pidgin and creole languages (2)

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Pidgin and Creole Languages Originally thought of as incomplete, broken, corrupt, not worthy of serious attention. Pidgins still are marginal: in origin (makeshift, reduced in structure), in attitudes toward them (low prestige); in our knowledge of them. Some quick definitions: Pidgin language (origin in Engl. word `business'?) is nobody's native language; may arise when two speakers of different languages with no common language try to have a makeshift conversation. Lexicon usually comes from one language, structure often from the other. Because of colonialism, slavery etc. the prestige of Pidgin languages is very low. Many pidgins are `contact vernaculars', may only exist for one speech event. Creole (orig. person of European descent born and raised in a tropical colony) is a language that was originally a pidgin but has become nativized, i.e. a community of speakers claims it as their first language. Next used to designate the language(s) of people of Caribbean and African descent in colonial and ex- colonial countries (Jamaica, Haiti, Mauritius, Réunion, Hawaii, Pitcairn, etc.) Relexification The process of substituting new vocabulary for old. Pidgins may get relexified with new English vocabulary to replace the previous Portuguese vocabulary, etc. Pidgin From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Not to be confused with the Pigeon bird. For the instant messaging client, see Pidgin (software). A pidgin /ˈpɪdʒi:n/, or pidgin language, is a simplified version of a language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the

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Pidgin and Creole Languages

Originally thought of as incomplete, broken, corrupt, not worthy of serious attention. Pidgins still are marginal: in origin (makeshift, reduced in structure), in attitudes toward them (low prestige); in our knowledge of them.

Some quick definitions:

Pidgin language (origin in Engl. word `business'?) is nobody's native language; may arise when two speakers of different languages with no common language try to have a makeshift conversation. Lexicon usually comes from one language, structure often from the other. Because of colonialism, slavery etc. the prestige of Pidgin languages is very low. Many pidgins are `contact vernaculars', may only exist for one speech event.Creole (orig. person of European descent born and raised in a tropical colony) is a language that was originally a pidgin but has become nativized, i.e. a community of speakers claims it as their first language. Next used to designate the language(s) of people of Caribbean and African descent in colonial and ex-colonial countries (Jamaica, Haiti, Mauritius, Runion, Hawaii, Pitcairn, etc.)Relexification The process of substituting new vocabulary for old. Pidgins may get relexified with new English vocabulary to replace the previous Portuguese vocabulary, etc.

PidginFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaNot to be confused with the Pigeon bird. For the instant messaging client, see Pidgin (software).A pidgin /pdn/, or pidgin language, is a simplified version of a language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside (but where there is no common language between the groups). Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language.[1][2] A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from multiple other languages and cultures. They allow people who have no common language to communicate with each other. Pidgins usually have low prestige with respect to other languages.[3]

Not all simplified or "broken" forms of a language are pidgins. Each pidgin has its own norms of usage which must be learned for proficiency in the pidgin.[4]Etymology[edit]The origin of the word is uncertain. Pidgin first appeared in print in 1850. The most widely accepted etymology is from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business.[5]

Another etymology that has been proposed is English pigeon, a bird sometimes used for carrying brief written messages, especially in times prior to modern telecommunications.[6]

Terminology[edit]The word pidgin, formerly also spelled pigion,[5] used to refer originally to Chinese Pidgin English, but was later generalized to refer to any pidgin.[7] Pidgin may also be used as the specific name for local pidgins or creoles, in places where they are spoken. For example, the name of the creole language Tok Pisin derives from the English words talk pidgin. Its speakers usually refer to it simply as "pidgin" when speaking English.[8][9] Likewise, Hawaiian Creole English is commonly referred to by its speakers as "Pidgin".

The term jargon has also been used to refer to pidgins, and is found in the names of some pidgins, such as Chinook Jargon. In this context, linguists today use jargon to denote a particularly rudimentary type of pidgin;[10] however, this usage is rather rare, and the term jargon most often refers to the words particular to a given profession.

Pidgins may start out as or become trade languages, such as Tok Pisin. Trade languages are often fully developed languages in their own right such as Swahili. Trade languages tend to be "vehicular languages", while pidgins can evolve into the vernacular.[clarification needed]

Common traits among pidgin languages[edit]Since a pidgin language is a fundamentally simpler form of communication, the grammar and phonology are usually as simple as possible, and usually consist of:[citation needed]

Uncomplicated clausal structure (e.g., no embedded clauses, etc.)Reduction or elimination of syllable codasReduction of consonant clusters or breaking them with epenthesisBasic vowels, such as [a, e, i, o, u]No tones, such as those found in West African and Asian languagesUse of separate words to indicate tense, usually preceding the verbUse of reduplication to represent plurals, superlatives, and other parts of speech that represent the concept being increasedA lack of morphophonemic variationPidgin development[edit]The initial development of a pidgin usually requires:

prolonged, regular contact between the different language communitiesa need to communicate between theman absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible interlanguageKeith Whinnom (in Hymes (1971)) suggests that pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others.

Linguists sometimes posit that pidgins can become creole languages when a generation of children learn a pidgin as their first language,[11] a process that regularizes speaker-dependent variation in grammar. Creoles can then replace the existing mix of languages to become the native language of a community (such as the Chavacano language in the Philippines, Krio in Sierra Leone, and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea). However, not all pidgins become creole languages; a pidgin may die out before this phase would occur (e.g. the Mediterranean Lingua Franca).

Other scholars, such as Salikoko Mufwene, argue that pidgins and creoles arise independently under different circumstances, and that a pidgin need not always precede a creole nor a creole evolve from a pidgin. Pidgins, according to Mufwene, emerged among trade colonies among "users who preserved their native vernaculars for their day-to-day interactions". Creoles, meanwhile, developed in settlement colonies in which speakers of a European language, often indentured servants whose language would be far from the standard in the first place, interacted extensively with non-European slaves, absorbing certain words and features from the slaves' non-European native languages, resulting in a heavily basilectalized version of the original language. These servants and slaves would come to use the creole as an everyday vernacular, rather than merely in situations in which contact with a speaker of the superstrate was necessary.[12]

List of pidgins[edit]The following pidgins have Wikipedia articles or sections in articles. They are only a fraction of the pidgins of the world.

List of English-based pidginsAlgonquianBasque pidginArafundi-Enga PidginBarikanchi PidginBasqueIcelandic pidginBimbashi ArabicBroken Slavey and Loucheux JargonCamthoPidgin Delaware

Theories

A pidgin is a restricted language which arises for the purposes of communication between two social groups of which one is in a more dominant position than the other. The less dominant group is the one which develops the pidgin. Historically, pidgins arose in colonial situations where the representatives of the particular colonial power, officials, tradesmen, sailors, etc., came in contact with natives. The latter developed a jargon when communicating with the former. This resulted in a language on the basis of the colonial language in question and the language or languages of the natives. Such a language was restricted in its range as it served a definite purpose, namely basic communication with the colonists. In the course of several generations such a reduced form of language can become more complex, especially if it develops into the mother tongue of a group of speakers. This latter stage is that of creolisation. Creoles are much expanded versions of pidgins and have arisen in situations in which there was a break in the natural linguistic continuity of a community, for instance on slave planatations in their early years.

The interest of linguists in these languages has increased greatly in the last few decades. The main reason for this is that pidgins and creoles are young languages. In retracing their development it may be possible to see how new languages can arise. Furthermore, the large number of shared features among widely dispersed pidgins and creoles leads to the conclusion that creoles at least show characteristics which are typical of language in the most general sense, the features of older languages, such as complex morphology or intricate phonology, arising due to the action of various forces over a long period of time after the birth of these languages. In type, creoles are all analytic and generally lack complexity in their sound systems.

The terms pidgin and creole

There are a number of views on the origin of the term pidgin, none of which has gained sole acceptance by the academic community.

1)Chinese corruption of the word business. As the word is used for any action or occupation (cf. joss-pidgin religion and chow-chow-pidgin cooking') it should not be surprising that it be used for a language variety which arose for trading purposes.

2)Portuguese ocupaao meaning trade, job, occupation. This suggestion is interesting as the Portuguese were among the first traders to travel to the third world and influence natives with their language. Phonetically the shift from the original word to a form /pidgin/ is difficult to explain.

3)A form from the South American language Yayo -pidian meaning people (claim put forward by Kleinecke, 1959). This form occurs in tribal names like Mapidian, Tarapidian, etc. This claim rests on a single occurrence of the word Pidians in a text from 1606. But as several authors have pointed out this might be a spelling error for Indians seeing as how the author has other misspellings in the text in question.

4)Hancock (1972) suggested that the term is derived from pequeno portugues which is used in Angola for the broken Portuguese spoken by the illiterate. This view is semantically justified seeing that the word pequeno is often used to mean offspring, in this case a language derived from another. Phonetically, the shift to /pidgin/ is not difficult to account for: /peke:no/ > /pege:n/ > /pigin/ > /pidgin/ (stages not attested, however).

5)Hebrew word pidjom meaning barter. This suggestion is phonetically and semantically plausible, hinges however on the distribution of a Jewish word outside of Europe and its acceptance as a general term for a trade language.

The term creole There is less controversy on this issue than on the previous one. The term would seem to derive from French creole, it in its turn coming from Portuguese crioulo (rather than from Spanish criollo') which goes back to an Iberian stem meaning to nurse, breed, bring up. The present meaning is native to a locality or country. Originally it was used (17th century) to refer to those from European countries born in the colonies. The term then underwent a semantic shift to refer to customs and language of those in the colonies and later to any language derived from a pidgin based on a European language, typically English, French, Portuguese, Spanish or Dutch. Now the term refers to any language of this type, irrespective of what the input language has been.

Theories of origin

There are various theories about the origin of pidgins which have been proposed in the last hundred years or so. These can be presented as a basic group of five theories which show a degree of overlap; note that a mixture of origins is also a possibility which should also be considered.

1) The baby-talk theory At the end of the last century Charles Leland, when discussing China coast pidgin English, noted that there were many similarities with the speech of children such as the following features:

a)High percentage of content words with a correspondingly low number of function words b)Little morphological marking c)Word classes more flexible than in adult language (free conversion) d)Contrasts in area of pronouns greatly reduced e)Number of inflections minimised

Later linguists, notably Jespersen and Bloomfield, maintained that the characteristics of pidgins result from imperfect mastery of a language which in its initial stage, in the child with its first language and in the grown-up with a second language learnt by imperfect methods, leads to a superficial knowledge of the most indispensable word, with total disregard of grammar (Jespersen 1922: 234). The evaluative nature of such views would be rejected by linguists today.

2) Independent parallel development theory This view maintains that the obvious similarities between the worlds pidgins and creoles arose on independent but parallel lines due to the fact that they all are derived from languages of Indo-European stock and, in the case of the Atlantic varieties, due to their sharing a common West African substratum. Furthermore, scholars like Robert Hall specify that the similar social and physical conditions under which pidgins arose were responsible for the development of similar linguistic structures.

3) Nautical jargon theory As early as 1938 the American linguist John Reinecke noted the possible influence of nautical jargon on pidgins. It is obvious that on many of the original voyages of discovery to the developing world many nationalities were represented among the crews of the ships. This fact led to the development of a core vocabulary of nautical items and a simplified grammar (at least as regards English). Later pidgins show many of these lexical items irrespective of where the language varieties are spoken. Thus the word capsise turns up with the meaning turn over or spill in both West Atlantic and Pacific pidgins. So do the words heave, hoist, hail, galley, cargo. One of the shortcomings of this otherwise attractive theory is that it does not help to account for the many structural affinities between pidgins which arose from different European languages.

4) Monogenetic/relexification theory According to this view all pidgins can be traced back to a single proto-pidgin, a 15th century Portuguese pidgin which was itself probably a relic of the medieval lingua franca (also known as sabir from the Portuguese word for know') which was the common means of communication among the Crusaders and traders in the Mediterranean area. Lingua franca survived longest on the North African coast and is attested from Algeria and Tunesia as late as the 19th century. The theory maintains that when the Portuguese first sailed down the west coast of Africa in the 15th century they would have used their form of lingua franca (sabir). Afterwards in the 16th and 17th centuries when the Portuguese influence in Africa declined, the vocabulary of the then established pidgins would have been replaced by that of the new colonial language which was dominant in the area, say English or French. As the Portuguese were among the first traders in India and South East Asia a similar situation can be assumed to have obtained: the vocabulary of the original Portuguese pidgin was replaced by that of a later European language. Note that with this theory the grammatical structure of pidgins would not have been effected by the switch in vocabulary (this is what is meant by the term relexification). Thus the obvious similarity in structure of all pidgins would go back to the grammar of the proto-pidgin coming from the Mediterranean area. What this theory does not explain is why the structure (analytic) should be of the type it is. Furthermore there are a number of marginal pidgins (Russenorsk, Eskimo Trade Jargon) which cannot conceivably be connected with Portuguese and which are nonetheless analytic in structure just as the pidgins based on the main European colonial languages are.

5) Universalist theory This is the most recent view on the origin of pidgins and has elements in common with the other theories. However, the distinguishing mark of this theory is that it sees the similarities as due to universal tendencies among humans to create languages of a similar type, i.e. an analytic language with a simple phonology, an SVO syntax with little or no subordination or other sentence complexities, and with a lexicon which makes maximum use of polysemy (and devices such as reduplication) operating from a limited core vocabulary. To put it in technical terms, a creole will be expected to have unmarked values for linguistic parameters, e.g. with the parameter pro-drop, whereby the personal pronoun is not obligatory with verb forms (cf. Italian capisco I understand'), the unmarked setting is for no pro-drop to be allowed and indeed this is the situation in all pidgins and creoles, a positive value being something which may appear later with the rise of a rich morphology.

Developmental stages of pidgins/creoles

Social situationLinguistic correlate1)Marginal contactRestricted pidgin2)NativisationExtended pidgin3)Mother tongue developmentCreole4)Movement towards standard language (not necessarily input language)Decreolisation

Pidgins are generally characterised as restricted and extended. In the life-cycle of pidgins one can note that they start off as restricted language varieties used in marginal contact situations for minimal trading purposes. From this original modest outset a pidgin may, assuming that there are social reasons for it to do so, develop into an extended type. The latter is characterised by the extension of the social functions of a pidgin. One very frequent scenario in the later development of a pidgin is where it is used as a means of communication not just among black and white speakers but among native speakers themselves who however have very different native languages. This is the major reason for the survival of pidgin English in West Africa. The function of pidgin English is thus as a lingua franca, i.e. a common means of communication between speakers who do not understand their respective native languages.

The process of pidginisation is very common in any situation in which a lingua franca is called for. Normally any such variety dies out very quickly once the situation which gave rise to it no longer obtains. If the situation does continue to exist then the pidgin is likely to survive. The steps from restricted to extended pidgin and further to creole are only taken by very few languages, particularly the major restructuring typical of pidgins is not normally carried out by any but a very small number of input varieties.

Reasons for creole development Creoles may arise in one of two basic situations. One is where speakers of pidgins are put in a situation in which they cannot use their respective mother tongues. This has arisen in the course of the slave trade (in the Caribbean and the southern United States) where speakers were deliberately kept in separate groups to avoid their plotting rebellion. They were then forced to maintain the pidgin which they had developed up to then and pass it on to future generations as their mother tongue thus forming the transition from a pidgin to a creole. A second situation is where a pidgin is regarded by a social group as a higher language variety and deliberately cultivated; this is the kind of situation which obtained in Cameroon and which does still to some extent on Papua New Guinea. The outcome of this kind of situation is that the children of such speakers which use pidgin for prestige reasons may end up using the pidgin as a first language, thus rendering it a creole with the attendant relinquishing of the native language of their parents and the expansion of all linguistic levels for the new creole to act as a fully-fledged language.

Monogenetic Theories (single-origin theories)Monogenetic theories assume monogenesis, hence the name. It is argued that there is a single origin of European-based pidgins and creoles.Monogenesis and RelexificationMonogenetic approaches explain the structural similarities between most or all European-based pidgins (and creoles) with a common origin.According to monogenetic theories, all pidgins have a common origin, the proto-pidgin. Thus, pidgins are genetically related and descent from a common ancestor.A fifteenth century Portuguese-based pidgin in West Africa (WAPP) has been established as the proto-pidgin. It functions similar to a late version of the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca called Sabir.According to the theory of monogenesis, WAPP (West African Pidgin Portuguese) was carried around the world in the course of European colonization and, as a consequence, gave rise to pidgins (and later creoles) in many places. These pidgins and creoles all retained particular structural features including lexical remnants of the Portuguese-based proto-pidgin.An important component of the monogenesis theory is relexification. Relexification explains the lexical differences between pidgins and creoles, as they are historically related and derive from a common origin in WAPP.The term 'relexification' means the total or near-total replacement of the vocabulary of a particular language by vocabulary from another language.Thus, if relexification is assumed, when WAPP was carried around the world and its speakers came into contact with different groups of European colonizers English, Spanish, Dutch and French - it was adopted by these colonizers by a process of relexification. Thus, WAPP was relexified and influenced by the particular European colonizers language with which it was in contact. It gave rise to different European-based pidgins and creoles over time.While the lexicon changed and Portuguese words were replaced by words from other European colonizers' languages, the basic grammatical structure of WAPP was retained. According to the monogenesis theory, this is the reason for the structural similarities between pidgins and creoles which have different lexifier languages.Disadvantage of the monogenesis theory:The theory of monogenesis does not consider the development of all pidgins and creoles worldwide. It only focuses on European-based pidgins and creoles that originated from WAPP.However, there are pidgins and creoles which developed without European connections (e.g. several African or Asian pidgins). These contact languages also show basic structural similarities.Consequently, although monogenesis assumes relexification, and although this may be an appropriate explanation for all European-based pidgins and creoles, it cannot account for the structural similarities between pidgins and creoles worldwide.A more general theory of genesis, thus, should cover all cases of pidginization. Such a theory then must be a polygenetic one which assumes multiple independent origins for the contact languages of the world.

Creole languageFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaNot to be confused with Creole markup language.

Road sign in Guadeloupe Creole meaning Slow down. Children are playing here. The literal translation is "Lift your foot [from the accelerator]. There are small people playing here".A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin, i.e. a simplified version of a language. Creoles differ from pidgins because creoles have been nativized by children as their primary language, with the result that they have features of natural languages that are normally missing from pidgins, which are not anyone's first language.

The precise number of creoles is not known, particularly as these are poorly attested, but about one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500, predominantly based on European languages, due to the Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade,[1] though there are creoles based on other languages, including Arabic, Chinese, and Malay. The creole with the largest number of speakers is Haitian Creole, with about ten million native speakers.

The lexicon of a creole language is largely supplied by the parent languages, particularly that of the most dominant group in the social context of the creole's construction, though there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts. On the other hand, the grammar often has original features that may differ substantially from those of the parent languages.

Overview[edit]A creole is believed to arise when a pidgin, developed by adults for use as a second language, becomes the native and primary language of their children a process known as nativization.[2] The pidgin-creole life cycle was studied by Hall in the 1960s.[3]

Creoles share more grammatical similarities with each other than with the languages from which they are phylogenetically derived.[4] However, there is no widely accepted theory that would account for those perceived similarities.[5] Moreover, no grammatical feature has been shown to be specific to creoles,[6][7][8][9][10][11] although it is generally acknowledged that creoles have simpler and less sophisticated grammar than longer-established languages

Many of the creoles known today arose in the last 500 years, as a result of the worldwide expansion in European maritime power and trade in the Age of Discovery, which led to extensive European colonial empires and an intense slave trade. Like most non-official and minority languages, creoles have generally been regarded as degenerate variants or dialects of their parent languages. Because of that prejudice, many of the creoles that arose in the European colonies have become extinct. However, political and academic changes in recent decades have improved the status of creoles, both as living languages and as object of linguistic study.[12][13] Some creoles have even been granted the status of official or semi-official language.

Linguists now recognize that creole formation is a universal phenomenon, not limited to the European colonial period, and an important aspect of language evolution (see Vennemann (2003)). For example, in 1933 Sigmund Feist postulated a creole origin for the Germanic languages.

Other scholars, such as Salikoko Mufwene, argue that pidgins and creoles arise independently under different circumstances, and that a pidgin need not always precede a creole nor a creole evolve from a pidgin. Pidgins, according to Mufwene, emerged among trade colonies among "users who preserved their native vernaculars for their day-to-day interactions." Creoles, meanwhile, developed in settlement colonies in which speakers of a European language, often indentured servants whose language would be far from the standard in the first place, interacted extensively with non-European slaves, absorbing certain words and features from the slaves' non-European native languages, resulting in a heavily basilectalized version of the original language. These servants and slaves would come to use the creole as an everyday vernacular, rather than merely in situations in which contact with a speaker of the superstrate was necessary.[14]

History[edit]Origin[edit]The English term creole comes from French crole, which is cognate with the Spanish term criollo and Portuguese crioulo, all descending from the verb criar ('to breed' or 'to raise'), all coming from Latin creare ('to produce, create').[15] The specific sense of the term was coined in the 16th and 17th century, during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade that led to the establishment of European colonies in other continents.

The terms criollo and crioulo were originally qualifiers used throughout the Spanish and Portuguese colonies to distinguish the members of an ethnic group who were born and raised locally from those who immigrated as adults. They were most commonly applied to nationals of the colonial power, e.g. to distinguish espaoles criollos (people born in the colonies from Spanish ancestors) from espaoles peninsulares (those born in the Iberian Peninsula, i.e. Spain). However in Brazil the term was also used to distinguish between negros crioulos (blacks born in Brazil from African slave ancestors) and negros africanos (born in Africa). Over time, the term and its derivatives (Creole, Krol, Kreyol, Kriol, Krio, etc.) lost the generic meaning and became the proper name of many distinct ethnic groups that developed locally from immigrant communities. Originally, therefore, the term "creole language" meant the speech of any of those creole peoples.

Geographic distribution[edit]As a consequence of colonial European trade patterns, most of the known European-based creole languages arose in coastal areas in the equatorial belt around the world, including the Americas, western Africa, Goa along the west of India, and along Southeast Asia up to Indonesia, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Seychelles and Oceania.[according to whom?]

Many of those creoles are now extinct, but others still survive in the Caribbean, the north and east coasts of South America (The Guyanas), western Africa, Australia (see Australian Kriol language), and in the Indian Ocean.

Atlantic Creole languages are based on European languages with elements from African and possibly Amerindian languages. Indian Ocean Creole languages are based on European languages with elements from Malagasy and possibly other Asian languages. There are, however, creoles like Nubi and Sango that are derived solely from non-European languages.

Social and political status[edit]Because of the generally low status of the Creole peoples in the eyes of prior European colonial powers, creole languages have generally been regarded as "degenerate" languages, or at best as rudimentary "dialects" of the politically dominant parent languages. Because of this prejudice, the word "creole" was generally used by linguists in opposition to "language", rather than as a qualifier for it.[16] This prejudice was compounded by the inherent instability of the colonial system, leading to the disappearance of creole languages, mainly due to dispersion or assimilation of their speech communities.[16]

Another factor that may have contributed to the relative neglect of creole languages in linguistics is that they do not fit the 19th-century neogrammarian "tree model" for the evolution of languages, and its postulated regularity of sound changes (these critics including the earliest advocates of the wave model, Johannes Schmidt and Hugo Schuchardt, the forerunners of modern sociolinguistics). This controversy of the late 19th century profoundly shaped modern approaches to the comparative method in historical linguistics and in creolistics.[12][16][17]

Creole in use at car rental counter, USABecause of social, political, and academic changes brought on by decolonization in the second half of the 20th century, creole languages have experienced revivals in the past few decades. They are increasingly being used in print and film, and in many cases, their community prestige has improved dramatically. In fact, some have been standardized, and are used in local schools and universities around the world.[12][13][18] At the same time, linguists have begun to come to the realization that creole languages are in no way inferior to other languages. They now use the term "creole" or "creole language" for any language suspected to have undergone creolization, terms that now imply no geographic restrictions nor ethnic prejudices.

Classification of creoles[edit]Historic classification[edit]According to their external history, four types of creoles have been distinguished: plantation creoles, fort creoles, maroon creoles, and creolized pidgins.[19] By the very nature of a creole language, the phylogenetic classification of a particular creole usually is a matter of dispute; especially when the pidgin precursor and its parent tongues (which may have been other creoles or pidgins) have disappeared before they could be documented.

Phylogenetic classification traditionally relies on inheritance of the lexicon, especially of "core" terms, and of the grammar structure. However, in creoles, the core lexicon often has mixed origin, and the grammar is largely original. For these reasons, the issue of which language is the parent of a creole that is, whether a language should be classified as a "Portuguese creole" or "English creole", etc. often has no definitive answer, and can become the topic of long-lasting controversies, where social prejudices and political considerations may interfere with scientific discussion.[12][13][20]

Substrate and superstrate[edit]The terms substrate and superstrate are often used when two languages interact. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in second language acquisition or language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain source language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon it for another target language (the superstrate).[21] The outcome of such an event is that erstwhile speakers of the substrate will use some version of the superstrate, at least in more formal contexts. The substrate may survive as a second language for informal conversation. As demonstrated by the fate of many replaced European languages (such as Etruscan, Breton, and Venetian), the influence of the substrate on the official speech is often limited to pronunciation and a modest number of loanwords. The substrate might even disappear altogether without leaving any trace.[21]

However, there is dispute over the extent to which the terms "substrate" and "superstrate" are applicable to the genesis or the description of creole languages.[22] The language replacement model may not be appropriate in creole formation contexts, where the emerging language is derived from multiple languages without any one of them being imposed as a replacement for any other.[23][24] The substratum-superstratum distinction becomes awkward when multiple superstrata must be assumed (such as in Papiamentu), when the substratum cannot be identified, or when the presence or the survival of substratal evidence is inferred from mere typological analogies.[9] On the other hand, the distinction may be meaningful when the contributions of each parent language to the resulting creole can be shown to be very unequal, in a scientifically meaningful way.[25] In the literature on Atlantic Creoles, "superstrate" usually means European and "substrate" non-European or African.[26]

Decreolization[edit]Since creole languages rarely attain official status, the speakers of a fully formed creole may eventually feel compelled to conform their speech to one of the parent languages. This decreolization process typically brings about a post-creole speech continuum characterized by large scale variation and hypercorrection in the language.[12]

It is generally acknowledged that creoles have a simpler grammar and more internal variability than older, more established languages.[27] However, these notions are occasionally challenged.[28] (See also language complexity.)

Phylogenetic or typological comparisons of creole languages have led to divergent conclusions. Similarities are usually higher among creoles derived from related languages, such as the languages of Europe, than among broader groups that include also creoles based on non-Indo-European languages (like Nubi or Sango). French-based creoles in turn are more similar to each other (and to varieties of French) than to other European-based creoles. It was observed, in particular, that definite articles are mostly prenominal in English-based creole languages and English whereas they are generally postnominal in French creoles and in the variety of French that was exported to the colonies in the 17th and 18th century.[29] Moreover the European languages which gave rise to the creole languages of European colonies all belong to the same subgroup of Western Indo-European and have highly convergent grammars; to the point that Whorf joined them into a single Standard Average European language group.[30] French and English are particularly close, since English, through extensive borrowing, is typologically closer to French than to other Germanic languages.[31] Thus the claimed similarities between creoles may be mere consequences of similar parentage, rather than characteristic features of all creoles.

Creole genesis[edit]There are a variety of theories on the origin of creole languages, all of which attempt to explain the similarities among them. Arends, Muysken & Smith (1995) outline a fourfold classification of explanations regarding creole genesis:

Theories focusing on European inputTheories focusing on non-European inputGradualist and developmental hypothesesUniversalist approachesTheories focusing on European input[edit]Monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles[edit]The monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles hypothesizes that they are all derived from a single Mediterranean Lingua Franca, via a West African Pidgin Portuguese of the 17th century, relexified in the so-called "slave factories" of Western Africa that were the source of the Atlantic slave trade. This theory was originally formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Taylor,[32] Whinnom,[33] Thompson,[34] and Stewart.[35] However, this hypothesis is no longer actively investigated.

Domestic origin hypothesis[edit]Proposed by Hancock (1985) for the origin of English-based creoles of the West Indies, the Domestic Origin Hypothesis argues that, towards the end of the 16th century, English-speaking traders began to settle in the Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers as well as in neighboring areas such as the Bullom and Sherbro coasts. These settlers intermarried with the local population leading to mixed populations, and, as a result of this intermarriage, an English pidgin was created. This pidgin was learned by slaves in slave depots, who later on took it to the West Indies and formed one component of the emerging English creoles.

European dialect origin hypothesis[edit]The French creoles are the foremost candidates to being the outcome of "normal" linguistic change and their creoleness to be sociohistoric in nature and relative to their colonial origin.[36] Within this theoretical framework, a French creole is a language phylogenetically based on the French language, more specifically on a 17th-century koin French extant in Paris, the French Atlantic harbours, and the nascent French colonies. Supporters of this hypothesis suggest that the non-Creole French dialects still spoken in many parts of the Americas share mutual descent from this single koin. These dialects are found in Canada (mostly in Qubec and among the Acadian people of the Eastern Maritime provinces), the Prairies, Louisiana, Saint-Barthlemy (leeward portion of the island) and as isolates in other parts of the Americas.[37] Approaches under this hypothesis are compatible with gradualism in change and models of imperfect language transmission in koin genesis.

Foreigner talk and baby talk[edit]The Foreigner Talk (FT) hypothesis argues that a pidgin or creole language forms when native speakers attempt to simplify their language in order to address speakers who do not know their language at all. Because of the similarities found in this type of speech and speech directed to a small child, it is also sometimes called baby talk.[38]

Arends, Muysken & Smith (1995) suggest that four different processes are involved in creating Foreigner Talk:

AccommodationImitationTelegraphic condensationConventionsThis could explain why creole languages have much in common, while avoiding a monogenetic model. However, Hinnenkamp (1984), in analyzing German Foreigner Talk, claims that it is too inconsistent and unpredictable to provide any model for language learning.

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (November 2013)While the simplification of input was supposed to account for creoles' simple grammar, commentators have raised a number of criticisms of this explanation:[39]

There are a great many grammatical similarities amongst pidgins and creoles despite having very different lexifier languages.Grammatical simplification can be explained by other processes, i.e. the innate grammar of Bickerton's language bioprogram theory.Speakers of a creole's lexifier language often fail to understand, without learning the language, the grammar of a pidgin or creole.Pidgins are more often used amongst speakers of different substrate languages than between such speakers and those of the lexifier language.Another problem with the FT explanation is its potential circularity. Bloomfield (1933) points out that FT is often based on the imitation of the incorrect speech of the non-natives, that is the pidgin. Therefore one may be mistaken in assuming that the former gave rise to the latter.

Imperfect L2 learning[edit]The imperfect L2 (second language) learning hypothesis claims that pidgins are primarily the result of the imperfect L2 learning of the dominant lexifier language by the slaves. Research on naturalistic L2 processes has revealed a number of features of "interlanguage systems" that are also seen in pidgins and creoles:

invariant verb forms derived from the infinitive or the least marked finite verb form;loss of determiners or use as determiners of demonstrative pronouns, adjectives or adverbs;placement of a negative particle in preverbal position;use of adverbs to express modality;fixed single word order with no inversion in questions;reduced or absent nominal plural marking.Imperfect L2 learning is compatible with other approaches, notably the European dialect origin hypothesis and the universalist models of language transmission.[40]

Theories focusing on non-European input[edit]Theories focusing on the substrate, or non-European, languages attribute similarities amongst creoles to the similarities of African substrate languages. These features are often assumed to be transferred from the substrate language to the creole or to be preserved invariant from the substrate language in the creole through a process of relexification: the substrate language replaces the native lexical items with lexical material from the superstrate language while retaining the native grammatical categories.[41] The problem with this explanation is that the postulated substrate languages differ amongst themselves and with creoles in meaningful ways. Bickerton (1981) argues that the number and diversity of African languages and the paucity of a historical record on creole genesis makes determining lexical correspondences a matter of chance. Dillard (1970) coined the term "cafeteria principle" to refer to the practice of arbitrarily attributing features of creoles to the influence of substrate African languages or assorted substandard dialects of European languages.

For a representative debate on this issue, see the contributions to Mufwene (1993); for a more recent view, Parkvall (2000).

Because of the sociohistoric similarities amongst many (but by no means all) of the creoles, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation system of the European colonies have been emphasized as factors by linguists such as McWhorter (1999).

Gradualist and developmental hypotheses[edit]One class of creoles might start as pidgins, rudimentary second languages improvised for use between speakers of two or more non-intelligible native languages. Keith Whinnom (in Hymes (1971)) suggests that pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others. The lexicon of a pidgin is usually small and drawn from the vocabularies of its speakers, in varying proportions. Morphological details like word inflections, which usually take years to learn, are omitted; the syntax is kept very simple, usually based on strict word order. In this initial stage, all aspects of the speech syntax, lexicon, and pronunciation tend to be quite variable, especially with regard to the speaker's background.

If a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a native language, it may become fixed and acquire a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. Pidgins can become full languages in only a single generation. "Creolization" is this second stage where the pidgin language develops into a fully developed native language. The vocabulary, too, will develop to contain more and more items according to a rationale of lexical enrichment.[42]

Universalist approaches[edit]Universalist models stress the intervention of specific general processes during the transmission of language from generation to generation and from speaker to speaker. The process invoked varies: a general tendency towards semantic transparency, first language learning driven by universal process, or general process of discourse organization. The main universalist theory is still Bickerton's language bioprogram theory, proposed in the 1980s.[43] Bickerton claims that creoles are inventions of the children growing up on newly founded plantations. Around them, they only heard pidgins spoken, without enough structure to function as natural languages; and the children used their own innate linguistic capacities to transform the pidgin input into a full-fledged language. The alleged common features of all creoles would then be the consequence of those innate abilities being universal.

Recent study[edit]The last decade has seen the emergence of some new questions about the nature of creoles: in particular, the question of how complex creoles are and the question of whether creoles are indeed "exceptional" languages.

Creole prototype[edit]Some features that distinguish creole languages from noncreoles have been proposed (by Bickerton,[44] for example).

John McWhorter[45] has proposed the following list of features to indicate a creole prototype:

a lack of inflectional morphology (other than at most two or three inflectional affixes),a lack of tone on monosyllabic words, anda lack of semantically opaque word formation.McWhorter hypothesizes that these three properties exactly characterize a creole. However, the creole prototype hypothesis has been disputed:

Henri Wittmann (1999) and David Gil (2001) argue that languages such as Manding, Soninke, Magoua French and Riau Indonesian have all these three features but show none of the sociohistoric traits of creole languages.Others (see overview in Muysken & Law (2001)) have demonstrated creoles that serve as counterexamples to McWhorter's hypothesis the existence of inflectional morphology in Berbice Dutch Creole, for example, or tone in Papiamentu.[46]Exceptionalism[edit]Building up on this discussion, McWhorter proposed that "the world's simplest grammars are Creole grammars", claiming that every noncreole language's grammar is at least as complex as any creole language's grammar.[47][48] Gil has replied that Riau Indonesian has a simpler grammar than Saramaccan, the language McWhorter uses as a showcase for his theory.[8] The same objections were raised by Wittmann in his 1999 debate with McWhorter.[49]

The lack of progress made in defining creoles in terms of their morphology and syntax has led scholars such as Robert Chaudenson, Salikoko Mufwene, Michel DeGraff, and Henri Wittmann to question the value of creole as a typological class; they argue that creoles are structurally no different from any other language, and that creole is a sociohistoric concept not a linguistic one encompassing displaced populations and slavery.[50]

Thomason & Kaufman (1988) spell out the idea of creole exceptionalism, claiming that creole languages are an instance of nongenetic language change due to language shift with abnormal transmission. Gradualists[who?] question the abnormal transmission of languages in a creole setting and argue that the processes which created today's creole languages are no different from universal patterns of language change.

Given these objections to creole as a concept, articles such as "Against Creole Exceptionalism"[51] by DeGraff and texts like "Deconstructing Creole"[52] by Ansaldo and Matthews have arisen which question the idea that creoles are exceptional in any meaningful way. Additionally, Mufwene (2002) argues that some Romance languages are potential creoles but that they are not considered as such by linguists because of a historical bias against such a view.

Lingua francangua franca,( Italian: Frankish language)language used as a means of communication between populations speaking vernaculars that are not mutually intelligible. The term was first used during the Middle Ages to describe a French- and Italian-based jargon, or pidgin, that was developed by Crusaders and traders in the eastern Mediterranean and characterized by the invariant forms of its nouns, verbs, and adjectives. These changes have been interpreted as simplifications of the Romance languages.

Because they bring together very diverse groups of people, many empires and major trade entrepts have had lingua francas. If pidgins have sometimes been defined, less informatively, as lingua francas, it is because they evolved from varieties that had served as trade languages. Aramaic played this role in Southwest Asia from as early as the 7th century bc to approximately ad 650. Classical Latin was the dominant lingua franca of European scholars until the 18th century, while a less prestigious variety of Latin served as that of the Hanseatic League (13th15th centuries), especially in its bookkeeping.

During the era of European exploration in the 15th18th centuries, Portuguese served as a diplomatic and trade language in coastal Africa and in Asian coastal areas from the Indian Ocean to Japan. In Southeast Asia, meanwhile, Malay was already serving as an important lingua franca; it had been adopted by Arab and Chinese traders in the region well before the Europeans arrived. Later both the Dutch and the British used Malay for communication with the peoples resident in the region.

Modern lingua francas may or may not be officially designated as such: the United Nations employs six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish); international air traffic control uses English as a common language; and some multilingual Asian and African countries have unofficial lingua francas that facilitate interethnic or interregional communication. Such languages may be erstwhile pidgins, as with Lingala in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Nigerian and Cameroon pidgins, or Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea; they may also be non-pidginized varieties such as Swahili in East Africa or Hausa in West Africa.Characteristics[edit]Lingua franca is a term defined functionally, independent of the linguistic history or structure of the language:[4] though pidgins and creoles often function as lingua francas, many such languages are neither pidgins nor creoles.

Whereas a vernacular language is used as a native language in a community, a lingua franca is used beyond the boundaries of its original community, and is used as a second language for communication between groups. For example, English is a vernacular in the United Kingdom, but is used as a vehicular language (i.e., a lingua franca) in the Philippine Islands and India.

International auxiliary languages such as Esperanto have not had a great degree of adoption globally, so they cannot be described as global lingua francas.

Etymology[edit]The term lingua franca originated as the name of a particular language that was used around the eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce and diplomacy - from late medieval times and especially during the Renaissance era, up to the 18th century. At that time, Italian speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire and a simplified version of Italian, including many loan words from Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan, Spanish, as well as Arabic and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" (in the generic sense used here) of the region.

In Lingua Franca itself, lingua means a language (as in Italian) - Franca is related to Phrankoi in Greek and Faranji in Arabic, as well as the equivalent Italian: in all three cases the literal sense is "Frankish", but this name was actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period.[5][6][7]

The Douglas Harper Etymology Dictionary states that the term Lingua Franca (as the name of the particular language) was first recorded in English during the 1670s,[8] although an even earlier example of the use of Lingua Franca in English is attested from 1632, where it is also referred to as "Bastard Spanish".[9]

As recently as the late 20th century, the use of the generic term was restricted by some to mean only hybrid languages that are used as vehicular languages (owing to its original meaning), but nowadays it refers to any vehicular language.[10]

Examples[edit]Main article: List of lingua francasThe use of lingua francas may be almost as old as language itself. Certainly they have existed since antiquity. Latin and Greek were the lingua francas of the Roman Empire; Akkadian, and then Aramaic, remained the common languages of a large part of Western Asia through several earlier empires.[11] Examples of lingua francas remain numerous, and exist on every continent. The most obvious example as of the early 21st century is English. There are many other lingua francas centralized on particular regions, such as French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili.

In certain countries the lingua franca is also used as the national language; e.g., Urdu is the lingua franca of Pakistan, as well as the national language. Indonesian has the same function in Indonesia; even though Javanese has more native speakers, Indonesian is the sole official language and spoken (often as a second language) throughout the country.

6. BibliographyBlum-Kulka, Shoshanna (1989). "Playing it safe: The role of conventionality in indirectness". In: Blum-Kulka et al. (Eds.), 37-70.Bublitz, Wolfram (1986). "Gesprchsthema und thematische Handlungen im Englischen". In: Burkhardt, Armin und Krner, Karl-Hermann (Eds.). Pragmantax. Akten des 20. Linguistischen Kolloquiums Branschweig 1985, 225-234.------- (1988). Supportive Fellow-Speakers and Cooperative Conversations. Amsterdam und Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Buttjes, Dieter (1991). "Interkulturelles Lernen im Englischunterricht". Der Fremdsprachliche Unterricht 25(1), 2-9.Buttler, Christopher (1985). Statistics in Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.Coulmas, Florian (Ed.) (1981). Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Pre-patterned Speech. The Hague: Mouton.Edmondson, Willis and House, Juliane (1981). Let's talk and talk about it. Mnchen, Wien und Baltimore: Urban und Schwarzenberg.Enninger, Werner. (1987). 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Newbury Park, California, London and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 88-102.Gramkow-Andersen, Karsten (1993). Lingua Franca Discourse: An Investigation of the Use of English in an International Business Context. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Aalborg Universitestcenter.House, Juliane (1982). "Opening and closing phases in German and English dialogues". Grazer Linguistische Studien 16, 52-82.Hbler, Axel (1985). Einander Verstehen. Englisch im Kontext internationaler Kommunikation. Tbingen: Narr.Hllen, Werner (1982). "Teaching a foreign language as `lingua franca". Grazer Linguistische Studien 16, 83-88.Hymes, Dell H.(1972). "On communicative competence". In: Pride, J.B. and Homes, Janes (eds.). Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 269-293.Kasper, Gabriele (1981). Pragmatische Aspekte in der Interimsprache. Tbingen: Narr. Keller, Eric (1979). "Gambits: Conversational strategy signals". Journal of Pragmatics 3(3/4), 219-238.Knapp, Karlfried (1991). Linguistische Aspekte interkultureller Kommunikationsfhigkeit. Unverffentlichte Habilitationsschrift, eingereicht bei der Philosophischen Fakultt der Heinrich-Heine-Universitt Dsseldorf im Mai 1991.Koike, Dale April (1989). "Requests and the role of deixis in politeness". Journal of Pragmatics 13, 187-202.Kultusministerium des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (Ed.) (1993). Richtlinien und Lehrplne fr das Gymnasium - Sekundarstufe I - in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Englisch. Frechen: Ritterbach.Meeuwis, Michael (1994). "Nonnative-Nonnative Intercultural Communication: An Analysis of Instruction Sessions for Foreign Engineers in a Belgian Company". Multilingua 13:1-2, 59-82.Meierkord, Christiane (1996). Englisch als Medium der interkulturellen Kommunikation. Untersuchungen zum non-native-/ non-native-speaker-Diskurs. Frankfurt et al.: Lang.Nelson, Cecil Linwood (1984). Intelligibility: The Case of Non-Native Varieties of English. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International.Orestrm, Bengt (1983). Turn-Taking in English Conversation. Lund: Liber (CWK Gleerup).Poel, Kris van de (1991). Modification in Phatic Endphases: A Study of Cross-Linguistic and Interlanguage Aspects. Unverffentl. Dissertation. Universitt Edinburgh 1991.Sacks, Harvey et al. (1974). "A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation". Language 50/4, 696-735.Schegloff, Emanuel A. und Sacks, Harvey (1973). "Opening up closings". Semiotica 8, 289-327.Schneider, Klaus Peter (1987). "Topic selection in phatic communication". Multilingua 6/3, 247-256.------- (1988). Small Talk: Analysing Phatic Discourse. Marburg / Lahn: Hitzeroth. (Univ. Diss. Marburg / Lahn).Schwartz, Joan (1980). "The Negotiation for Meaning: Repair in Conversations between Second Language Learners of English". In: Larsen-Freeman, Diane (ed.). Discourse Analysis in Second Language Research, 138-153.Smith, Larry and Nelson, Cecil (1985). "International Intelligibility of English: Directions and Resources". World Englishes 4.2, 333-342.Tannen, Deborah and ztek, Piyale Cmert (1981). "Health to our mouths: Formulaic expressions in Turkish and Greek". In: Coulmas, Florian (Ed.), 37-54.Varonis, Evangeline M. and Gass, Susan (1985). "Non-Native / Non-Native Conversations: A Model for Negotiation of Meaning. Applied Linguistics 6, 71-90.Westheide, Henning (1991). "Dialogstrukturierende Routineformeln". In: Stati, Sorin et al. (Eds.). Dialoganalyse III. Referate der 3. Arbeitstagung Bologna 1990. Teil 2. Tbingen: Niemeyer, 325-337.Yamada, Haru (1990). "Topic management and turn distribution in business meetings: American versus Japanese strategies". Text 10(3), 271-295.Zimmermann, Rainer (1984). Pragmalinguistik und kommunikativer Fremdsprachenunterricht. Heidelberg: Groos.Notes1 An earlier poster version of this article was presented at the 11th AILA World Congress of Applied Linguistics, 1996 in Jyvaskyl, Finland.2 The studies which deal with lingua franca English so far mainly addressed the question of mutual intelligibility of different varieties - including learner language varieties - of English (for example Nelson (1984) and Smith and Nelson (1985)). Analyses of interaction between non-native speakers of English are still scarce. Two of these, Schwartz (1980) and Varonis and Gass (1985) investigated the negotiation of meaning from a learner language perspective. Studies focussing on discourse structure include Firth (1990 and 1996), Gramkow (1993), Meeuwis (1994) and Meierkord (1996). 3 Theoretical as well as methodological problems associated with the analysis and interpretation of non-native-/ non-native discourse are dealt with in Meierkord (1996) and (1998). These topics are not dealt with in depth here.4 At the present time, however, we know too little about the processes and conditions involved in international communication to set a norm for the kind of English that is adequate for this type of communication and that could be used as a basis for the identification of learner-language utterances. [my translation, CM]5 Hymes (1972) assumes that speakers do not only acquire competence for grammar, but also a competence for use.6 A speaker is considered to be communicatively competent, if s/he can form turns, which are (1) grammatically structured, (2) adapted to the linguistic resources available to her, (3) suitable for the circumstances relevant to the conversation and (4) commonly used in the respective situation.7 Schegloff and Sacks (1973) provide a theory of the structure of closing sequences and Poel (1991) investigates phatic endphases in interlanguage communication.8 These differ slightly form opening and closing phases, both regarding their conversational functions and the illocutions found with them (cf. Meierkord 1996: 52f.).9 The individual illocutions have been identified according to Edmondson and House (1981), who define illocutions as the speaker's communicative intent (1981: 48).10 For the subsequent analyses, a turn will be defined as any utterance of a speaker, which furthers the topic of the conversation, and which ends either when another speaker takes the turn or by a long pause. A turn may be interrupted by short pauses up to two seconds as well as by simultaneous speech by another speaker, if this does not result in turn-taking. Turn-taking itself may occur with a pause between turns, with a non-comprehensible pause or with overlapping turns. In case turns overlap, the overlapping speech is considered to belong to all individual turns respectively.11 Coulmas (1981), Blum-Kulka (1989) and Westheide (1991) provide further evidence on this topic.12 topic change differs from a topic shift with regard to the content of the following topic. Whereas in the case of a shift its content is related to that of the precious topic, there is no relation between both topics after a change has occurred.13 For a detailed account of the turn-taking system see Sacks et al. (1974), Orestrm (1983) and Goodwin (1989).14 The motivation and exact procedure is stipulated in Meierkord (1996: 108).15 The mode is that value which has the highest frequency. (Cf. Buttler 1985: 32).16 "The median value is that value of an arranged set of figures in order from highest to lowest, that is, in 'rank' order, which has equal numbers of observations above it and below it." (Buttler 1985: 29-30)17 Cf. e.g. Gtz (1977 and 1980) and Enninger (1987).18 Laughter also plays an important role in repair sequences, i.e. stretches of talk which occur after the conversation had been interrupted due to misunderstandings. In these cases, speakers lacked a certain vocabulary item and had to jointly negotiate its meaning. During such sequences, the speakers' use of laughter helped them cope with these potentially face-threatening situations. A thorough description and interpretation of negotiation sequences can be found in Meierkord (1996).19 L [the learner] assumes that N [a native speaker] assumes, that due to a lack of (receptive) competence in the English language, L does not (fully) understand what N says; L therefore lets N know by frequently sending back-channels that she does understand.20 For a discussion of the notion of safe topic see Schneider (1988: 26). 21 For a description and interpretation of these breakdowns see Meierkord (1996: 205 ff.).