Ecology Meets Ideology: The Case of Creole Languages
Ecology Meets Ideology: The Case of Creole Languages

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I examine various issues in the genesis of creole languages from the perspective of language ecology. The creole varieties considered are the Atlantic and Pacific English pidgins and creoles. For reasons of space, the analysis is restricted to the so-called world-wide features of these varieties of restructured English. The paper is structured as follows: section 1 – introduction; section 2 provides a summary of the ecological or ecolinguistic framework; section 3 looks at ideological prejudices and stereotypes of creole languages; section 4 outlines the theory of creole genesis adopted in this paper; section 5 gives a brief description of the world-wide features found in English pidgins and creoles, sources and the methodology; section 6 presents the views of Baker and Huber (2001) on the emergence of world-wide features in English pidgins and creoles; section 7 contains an own account; and section 8 presents some conclusions.

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