From genetic creolistics to genetic linguistics: Lessons we should not miss!
Salikoko S. Mufwene (University of Chicago)
If the title of this paper sounds strange, intriguing, or surprising to some, it's because it is an invitation to change perspectives, especially from practicing creolistics with the traditional assumption that creoles are unusual or exceptional developments to one where we should reopen the books on such traditional preconceptions. Recent findings on the emergence of these new vernaculars suggest that there is nothing unusual with their evolution from a more complex to a simpler morphosyntax, which is not necessarily correlated with simpler semantics; nor is there anything exceptional with the grounding of such developments in the contacts of populations and of language varieties. We are in fact invited to pay (more) attention to the relevance of ecology to evolution, to the fact that the latter may be more variational than transformational, and to the dynamics of competition and selection occasioned by different feature pools...yes, just like in biological evolution, provided we know which model to follow and what are the right questions to ask, including the relevant language varieties to compare and the limits of the comparative method. We can also ask whether the mechanisms that produce norms in a population (through the mutual accommodations of idiolects) are different in kind from those that drive competition and selection among language varieties, spreading some but endangering others and driving some of these to extinction. The bottom line is: assuming uniformitarianism in general processes but attributing apparent idiosyncrasies to ecological peculiarities, what do recent cases of language evolution tell us about language evolution in earlier stages of human history, which is likewise marked by layers of colonization, migrations, and contacts of populations and languages? What's new and what's the same? And why are the terms creole and creolization more useful socially than otherwise?