis thus represents a sort of

mini “société à deux vitesses” that Bollée (2007: 109) described in Reunion.18

Unlike in

Reunion, however, the division in Saint-Louis was essentially between the sexes.

5. The Saint-Louis girls and their contribution to Tayo

One of the more recent Tayo stories to be told involves the above-mentioned mission-

educated Saint-Louis girls and their role in the formation of Tayo (Speedy 2013). Both Corne

and Ehrhart mention the girls in their respective accounts of Tayo development, noting their

“good French” and their role as interpreters in first-generation couples and imply, without

going into any detail, that they had some influence on the emergent creole.

Digging deeper into the stories behind these brief references, in Speedy (2013) I

explore the lives of the girls and the way in which their linguistic contribution shaped Tayo.

Within the hierarchical mission society, the Saint-Louis girls, with their “good”, although

mostly second language varieties of French, took on an unusual and quite exceptional role in

the fledgling Saint-Louis community.

The artificial ‘tribe’ that Saint-Louis would become resembled no other tribe in New

Caledonia.19

Men and women, originally from different geographical and linguistic areas of

the colony, were grouped together on the mission lands, land that the government had

appropriated from the Kanak clans of the Far South and gifted to the missionaries (Dauphiné

1995). While in traditional Melanesian society women would marry outside of their clan and

move to the husband’s residence, in Saint-Louis the women did not move away to marry.

They were not therefore faced with integrating a new clan and learning a new language (their

16

Malagasy, an important substrate language in Reunion Creole, and the Melanesian substrate languages in

Tayo are all Austronesian languages. But it would require a lot more comparative research demonstrating many

shared non-universal structures before we could hypothesise substratal convergence between Malagasy and the

Melanesian languages as an explanation for Reunion Creole influence on Tayo. This may not, however, prove

very productive. With regards to comparative studies of Mauritian Creole and Tok Pisin (that also have shared

Austronesian substrates) Anthony Grant and Diana Guillemin question whether similarities in these substrates

are significant and come to the conclusion that they are not (2012: 90). 17

It should also be noted here that while Tayo shares a number of features with other creoles, Corne’s work has

shown that it also exhibits some quite specifically Melanesian features, particularly in the TAM system, the

pronominal system, relativisation, the imperative etc. 18

A society running at two speeds or a society in which different groups had more or less contact with the

language of power. Like in a homestead situation, the Saint-Louis girls had much closer contact with the

‘masters’ (the Marists) whereas the adults and boys had more of a plantation-like experience with less exposure

to the French of the Marists. 19

Indeed the concept of a tribe in New Caledonia (and elsewhere) is a colonial construct. Traditional Kanak

society was built around the clan (cf. Bensa and Leblic 2000).

7

husband’s) in order to function in society. This movement of women in traditional Kanak

society safeguarded the practice of societal multilingualism as the women would teach their

mother tongue to their children (Leenhardt 1946: XVI). In Saint-Louis, however, “in the

space of a few generations, we see a breakdown of this traditional type of societal

multilingualism. Instead of teaching their children a Kanak mother tongue and adopting the

husband’s Kanak language as the family (and then community) language, many of the Saint-

Louis couples used an interlanguage or second language variety of French as their means of

communication” (Speedy 2013). Thus the girls’ language, which was learned at school and

practised in their domestic and religious activities and close association with the Marist

sisters, became the model or target language for the community, starting from within the

family unit.

This ‘preference’ for varieties of French over ancestral languages was driven firstly

by the unique nature of the réduction in its grouping together of people of different linguistic

backgrounds and the subsequent development of an artificial tribe or village around the

mission, both of which went against Melanesian custom. Secondly, French in its various

forms (L1, L2, regional, creolised, pidginised etc.) was the only common language everyone

at Saint-Louis had some level of access to. Moreover, the civilising mission of the Marists

meant that Kanak languages were most likely subject to stigmatising colonial discourses and

French, as the language of power, was portrayed as more prestigious. Despite the attempted

deculturation of Kanak converts, the Saint-Louis women succeeded in maintaining

(consciously or not) a part of their Melanesian identity. While on the one hand they

guaranteed that the community language would be French-based, I argue that they also would

have transferred, through their second language varieties of French, Melanesian grammatical

and conceptual features or “cryptotypes” (cf. Manessy 1989) into Tayo, reinforcing substratal

patterns transferred by the men.

6. A story of origins

8

Figure 1 – Linguistic Map of New Caledonian Languages (Source: LACITO-CNRS

2011)

The final Tayo story I wish to highlight in this paper is one that has not yet been told. It is a

story of origins. In Corne and Ehrhart’s Tayo story, everything began in 1860 when the

Marists’ second attempt to establish a réduction at Saint-Louis was successful.20

The

missionaries set up camp with a group of Touho neophytes (speakers of Cèmuhî) and were

soon joined by Kanaks from the surrounding areas (speakers of Drubea and Numèè). In 1880,

refugees from Bouloupari (speakers of Xârâcùù and Xârâguré) arrived at the mission. The

village of Saint-Louis developed along ethno-linguistic lines, with the emergence of four

distinct quarters (St-Paul, St-Thomas, St-Jean and St-Tarcicius) each with its own distinct and

mutually unintelligible ancestral language. This linguistic diversity meant that the neophytes

needed to form a language of intra-village communication, which provided the incentive for

the creation of Tayo (cf. Corne, 1994, 1999 and 2000a).

However, this depiction of a sort of Pacific Babel needs some nuancing. When we

take into consideration the history of contact that the founding neophytes had with the

Marists and other Europeans, the assumption that they would not have been able to

communicate with each other is not quite accurate. It is more likely that the first Kanaks to

arrive in Saint-Louis, the Touho and a smaller group from Pouébo-Balade (Brou 1982: 45),

would have already had L2 French or at least an interlanguage or pidgin which they used to

communicate with the Marists. Some of them may have spoken French well. The later

arrivals from the Far South and Bouloupari would most likely have had some command of

20

In 1856, the Marists made a first attempt to set up a mission at Saint-Louis but it was abandoned due to

hostilities from local Kanaks (Dauphiné 1995: 27).

9

the local New Caledonian French-based pidgin which they would have been able to introduce

in the interim to communicate with both the Marists and other neophytes at Saint-Louis.21

It should be noted that the Marists were not monolingual French speakers either. From

their arrival and first installation at Balade in 1843, they set about learning local languages.

Initially employing the Polynesian “langue de relation” that had been in use in New

Caledonia since first contact with the Europeans (cf. Hollyman 2000a: 28), 22

the missionaries

learned the language of Balade and subsequently tried to learn the languages of the peoples in

their later installations. In 1851, François Leconte wrote of the missionaries, “Missionaries

who have previously sojourned in either Tonga or Wallis Island therefore have a distinct

advantage over their fellow clergymen as they can make themselves understood in almost all

parts of the island before having studied the language of the tribe [that they are attempting to

convert]” (quoted in Hollyman 2000a: 28). Of the first Marists to arrive in New Caledonia,

Father Viard, who had a good command of Tongan, led the evangelisation. It took Monsignor

Douarre and Father Rougeyron about a year to learn the local Kanak language. In 1845,

Father Rougeyron wrote of his initial struggle with this linguistic task:

The language of the New Caledonians seems very difficult to me, both because of its

characteristics that are so different from our European languages and because of its

pronunciation. As the only Europeans on this island, with no interpreters and no

grammar or vocabulary books […] we have had enormous challenges to overcome. In

the last three months we have started to babble in New Caledonian and give some

instruction [to the New Caledonians].23

That same year, Father Rougeyron, whose language skills steadily improved, began work on

his dictionary (Essertel 2008: 99). In 1860, Rougeyron’s Dictionnaire de Pouébo et d’Ouvéa

was completed.

As Kanak contact with European whalers, sandalwood and bêche-de-mer traders

increased from the 1840s, the language of communication, which had initially been via the

Polynesian vehicular language, shifted to an English-based pidgin that originated in New

South Wales or the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) (cf. Hollyman 2000a: 29, 46). Once French

settlement got underway and the gallicisation of the indigenous population began, an

endogenous French-based pidgin developed. After coexisting for about fifteen years, the

French-based pidgin replaced the English-based pidgin by about 1875-1880 (Hollyman

2000a: 46-47). As the Kanaks began speaking these European-based pidgins, the Marists

were also able to use them as languages of communication with potential converts.

Nevertheless, learning the local language continued to remain high on the agenda. When the

three Marist Sisters arrived at La Conception in 1858, for instance, we are told that along

with teaching the children French, teaching the women to sew and taking care of the sick,

21

The French-based pidgin came about after French annexation and subsequent contact between Kanaks and

French administrators and colonists. According to Hollyman (1964:58), it developed from the beach-la-mar or

English-based pidgin spoken in New Caledonia from the 1840s and was spoken throughout the nineteenth

century. It contained French, English, Polynesian and Melanesian elements. 22

Prior to European contact, small groups of Polynesians had at various times arrived and settled in parts of the

east coast of New Caledonia and Uvea (where a Polynesian language, Faga Uvea, is still spoken today).

Polynesian languages were thus spoken in New Caledonia and some lexical items entered local Melanesian

languages. Initial contact with European explorers was facilitated by the presence of Polynesian languages and

speakers, who sometimes acted as interpreters. Indeed, in Balade, Polynesian became the lingua franca for

communication between European explorers, missionaries and traders (Hollyman 1959, 2000a). The Europeans

used pidginised Polynesian (or Maritime Polynesian Pidgin) as reported by Drechsel (2007). 23

Letter from Father Rougeyron to Jean-Claude Colin, New Caledonia, 1 October 1845. Quoted in Essertel

(2008: 97).

10

they were also expected to learn the local Kanak languages (Delbos 1993: 125). The Marists

and the neophytes of Saint-Louis, then, would most certainly have had ways of

communicating with each other.

In addition to their own linguistic efforts, the Marists naturally began teaching French

to their converts. This was done right from their first installations at Balade and Pouébo. It

was their practice to take young people, the children of chiefs in particular, under their

tutelage to teach them language and literacy (Essertel 2008: 99). These educated converts

were then used as intermediaries in the Marists’ dealings with other Kanaks. When, in 1847,

the Marists were forced to temporarily flee their northern installation, they took the young

people with them on their travels – to the New Hebrides, Sydney, the Ile of Pines, Yaté and

Futuna. Once the group returned to Balade and Pouébo in 1851, these young people

participated in the foundation of new mission stations (Delbos 1993).

7. The foundation of La Conception and Saint-Louis

In 1855, after a series of failures elsewhere, Father Rougeyron decided to set up a réduction

at La Conception in the south of the colony, not far from Port-de-France (Noumea). He took

with him 120 converts from Balade. In 1856, 90 converts from Touho and 158 from Pouébo

joined them. These neophytes lived together for four to five years at La Conception before

the Marists took a group of 30 of them to set up the Saint-Louis réduction (Delbos 1993: 100-

101).

The installation of hundreds of northern Kanaks in southern New Caledonia was

greeted enthusiastically by the local military administrators who saw the missions as

providing a buffer zone between the fledgling civilian settlement in Port-de-France and the

local Kanaks. They also regarded them as allies in their quest to rid the south of its “hostile”

indigenous population in order to seize their lands for farming. They used the neophytes as

guides and soon asked them to participate in the military campaigns against the local “rebel”

tribes. The converts were rewarded with provisions, booty and children, who they had taken

prisoner and who they were allowed to take to La Conception to be raised in “Christian

families” (Dauphiné 1995: 23-24, 31-32).

The foundation members of Saint-Louis, then, had been with the Marists for at least

four or five years. Some of them, especially those who the Marists had taken under their wing

as young people, may well have been living alongside the Marists for much longer. Some

also had contact with the French and other Europeans.24

It is improbable, then, that they did

not already have some form of L2 French.

8. Local pidgins

The first language of communication at Saint-Louis could not, therefore, have been a pidgin

that came about at Saint-Louis itself after 1860 solely due to the variety of Kanak languages

spoken there. It is more likely that most of the neophytes were multilingual prior to their

arrival at Saint-Louis. They had their ancestral languages that they could use to communicate

with people from their own tribe - we must not forget too that most would have spoken more

than one Kanak language due to the tradition of societal multilingualism in New Caledonia

(cf. Haudricourt 1961). They also would have had some command of the pidgins (French

and/or English-based) which were fairly widely used as vehicular languages in the colony at

this time. And some may have attained a good level of French. Right from the beginning, the

linguistic ecology of the réduction was thus more complex than it has been portrayed to date.

24

In addition to providing military aid, converts at La Conception (and later Saint-Louis) were also employed

on public works (Dauphiné 1995: 50).

11

Bi- and multilingualism would have been the norm rather than the exception with the

evangelising and civilising mission of the Marists pushing everyone towards French.

Could Tayo have grown out of the local vehicular languages (the pidgins) that would

have undergone expansion and modification by the various superstrate and substrate input

languages spoken at Saint-Louis? Later arrivals at Saint-Louis would have reinforced the

pidginised elements in the emerging creole. The input of the New Caledonian pidgins could

perhaps account for the retention of “generalised” and “simplified” substrate features in Tayo

(cf. Corne 1999) that Jeff Siegel has argued for in other contact languages (2007).

Unfortunately, linguistic data on the New Caledonian pidgins are sparse. The few

examples reproduced below represent a small snapshot of the Polynesian, English and

French-based pidgins that were once spoken in New Caledonia and demonstrate the level of

lexical mixing that they involved.25

(1) Candio non lélé, lui beaucoup coïoné Français (1863-6) (Garnier 1991: 59).

Candio is not good. He tricked/screwed over the French a lot.

(2) My want mate-mate casi belong me (1863-6) (Garnier 1991: 102).

I want to die in my own hut.

(3) Kanak comme ça… lui beaucoup content kaï-kaï ses ennemis (1863-6) (Garnier 1991:

157-158)

Kanaks are like that… they are very happy to eat their enemies.

(4) Boat belong you? (1863-6) (Garnier 1991: 190)

Is it your boat?

(5) Tayos, lookout belong faia (1863-6) (Garnier 1991: 44)

Friends/Kanaks, be careful of the fire.

(6) Mi toupaï, popiné, - finish kaïkaï – beaucoup lélé (1884) (Hollyman 2000a: 52)

I killed the woman (his wife), I ate her, she was very good.

The name Tayo itself comes from the Polynesian and subsequent pidgin word ‘tayo’ (friend)

which designated the Kanak man as opposed to the Kanak woman (‘popinée’ – again from

Polynesian ‘wahine’) in colonial New Caledonia. Hollyman (2000b: 92) explains that ‘tayo’

underwent a similar transformation in the creole of Saint-Louis as the word ‘Maori’ in New

Zealand. The original meaning of ‘Maori’ (ordinary or common) shifted to designate the

indigenous people and then the language spoken by the indigenous people while ‘tayo’ first

designated the people and then their language. Other lexical items that entered via pidgin,

such as ‘poka’ (pig), are also found in Tayo (cf. Ehrhart 1993: 115).26

25

All of the examples were uttered by Kanaks (although recorded by Europeans) except for (5) which is

attributed to the settler and sugar planter Ferdinand Joubert. While visiting the Joubert concession of Koé,

Joubert explained to Jules Garnier that his Kanak workers did not understand French well so he used this

“lingua franca” (or pidgin) to communicate with them. Garnier mentions other words of pidgin/English origin

used to designate items at the farm including ‘le cooka’ (cook), ‘fena’ (fence) and ‘paddock’ (field or paddock)

(Garnier 1991: 29-44). 26

In the Loyalty Islands and some northern Kanak languages, the term ‘puaka’ is used to designate the pig and

comes from Polynesian. Pidgin ‘Poaka’, from English ‘porker’appears to be the source of ‘poka’ or ‘poca’ as

used in Kanak languages in the north and far south of New Caledonia (Hollyman 1959: 383). This term,

according to Hollyman (1959: 383) “represents original beach-la-mar usage” and it is also present in NCF.

12

In terms of potential structural transfer, we can take the example of the possessive

preposition ‘belong’ as in (2) and (4) and compare it with the use of ‘pu’ from French ‘pour’

(for) in the Tayo possessive when we have N + [pu + animate N]pp as in (7) and (8):

(7) Kas pu mwa (Ehrhart 1993: 140)

My house.

(8) Mater pu bude (Corne 1995: 175)

Your mother/The mother of you two.

‘Belong’ was possibly reanalysed and transferred into Tayo as one of the three possible ways

of marking possession.27

McConvell notes that in some Australian creoles, elements related

to ‘for’ (‘fo’ and ‘bo’) are replacing ‘bilong’ in possessives echoing the use of ‘fu’ or ‘fi’

from English ‘for’ in the Atlantic creoles (2005: 92, 96). While the forms are different,

Cèmuhî, Drubea and Xârâcùù all allow for N + particle/preposition + N to mark possession.28

While the French possessive allows N + de/à + N, it does not allow N + pour + N. This

construction is found, however, in other contact/pidgin varieties of French such as Tây Bôi

and Algerian French, both of which were spoken in New Caledonia in the nineteenth century

(cf. Hollyman 2000b, Speedy 2005). This feature would seem, then, an example of

convergence and/or universals (in pidginised varieties of French), underlining once again the

complexity of the contact situation at Saint-Louis.

9. Different stories, different linguistic processes

These Tayo stories thus provide a window on the complex and multi-layered nature of Saint-

Louis’ linguistic ecology. There would appear to have been many different linguistic

processes at work. The superstrate input was not as simple as the label ‘Marist French’

implies as the Marists themselves were multilingual and may have reinforced (consciously or

not) the transfer of elements from the Kanak languages and the Polynesian, English and

French pidgins that they spoke. The mission-educated girls with their “good” French may

have transmitted not only their L2 French, doubtlessly containing SLA universals, into Tayo

but also most likely reinforced the transfer of Kanak cryptotypes into the emerging creole.

The substrate input involved four or five mutually unintelligible Melanesian

languages that shared a number of general grammatical patterns as well as similar

worldviews. The substrate input may have entered directly or indirectly, most likely building

on the pidgin of the first arrivals which was reinforced over the first twenty years of

settlement as new neophytes arrived. Moreover, the Reunion Creole, convict French and New

Hebridean pidgin (Bislama) spoken in the Saint-Louis fields provided additional opportunity

for input/influence/transfer, the latter perhaps reinforcing general Oceanic patterns in the

emerging Tayo and Reunion Creole perhaps reinforcing emerging creole features.

10. Conclusion

Siegel writes:

A creole is made up of a subset of the features that are used for communication in the

language contact situation. These include features from pidginized L2 varieties of the

lexifier and from the lexifier itself, and features from other contact languages as well

as from substrate languages (2007: 176).

27

Tayo also allows N + [de + inanimate N]pp and N + [à + material N]pp (cf. Kihm 1995). 28

See Rivierre (1980: 152-156), Kihm (1995) and Moyse-Faurie (1995: 52-53) for examples in these three

languages respectively.

13

This seems to characterise the creole of Saint-Louis. However, its eventual emergence was

the result of the combination of a variety of different linguistic processes among a population

that had different access to and perhaps motivation for second language acquisition. There is

a tendency in creole studies to want to elaborate broad paradigms that account for the

existence of all creoles but, as the Tayo stories have demonstrated, the development of a new

language is very complex. It is important to understand the linguistic ecology of a

creolophone society at the time the creole was developing if we hope to comprehend why or

how the language came into being. In other words, before attempting to apply a general

theory of creolisation onto a given creole, we first need to have a very good idea of its social

and demographic history. To do so, we need to identify and relate all of the stories that make

up a creole’s history and accept that a number of different processes of creolisation may well

be implicated in the formation of a new community language.

14

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