#creolistics

I had a busy day yesterday so I didn't have time to dedicate a reply to this ask, but now I'm here and cracking my knuckles with joy.

For context, I brought up creolization in my post a linguistic analysis of Ravkan. I spoke about two possibilities to the relationship the fictional language has with Russian (as Ravkan is heavily based on Russian), and my opinion weighed on creolization having merit in Ravkan's emergence.

But let's forget about that and talk about our real world instead, since that is where we base our research in!

Creolization is the process in which a language emerges from cultures that speak very different languages. The latter are called "contact languages" — languages brought into contact. It seems simple at first, but the truth is, linguists argue a lot about Creole languages, creolization and what defines it. What counts as creolization, what doesn't, if we even have a true understanding of Creole languages.

That's probably where you found the confusion. Typically, creolization is spoken to in regards to colonial societies: the Caribbean Creoles, Pacific island Creoles, African West Coast Creoles. A lot of linguists limit the scope of studying creolization to these circumstantial societies. However, as my creolistics professor with over 30 years experience in the field would say, that is a load of Eurocentric bull. All languages exist in a "Creole-continuum" — on various degrees of merging and emergence from contact languages — because all languages are brought into contact with each other, one way or another. The continuum allows us to understand what factors weigh in on the emergent languages, what social, cultural and economic structures cause the most dramatic linguistic changes.

As someone from the Caribbean, I can tell you that learning about creolization doesn't really stop being confusing, but only because most of the first rules and primary research were written by people who were not, in fact, Creole speakers. They were people who superimposed their classic understanding of linguistics onto creolistics.

Our definitions have changed since, but they are not set in stone. Sometimes (oftentimes) you will find linguists and creolists disagree on terminology and scope. The idea I mention of the Creole-continuum is something disagreed upon as well, because defining every language with the continuum would mean that Creole languages are not inherently "special/weaker/simpler" from any other language in the world (they aren't).

With certainty, we can say that creolization separates emergent languages from the contact languages that came before. They become distinctly their own. To give a heavily-researched example: Jamaican Patois. It is not an English dialect. It is also not an African-English franken-language. It is Patois. It is classified as an English-lexifier language with many other linguistic influences, among them African and Indigenous. Patois speakers may identify their language in a Creole continuum, as it has sociolinguistic varieties: from the more English-lexified, to the more Niger-Congo-lexified.

Now, what separates Patois' creolization from Middle English emerging in a Franco-ruled English society, which also became French-lexified? With Norse and Old English-Germanic influences? With a sociolinguistic variety per region?