Sometimes the merit of asking a question is not just in its answer, but in the issues that question encourages us to explore along the way.
- The Middle English Creolization Hypothesis, David O'Neil (2019)
what the hell is a creole
before we get into talking about "lexical superstrata" and stuff like that let us define a creole!
a language that has evolved from a pidgin but serves as the native language of a speech community
ok? so what is a pidgin?? 🕊
a simplified speech used for communication between people with different languages
these very clean explanations of these terms are not just simplifications invented by the Merriam Webster Dictionary authors, this is often the starting point that linguists have taken throughout history for those terms
origin of the speakies
but their origins shed a lot more light on how they really exist in the study of human language
"pidgin" literally means "business"
it originally referred to a very specific trade language that developed among the Chinese workers in ports along the South China Sea in order to have a subset of English for use during transactions with visiting English-speaking merchants
this form has come to be called Chinese Pidgin English which is described as "broken English" on what is is perhaps the absolute worst linguistics related article on Wikipedia, and the language itself died out in the 19th century it lives on in various descendants around the world
it is from this CPE we get the English words and phrases "chopsticks", "chop chop", "look-see", and "no can do" - among many others
a language called Tok Pisin has a similar origin as a hybrid of English and the Polynesian language Kuanua (along with many other linguistic influences), it is one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea where it is continuing to grow in popularity
you will see this pattern a lot:
- the speakers of one language are incentivized to learn the language of some more powerful group (which may be tiny in comparison)
many linguists believed that pidgin languages mirrored the development of primordial language in early humans
but wait a minute, how can a primordial or "broken English" become a national language?
colonialism
Creole languages result from the adaptation of a language, especially some Indo-European language, to the (so to speak) phonetic and grammatical genius of a race that is linguistically inferior. The resulting language is composite, truly mixed in its vocabulary, but its grammar remains essentially Indo-European, albeit extremely simplified.
- Vinson (1889) - as quoted in Against Creole Exceptionalism by DeGraff (2003)
did your brain just make a screeching sound like that of an out of control vehicle skidding across the motorway leaving burned rubber in its wake before slamming into the sidewall?
because when i first read that, mine sure did!
there is a vast history of abject unabashed racism around the taxonomies and descriptions of certain languages
it is absolutely fucking wild to describe a language like Mandarin of all things as "linguistically inferior", holy shit
"broken English" has never become a national language, and as demonstrated by many researches such as Michael DeGraff and summarized by David O'Neil: pidgins and creoles are complex linguistic phenomena with equivalent expressive potential as any other language, and the taxonomy itself is problematic
it is difficult to explore linguistics experimentally for practical and ethical reasons, but we can see a powerful case study in everyone's favorite constructed language ... no not Esperato ... yesss Toki Pona - a language whose entire dictionary is only a couple of pages and yet is spoken by an ever-growing world-spanning population, and which a sizable portion of words comes from Tok Pisin!
once a useful set of linguistic symbols is established it is up to the ingenious minds of the speakers to form them into concepts and ideas
is Toki Pona a fair comparison for pidgins then? hell no! i do not want to conflate a tiny conlang with languages that were innovated over hundreds of years by a diverse group of people
but it does show that language does not exist independent of people and the vast range of emotions and ideas that can be conveyed with a limited lexicon - and even the simplest persisting pidgins we know of are still dozens of times larger than Toki Pona
creolization is a testament to the astonishing linguistic creativity of creole speakers, and modern creolization theories should not be mistaken as having anything in common with the colonialist absurdities of nineteenth-century linguistic theory.
- The Middle English Creolization Hypothesis, David O'Neil (2019)
whew, okay, so how does this apply to English itself?
the two stage creolization hypothesis
this is the belief that Old English underwent two phases of creolization, resulting in a double creole (sounds like a delicious dipping sauce - double creole ... mmm) of various Germanic and other western Indo-European languages that we call Middle English
there are other variations on this with only one or maybe three but this is the core argument which everyone uses as a jumping off point
round 1 - fight!
Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard,
metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihuaes,
ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ
- Cædmon's Hymn (~650 AD)
POV the year is 865 AD and you are the western portion of the british isles: your friends call you The Danelaw 😎
damn what a cool name
over the next century the language we now know as Old English would end up being altered forever, by forces that are still hotly debated
it is extremely odd that Old English picked up what appears to be Old Norse pronouns - a language feature which tends to not be borrowed or loaned
did the Old Norse influence from the close association of the Norse settlers in the British isles with the Old English residents form a creole which influenced what became Middle English?
round 2 - tag team back again
Herknet to me, gode men,
Wiues, maydnes, and alle men,
Of a tale þat ich you wile telle,
Wo so it wile here, and þer-to duelle.
- Havelok the Dane (~1280 AD)
another century later and there is a massive influx of a new words into the English written works of the time, predominantly of a certain kind of Old French as well as Latin, this time suspiciously recently after a new Norman king took over the british isles
does this huge influx of Franco-Latin lexicon and simplification of Old English grammar into something recognizable by modern English readers constitute a creole of its predecessors?
and if either of them did, what would that mean for the positioning of other languages with that label?
the debate begins
in 1977 AD a pair of linguists Charles-James N. Bailey and Karl Maroldt at the University of Berlin published an article in Langues en Contact - Pidgins, Creoles (edited by Jürgen M. Meisel) which first introduced the theory
i find it not at all surprising that the forward of the book is in French, with its selection of articles in both English and French, and perhaps it is not accidental that Bailey and Maroldt decided to submit to this publication specifically
early in the essay they say:
We make no claim that Middle English developed out of a Pidgin.
- The French Lineage of English Bailey & Maroldt (1977)
that kind of blows away our earlier definitions!
and here is a confession: despite the common definition that i quoted at the beginning being often used, the link between pidgins and creoles is itself debated in linguistics with recent research papers implying an altogether different route for how creoles develop! (this is a super interesting area of research but this thing is already long enough)
the main goal for Bailey & Maroldt though was to demonstrate that creolization is not exceptional (to borrow a turn of phrase from DeGraff), instead it is part of a linguistic process that is shared by all forms of language, and they believed that new languages only form due to influence from other languages, saying:
Each node on a [linguistic] family tree therefore has to have, like humans, at least two parents.
setting aside that languages seem to evolve internally on their own, this is a really compelling idea! after all it is pretty rare for a language to just have zero contact with another language or dialect for a thousand years
i do still think that the contributions and the manner of influence are still relevant to describe that parentage, but maybe the terms "pidgin" and "creole" are not the way to do so?
but i mean, that is an intense difference between Old and Middle English there! what else could have changed a language so drastically?!
post-Danelaw Old English
lets do a quick second look at Old English and see if we missed anything!
firstly, i chose examples that were very far apart, the Old English example is from the oldest known recording and predates even the Danelaw by hundreds of years, so let us take a look at one of the later documents from the Old English period
in high school my English literature teacher gave us this riddle translated to 21st century SA English and pretended to act scandalized when we guessed the obvious (yet incorrect) answer:
Ic eom wunderlicu wiht wifum on hyhte
neahbuendum nyt; nægum sceþþe
burgsittendra nymthe bonan anum.
Staþol min is steapheah stonde ic on bedde
neoðan ruh nathwær. Neþeð hwilum
ful cyrtenu ceorles dohtor
modwlonc meowle þæt heo on mec gripe
ræseð mec on reodne reafath min heafod
fegeð mec on fæsten. Feleþ sona
mines gemotes seo þe mec nearwað
wif wundenlocc. Wæt bið þæt eage.
- riddle 25 from the Exeter Book (~1050 AD)
ok you probably still cannot read that, huh? me either, even though i know what it says in general!
i mean i happen to know that "wif" is "woman", so "wifum" is probably "women", and "eage" is one of the spellings of "eye", because it looks like the word for "egg" even though it is unrelated - but i cannot read the passage
speaking of which, here is a funny story from the Middle English period involving the changing language of the british isles and the word for eggs:
And specyally he axyed after eggys. And the good wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym we.
- preface to a translation of Virgil's Aeneid, William Caxton (1490)
that passage always makes me laugh, i picture a Monty Python sketch, but more topically it shows how widely the dialects had diverged on the isles to the point that some were not mutually intelligible - incidentally it also demonstrates that "axyed" has been part of not just spoken English but literary English for a very long time and anyone who says differently is definitely at the very least misinformed
i think that all of the historical quotes from various ages that i have shown here really exemplify the difference between pre-Norman and post-Norman English, in every situation before that era, it is basically unrecognizable, while afterwards it is readable - if archaic!
do you think that Caxton could have made sense of The Exeter Book?
if not, it implies that there has been less change in the last 600 years since Caxton than there was 230 years between 1050 and 1280 (when Havelok the Dane was written, and which is similar enough to Caxton's English that I assume he would have no issues reading) - and those are just two random quotes, i could find closer ones, but really this is plenty of evidence that shows that surely something was up!
the language that time forgot
Bailey & Maroldt make a heavy presumption of the "Nordic" creole in the "North", it is mentioned numerous times, but there is no indication of contemporaneous manuscripts or any other evidence of this intermediate stage of the Old Norse/Old English creole language between the beginning of the Danelaw and the rule of the Normans, but if it were indeed a creole, we should expect to see some major impact - right?
but there are no examples of this in the text, or anywhere else, to my knowledge
there are a large number of Old Norse loan words in English, but B&M fail to demonstrate this or even really mention it beyond a few really interesting examples like the third person pronoun "they"
where is the heavily Old Norse accented Old/Middle English creole evidence at?
my own attempt at an explanation in their stead is that this form of the language was isolated to a spoken dialect or register, perhaps primarily that of the large illiterate population, and it was not until after the Normans that these pre-existing changes were allowed to surface through literacy or the change social status of the those speakers
and indeed something similar is suggested by other researchers as well:
the appearance of very rapid change in [Early Middle English] is to a large extent illusory, as the conservative practices of [Old English] scribes often masked substantial changes which had already taken place before the Norman invasion.
- Middle English Case Loss and the "Creolization" Hypothesis, Cynthia Allen (1997)
so maybe there was some change during that time, but we just cannot see it from our limited perspective?
criticism of The French Lineage of English
ok it probably doesn't look like it, but i actually have long believed in the two stage creolization hypothesis, but i am not particularly impressed with a lot of the work that went into the original essay nor for that matter some of the rebuttals
after this batch of research - i have some thoughts, but first a quick diversion to complain about the state of scholarship on this topic...
citations and explanations
a lot of B&M's claims are simply not cited in the text!
like there is this really interesting bit about how Scandinavians were half the population, but like they definitely did not do that research themselves - so who did? on what basis did they make such a determination? for what years? what areas of the islands?
and they often only say "the North" by which i assume they mean "the northern region of modern-day England" eg The Danelaw and not, say, Scotland
there are huge blocks of text which ramble about minutia and individual words without showing any overarching trends or structural patterns - we had etymological dictionaries in 1977, that is not news, show me more!
but these limitations plague the research, including the...
criteria for creoles
i also take a lot of issue with many of their detractors for shoddy scholarship that is just as frustratingly insubstantial
not to put him on blast, but there is a section in Morris (2018) where he lists a set of criteria and then applies that criteria unevenly and in one case differs from broadly agreed upon traits of Middle English without any justification for doing so
the criteria comes from Defining Creole McHorter (1998) and is as follows (using Morris' rendition):
- a) little or no inflectional affixation
- b) little or no use of tone to lexically contrast monosyllables or encode syntax
- c) semantically regular derivational affixation
and from this Morris states:
Middle English conforms with one of the three creole criteria [little or no use of tone]
- Morris (2018)
which, honestly i had a very knee jerk negative reaction to, given that one of the defining traits agreed upon by nearly everyone is that Middle English demonstrates a massive simplification of Old English's inflection system with other researchers using the same criteria and easily state that English fits two of the three
Domingue (1977) also finds evidence for creolization in Middle English’s impoverished inflectional system, which she argues could have resulted either from the “convergence of several systems” or a “general trend toward simplification following universal rules”
- O'Neil (2019)
McWhorter himself has an entire chapter called What happened to English? dedicated to how radically simplified Middle English (and Modern English) grammar is compared to Old English and a litany of other Germanic languages from Yiddish to Icelandic
and there was another paper that specifically used McWhorter's criteria and flatly stated that Middle English met at least two of the criteria, i would cite it but i am having issues doing text search on my corpus and will have to update this later when i find it again, but believe me this is like not a hotly debated attribute so i do not know how his thesis advisor did not make him explain his "unique" application of the criteria
this is a fantastic time to mention that even finding good criteria for what a creole is... well it is not going well
death and taxonomies
in the wake of B&M's publication the ensuing firestorm against the concept encouraged many linguists to dig into Middle English and the circumstances around it to better understand its evolution
many fresh attempts were made to define a creole, often with the implicit bias of ensuring that English would be excluded, after all we have a list of languages that people agree are creoles but without any criteria so they are working backwards from that list and trying to make them fit
and it just is not working super well, with many papers concluding "well whatever a creole is, English is probably not one"
koinezation of English
oh god oh no please not another vocabulary word
"koine" is Ancient Greek for "common", it is basically the Greek version of "vulgar" (as in "vulgar Latin") and used in pretty much the same way linguistically
it is often described as the phenomenon which occurs when two or more dialects of the same language form a kind of average dialect between them to use as a lingua franca
but uh, a lot of papers say that this happened to English including Poussa (1984), senpai O'Neil (2019), and several others
which is bizarre because Old Norse and Old English were not dialects of each other, they are from different branches of the Germanic family tree for fuck's sake
if you want to hear what these two languages might have sounded like around 1000 AD check out the first 2 minutes of this video
if you pause that video at around 1:45 you will see a text comparison of each language latinized in the same way, there are a lot of similarities for sure and the languages are certainly a lot more alike than Modern English is to Modern Danish, presented here for comparison:
Good morning neighbor.
Good morning.
Aren't you Authun from Nottingham?
Yes, that's I. Harold from Derby, aren't you?
That I am. You can use "(informal) you". Is the day unlucky?
It is. I saw a buck, but I missed him.
Godmorgen nabo.
God morgen.
Er du ikke Authun fra Nottingham?
Ja, det er jeg. Harold fra Derby, er du ikke?
Det er jeg. Du kan bruge "(uformelle) dig". Er dagen uheldig?
Det er. Jeg så en buk, men jeg savnede ham.
despite the similarities it still seems like quite a stretch to call them dialects in just this one instance
it is almost like they are subconsciously just trying to fit English in somewhere that is anywhere but as a creole
an obolus to charon
frankly the whole debate is giving "Pluto is still a planet" vibes
yes yes the terms are wildly problematic - but linguists are still using them so here we are
yes yes English is an outlier - but mainly because it has become widespread due to colonization and later trade (one might argue that creoles exist for exactly this purpose, so maybe it is not so much an outlier after all?)
yes yes English still messy and complicated - but grammatically is far simpler than any other Germanic language, modern or historic... der die den dem das ... need i go on?
con(cl/f)usion
it seems clear to me that the terms and criteria are fundamentally lacking
what is the purpose they are trying to serve, really? from the many statements of a wide cast of linguists with diverse linguistic and cultural background, it seems that at least most of them are trying to move past a horrific legacy of racism (McGraff 2004 'Redux' is hilarious in its biting words to those that try to ignore it) and there is an attempt to reclaim the discipline to empower those people it had previously been used to oppress
myself, i do think that it is clear that there is a continuum of language contact and that it happens on different levels and with different types of impact based on the cultures involved and the power dynamics between them
i did not get too far into what McGraff actually thinks here, but his argument is that creolization is not exceptional - in that those languages are not distinct from other languages without knowing the historical context - and McWhorter's later efforts were due to a student asking him this very question because it kept him up at night
i agree wholeheartedly with McGraff, i have yet to see anything from him that i do not find eminently compelling, and while O'Neil gently smothers the 1977 original with a pillow, i think he does not close the door - he opens it for another generation of researchers to come and help redefine these terms and criteria
and i really really want to give you a firm conclusion here, but i think without doubling the amount of words where i try to actually come up with at least a 3-dimensional matrix model of language contact i feel like i can only say:
English is a creole - unless you do not want it to be
and to close the loop, here is another quote, this time from Morris
Whilst B&M may not have been successful in their argument, they highlighted issues within the areas of creole studies and language change that needed to be addressed.
- Is Middle English a Creole? An Evaluation of Bailey and Maroldt's (1977) Middle English Creole Hypothesis Dan Morris (2018)
References
- The Middle English Creolization Hypothesis - Persistence, Implications, and Language Ideology (O'Neil 2019)
- Against Creole Exceptionalism (McGraff 2003)
- Against Creole Exceptionalism Redux (McGraff 2004)
- An Analysis of Chinese English Varieties from the Perspective of Eco-Linguistics: A Case Study of Pidgin English (Zhang 2021)
- Cædmon's Hymn with Moore manuscript 737 images (Winans 2007)
- Reading Cædmon’s “Hymn” with Someone Else’s Glosses (Kiernan 1990)
- The Lay of Havelok the Dane (unknown scribe c. 1280, ed. Madden & Skeat 1868)
- Is English a Creole? (Nedelius 2018)
- The Exeter Book (unnamed scribe c. 970, c/o University of Exeter)
- Caxton's "Egges" Story (Caxton 1490, c/o British Library)
- Middle English Case Loss and the ‘Creolization’ Hypothesis (Allen 1997)
- Defining Creole (McWhorter 2005)
- Langues en contact - Pidgins - Creoles - Languages in Contact (ed. Meisel 1977)
- Contains "The French Lineage of English" (Bailey & Maroldt 1977)
ISBN 3-87808-075-1
- Journal of Creole Studies Volume 1 (ed. 1977)
- Contains "Middle English: Another Creole?" (Domingue 1977)
ISSN 0776-1120- "A Journal of Creole Studies began and ended in 1977, but in 1986 a new Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages emerged to become the organ of a new Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics." (Holm 2014)
- What is a Creole? (m'Cheaux 2024)
- while this video has little to do with Middle English other than a brief mention, it does cover the colonial and racist history of the classifications!
- it also is what inspired me to write this whole thing!
i did eventually find "The French Lineage of English" and i have incorporated critiques and analysis of it into my text, but i have not been able to obtain a copy of the 1977 "Journal of Creole Studies" Volume 1 that everyone references, even though there are tones of quotes from Domingue in the papers i have read, it might only be available at a physical university library?
general criticism of "The French Lineage of English"
this does not really belong in the main text, but i had to put this somewhere
within the original essay, they pat themselves on the back in a way that is definitely off putting, constantly saying things like:
We naturally expect to meet with much opposition from traditionalists, who will find it hard to see the matter in such a new, if convincing, light.
The basic fact of mixture, however, does not seem to be rationally disputable.
if you are ever writing a research paper, please refrain from this kind of posturing, it undercuts your argument no matter how good or bad
