# Is English a creole?



## vince

Is the English language a creole language, a formalized French-like language with a Germanic substrate?

Okay, maybe not 21th century English, but perhaps its direct ancestor, Middle English?

Look at it, it evolved from a Dutch-like Germanic language called "Anglo-Saxon" but after the Norman invasion, the ruling and educated class spoke French while the masses continued to speak Anglo-Saxon. As time went on, Germanic words were gradually displaced by French vocabulary, starting with the educated words, and gradually trickling down to more everyday terms.

Now, English vocabulary is 25%-80% French-based, the proportion based on how formal and technical the language used is (this includes French words evolved from Latin, many of which are themselves derived from Greek. This also includes words invented by English that were designed to match French morphology). What other languages have such a high proportion of another language's words in their lexicon, not including words that evolved separately in the two languages prior to contact? (e.g. English "I" and French "je" are related, but don't count as loaned words since they arose from a common ancestor. Nor are Spanish "mandar" and Portuguese "mandar".)

Perhaps Japanese with Middle Chinese, or Urdu with Persian?

Would you consider English, or at least Middle English a creole?


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## Tsoman

I think that it is a creole. And that that is part of its charm


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## Daddyo

No, it's not a creole language, because English (and especially Middle English) existed and was spoken by a large group of people way before America was discovered, and even much  longer before the French had descendants there.


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## Brioche

English is not a creole.

A creole is a pidgin language which has become a mother tongue.

A pidgin is a _grammatically simplified form of a language with elements taken from local languages, used for communication between people not sharing a common language._
_http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/pidgin?view=uk_

English is language which has borrowed and assimilated words from other languages.


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## .   1

A creole is a language that forms from extended contact between two languages.
English formed from the contact between a number of languages.

.,,


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## macta123

No, English is clearly not a Creole. It has words from Latin thru Old French. But it is grammaticaly far away from French. Creole, on the other hand is highly modelled on French with several different vocabulary and bit different pronounciation esp. that in West Indies, Lousiana (USA), Seychelles and Mauritius.


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## beclija

You are speaking of specifically french-based creoles, but the term creole language refers to "the result of a nontrivial mixture of two or more languages, usually with radical morphological changes and a syntax which is not obviously borrowed from either of the parent tongues" (Source), among other factors to narrow down the definition, but French is not required. 
I wouldn't say English is a creole, but it's certainly closer to it than any other European language, both structurally and from a historical point of view. I've come across an article recently that argues that it is not so much a creole as a koine language, and that the major influence for its structural changes was not so much the Saxon/French bilingual situation after the Norman conquer as the Saxon/Norse contact through the Vikings of the Danelag. I might try to find it again.


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## optimistique

I have been taught that English is in fact a creole language (I don't know much about a koinè-language). One important element is the simplification of the grammar, which is very present in modern English. English has lost its gender, its present tense verb conjugations, and the independece of the conjugated verb (much auxiliary verbs needed) to name a few.

I think some arguments given here contradict each other a bit, so I don't think if a language is or is not a creole language depends solely on the fact if it has been created through contact with one or more other languages. 
You could say English has been creolised multiple times. English does share a lot of grammatical similarities with the Scandinavian languages, while it is classified a Western Germanic language which do not have these elements.


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## fenixpollo

optimistique said:
			
		

> I think some arguments given here contradict each other a bit, so I don't think if a language is or is not a creole language depends solely on the fact if it has been created through contact with one or more other languages.


 The arguments contradict each other because there are several different definitions of the concept "creole". For me, a creole is not a language that is simply a mishmash of languages. Look at the Britannica definition from Daddyo's link: 





> A creole usually arises when speakers of one language become economically or politically dominant over speakers of another. A simplified or modified form of the dominant group's language (pidgin), used for communication between the two groups, may eventually become the native language of the less powerful community.


 This is not what happened with English. 





vince said:


> Look at it, it evolved from a Dutch-like Germanic language called "Anglo-Saxon" but after the Norman invasion, the ruling and educated class spoke French while the masses continued to speak Anglo-Saxon. As time went on, Germanic words were gradually displaced by French vocabulary, starting with the educated words, and gradually trickling down to more everyday terms.


 The "Anglo-Saxon Language", if you can call Old English that, was brought by the Angles and the Saxons -- two distinct groups. These people were invaders who conquered the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. Their Germanic languages altered (but didn't replace) the native Celtic languages.

English is not a creole, but a language that has evolved through a series of contacts with, and influences from, different languages.


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## modus.irrealis

I agree that by the strict definition of creole, English is not one, but even in a more loose sense, I don't think you can call it one, because the French influence seems to be mostly on the vocabulary (where it has been very widespread), and not on the grammatical structure itself, where the only influence I can see there is the use of "used to" for the habitual aspect. And most of English grammar can be traced back to Old English so there doesn't seem to be any drastic point of creolization that occured.

The other thing is that, and correct me if I'm wrong, many of the developments from Old English to Modern have strong parallels in some of the Scandinavian languages (loss of cases, e.g., or loss of verb inflections). beclija's point about the major influence might have been a Scandinavian language long before the Norman conquest is something I've come across before. And English even borrowed a personal pronoun from there (they) and that's more than can be said about French.


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## loladamore

Can we have a poll on this, please?

Fenixpollo makes a good point about the various definitions of creole. An interesting one is: *a mother tongue formed from the contact of a European language with another language, especially an African language* (*source*) which pretty much scuppers the chances of English being considered a creole. Most other definitions have a creole as a stabilized - and to a certain extent, *standardized- evolved pidgin*. That means that English would have had to have been a pidgin first in order to become a creole. 

I think that there are very good arguments for considering _*Old English*_ a *pidgin*, given that it arose from various low Germanic dialects (I'm talking pre-Norman times) which then came into contact with various Scandinavian varieties (the Vikings, the Danelaw and all that) prior to the Norman era. The Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians spoke similar dialects and perhaps pidginization led to the simplification of English grammar; a pidgin-like variety between the two cultures would have led to the loss of word endings and greater reliance on word order. If this English then 'settled', then I don't see why you can't argue that *early Middle English* was then indeed a *creole language*, spoken by the people, whereas the elite spoke Norman French. I don't think you could could call later Middle English a creole. Yes, a considerable amount of French vocabulary was absorbed, but structurally speaking, English remains essentially a germanic language.

As for the Celtic element, other than toponyms and a handful of lexical terms, its influence is negligible, with the obvious exception of peripheral language communities where the Celtic languages survived the Roman invasion, and where varieties of Gaelic are still spoken.

Bla, bla, bla, waffle, waffle, waffle. I'll shut up now.

And can we have a poll, please?


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## Julito_Maraña

There is a very good argument for saying English is not a _creole_: it doesn't come from a _pidgin_. That argument beats any argument that says English *is *a a creole. No pidgin, no creole. It's that simple. 

_Petroleoum _comes from the ground. If it's oil that comes from an _olive_, then it's not _petroleoum_. You can say it's an _oil _but _olive oil _isn't _petroleoum_. Neither are Brutus or Popeye.


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## konungursvia

I would say it is a BAstard, rather than a creole. The latter is a non-standard form of a known standard, whereas English is not a "colorfully messed up" version of some other more "legitimate" standard.


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## beclija

There are a lot of serious linguist who do believe that English went through a stage of creolization, while others doubt it. The exact definition of "creole" various and does not neccessarily include the notion of a pidgin origin. 

Anyway, saying that English originated from a creole either referring to the Norse/Saxon or the French/Saxon bilingual situation does _not _imply that it borrowed grammatical features from French - it just says that it was simplified due to a historical period where a lot of speakers (i.e. the French speaking Norman elite) did not speak very well. Which was, if I remember right, one of the arguments of the article mentioned above: The Normans were always a small elite, whereas the Danes settled in rather large numbers in Northern England. Calling it koine, though, implies that Norse and Saxon were at least in their basics mutually intelligible at that time (9th and 10th centuries), which cannot be directly proven.


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## HistofEng

Engish is not a Creole...it is simply a mixed language (not the same thing as a Creole)...The fact that English lost its cases and inflections has nothing to do with it being deemed a Creole. All the Romance languages have lost many inflections and cases and tenses when compared to their predecessor, Vulgar Latin.


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## Outsider

The loss of inflections seems to be a general trend in Western Indo-European languages, and particularly in many Germanic languages. We could perhaps discuss whether it was taken to a special extreme in English, but I don't think it's too extraordinary by itself.


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## Daddyo

I just thought of a detail that might seem irrelevant: After the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons in the Fourth (Fifth?) Century, when the land became ripe for all those waves of "North Men" marauders and invaders, the one group of North Men who invaded the land so thoroughly and completely that took over the very social order of the humans on the land itself were the Angles. So much so, that forever more Britain would be known as "Angle Land" (England), even throughout the subsequent and frequent other invasions, such as the Norman's.
So, maybe English doesn't get to be a creole, but a pastiche of sorts, a concatenation on an already existing language that too often was run over by political and economic conquerors.http://www.answers.com/pastiche&r=67


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## Julito_Maraña

That pastiche scenario is true for every language that I'm familiar with. Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, etc. etc.


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## übermönch

After reading this thread I came to a conclusion that every language is a creole, to a certain degree. Modern Greek, modern Hungarian, modern Russian, romance langs., modern Turkish, modern Persian etc. etc. including classical Latin are all simplifications of it's old, more complicated, versions that approx. underwent the same process as English through (contact with/assimilation of) other languages.


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## Julito_Maraña

übermönch said:


> After reading this thread I came to a conclusion that every language is a creole, to a certain degree. Modern Greek, modern Hungarian, modern Russian, romance langs., modern Turkish, modern Persian etc. etc. including classical Latin are all simplifications of it's old, more complicated, versions that approx. underwent the same process as English through (contact with/assimilation of) other languages.



All languages go through the changes that you describe. But that doesn't make them creoles. Not even creoles to a certain extent. Being a creole is sort of like being pregnant. You can't be pregnant to a certain extent.

If you took monlingual Japanese, Polish, Malenke and Aymara speakers and put them on a spaceship with a crew of *Dyirbal* speakers who are their bosses, these people will develop a pidgin based on Dyirbal (the prestige language) to communicate. Let's call that L1.

L1's grammar will be crude and loose but none of these people will speak it as a native language. Until the day they die, the Polish speakers will only speak Polish as a native language, the Japanese will be masters of only Japanese etc. 

But as the Poles intermarry with the Aymara, etc. they will have children and these children will speak something based on L1 but that would be completely different. As these kids grow up, they will be able to speak this new language as natives, let's call it L2, and they will be able to tell L1 speakers from L2 speakers. L1 speakers will never be able to handle L2 like their kids. The second generation will not sound like the first. A language will have been born almost out of nothing and rules that were not their in L1 will appear in L2.

L1 is a pidgin. L2 is a creole. There is no other way to make a creole. You have to force a group of people who can't understand each other into a situation where they need to communicate to make a pidgin. The only way you get a creole is when pidgin speakers reproduce.

So there is no such thing as "sort of a creole" or "creole to a certain extent."

At one point, those L2 to speakers can move bacl to Earth, to Australia, and their L2 can get decreolized under the influence of *Earth Dyirbal*. So in that sense, you can say the creole get's decreolized or decreolized to a certain extent if the process is not complete (if there are traces of the language that developed on the spaceship).


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## optimistique

loladamore said:


> I think that there are very good arguments for considering _*Old English*_ a *pidgin*, given that it arose from various low Germanic dialects (I'm talking pre-Norman times) which then came into contact with various Scandinavian varieties (the Vikings, the Danelaw and all that) prior to the Norman era. The Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians spoke similar dialects and perhaps pidginization led to the simplification of English grammar; a pidgin-like variety between the two cultures would have led to the loss of word endings and greater reliance on word order. If this English then 'settled', then I don't see why you can't argue that *early Middle English* was then indeed a *creole language*, spoken by the people, whereas the elite spoke Norman French. I don't think you could could call later Middle English a creole. Yes, a considerable amount of French vocabulary was absorbed, but structurally speaking, English remains essentially a germanic language.



But later Middle English is not an other language than early Middle Language. It's the same language, but at another point in time. So how can you call the latter a creole, but say that later Middle English is suddenly no longer one? So what does a language have to do to suddenly upgrade from a creole to a 'proper' language?

It's obvious now that whether English is or is not a creole, depends solely on the definition you have of a creole, so it is very, very subjective. You'll always find arguments pro or contra declaring English a creole like this.


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## Julito_Maraña

I guess you could argue that English is French depending on your definition of French. If you get liberal enough with the definition of French you can even argue that Cantonese is French. But I don't see, from an intellectual point of view, where that gets us.


Creole means something. And although French is not always easy to define some languages are not creoles and some languages aren't French. I would put English in both in those caterogies: Non-Creole and Non-French.


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## beclija

I don't see the point of that comparison? Has anyone argued that English is a French dialect? I must have overread that. French is a linguistic community, while "creole" is a term to categorize languages that share certain features, although the exact defininition varies. The answer to the question wether English is a creole depends on (a)your preferred definition of creole (which is as such rather arbitrary) and (b)details of the sociolinguistic situation at various stages of the development of English (about which not enough is known, and maybe never will be).


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## Julito_Maraña

beclija said:


> I don't see the point of that comparison? Has anyone argued that English is a French dialect?



I have heard arguments that English is a romance language! My point is that is not very useful to say that that Mars is a satelite because it revolves around the Sun like the our moon revolves around our Earth. Satelites are satelites and planets are planets. Creoles are one thing and languages that borrow many words another. 

A language can borrow 95 percent of its vocabulary without being a creole. I think definitions matter. I don't think a satelite is any object that revolves around another and I don't think that a creole is a language that has borrowed alot of words. 

While I believe that words mean what people mean them to be, if people out there think that a creole is any language that has alot of foreign words then linguists need a new word for what they are under the impression "creole" means.


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## beclija

I agree with you that it is nonsense to argue that English is a Romance language from the simple observation that almost its entire _basic _vocabulary and grammatical function words are still Germanic. And, yes, that remains valid even if it is 95% of its total vocabulary that is borrowed. But the main argument for saying English is a has gone through a stage of creolization is _not _that it has this much borrowings from that many languages, but that it underwent a number of structural changes that are otherwhise deemed typical for creolization, and that it might have had periods with a sociolinguistic situation similar to that which has in other cases lead to the emergence of a creole.
I don't think there anything bad or disrespectful about it. I personally find creolization a most interesting topic, in the top line of my linguistic interests.


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## optimistique

Julito_Maraña said:


> I have heard arguments that English is a romance language! My point is that is not very useful to say that that Mars is a satelite because it revolves around the Sun like the our moon revolves around our Earth. Satelites are satelites and planets are planets. Creoles are one thing and languages that borrow many words another.
> 
> A language can borrow 95 percent of its vocabulary without being a creole. I think definitions matter. I don't think a satelite is any object that revolves around another and I don't think that a creole is a language that has borrowed alot of words.



But a satelite just IS an object that revolves around another, I'm sorry. The moon is a satelite of the earth, and the satelite of a planet is called a moon. But we're not talking about astronomy. 



			
				Julito_Maraña said:
			
		

> While I believe that words mean what people mean them to be, if people out there think that a creole is any language that has alot of foreign words then linguists need a new word for what they are under the impression "creole" means.



I agree with you and that was exactly my point, that first a clear definition of creole had to be given in order to determine if English is one. But I never said that I found English to be a creole only because it had borrowed so many words from French. English has borrowed grammatical structures from probably Danish, at least an old(er) Scandinavian language. It could be called a creole after this period already, but I'm not saying that because I don't know enough about it. 

Then came the French invasion which indeed delivered English a lot of new words, but who can claim that no grammatical structures from French were borrowed? Maybe they're just so subtle that nobody recognises them as such. Maybe the use of the present particle? It exists in other Germanic languages of course, but is no longer used in the same way, while in French it is. Just a suggestion, though, I don't know for sure.


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## Hulalessar

Some tentative definitions:

A pidgin is a rudimentary language that comes into existence when two mutually unintelligible languages come into contact. It is never spoken as a mother tongue.

If the children of speakers of a pidgin adopt it as their primary means of communication it develops grammatical features and becomes a proper language capable of expressing everything the speaker needs to express. It then becomes a creole and is spoken as a mother tongue.

(Confusion can arise because some creoles are actually called pidgins.)

Code switching may occur in bilingual communities. Speakers change languages as the mood takes them, but the languages do not interfere with each other so that each language is spoken in the same way as speakers of each language speak it who do not code switch.

A mixed language differs from a creole in that it does not develop from a pidgin. It is likely to be understood by persons who understand the languages that are mixed, whereas a creole is likely to be unintelligible by speakers of the languages from which it arose.

Distinguishing between a language and a dialect is a vexed question, but suffice it to say that a dialect, thought it may have borrowings from an unrelated language, is not the same thing as a creole as it will never have been a pidgin. Dialect implies some degree of intelligibilty with other vareties of the same language, particularly those in close proximity, so that it is often possible to speak of a continuum of dialects - you will usually understand the man in the next village (unless of course he speaks a completely different language).

Quite apart from all the above, languages borrow from each other.

There is no hard and fast division between these categories. Some pidgins are more developed than others. There is obviously a transitional stage between a pidgin and a creole. Code switching may lead to the development of a mixed language. In countries where a creole is spoken as well as one of the languages which went to make it up there may be several registers between the two.

Gibraltar is an interesting case. Gibraltarians speak Llanito. Some regard it as a mixed language, some as a creole, some as a case of continuous code switching and some as a case of heavy borrowing. If you speak both Spanish and English you can understand most of it.

English is also an interesting case. If the above definitions are accepted, it is not a creole. If you describe a language as a "creole" you say something about how a language came about, not necessarily what it is like. It is possible for a language to be creole-like, without being a creole. Faced with a language that is apparently some sort of a blend can a linguist tell if a language is a creole? Is it possible to label a language a creole without knowing its history? I do not know enough (or for that matter much at all) about creoles to answer that, but if I believe what I read, creoles developed in widely separated areas tend to share similar features and to be languages without any baroque features. There is much argument about why this should be the case and in any event some creoles do have baroque features and some non-creoles lack them. However, if one accepts that there is a creole prototype to which most creoles conform and to which most non-creoles do not conform, then English is not creole-like.

Perhaps the essence of a creole is that two languages have been immolated and a new language has arisen phoenix-like from the ashes. That process never occurred with English, it was much slower.


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## helmet83

Brioche said:


> English is not a creole.
> 
> A creole is a pidgin language which has become a mother tongue.
> 
> A pidgin is a _grammatically simplified form of a language with elements taken from local languages, used for communication between people not sharing a common language._
> 
> 
> English is language which has borrowed and assimilated words from other languages.


 
If Modern English descended solely from Old English, I think it would resemble Modern Frisian, which, in common with all other Germanic languages, is much more conservative and grammatically complex than Modern English.

Personally I think the driver for this simplification lies firstly in the interaction between the Old Norse of the Danelaw and the Old English of the Southern Counties. These two languages shared a degree of vocabulary, and probably, intelligibility, so monolingual speakers of either could have held some kind of conversation (in a kind of pidgin?) if they met, but their grammars, inflection and word orders were substantially different. No doubt those living in the border regions of the Danelaw began to speak a dialect influenced by both languages, and probably simpler than either - i.e. a kind of creole, reflected in the Modern Midlands accent and dialects, which are intermediate between the Southern and Northern accents/ dialects. 

Perhaps over time this created a dialect continuum, with the most conservative OE/ Norse varieties existing in the most South Westerly/ Northerly parts of England respectively. This is still reflected in the accents and dialects existing in these areas today.

During the middle English period there was a large migration from the Midlands (i.e. the old Danelaw border lands) to London, and Modern Standard English is believed to be heavily influenced, if not largely derived, from Midlands dialects of Middle English, which would have been widely spoken at court etc. due to this influx.

So I would say Modern Standard English has a large part of its origins in a kind of Norse/ OE creole spoken in the Midlands of England where the two languages interacted, which subsequently became standard and is a large part of the reason English is the least conservative and simplest of all the Germanic languages. 

During the early modern english period, there seems to have been very conservative dialects retaining many features of Old English and Old Norse existing in places such as the South or North West. Recognisably Modern English has, however, existed and been evolving independently of more conservative dialects for around 500 years, and there does not seem to have been any movement to preserve more conservative forms of English as the simplified version became standard. It seems the conservative varieties of English were effectively dead by the end of the 17th century.

So given that recognisably Modern English has been the preeminent language of England for a good few centuries, and all th more consrvative languages and dialects from which it descended are now dead, perhaps one should describe Englishh as a language whose roots lie in a creole?


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## Frank06

Hi,


helmet83 said:


> If Modern English descended solely from Old English, I think it would resemble Modern Frisian,


If the world would be flat...
There is a lot that could have happened (and did happen) in a 1000 years. 


> which, in common with all other Germanic languages, is much more conservative and grammatically complex than Modern English.


You mean morphologically more complex?


> Personally I think the driver for this simplification lies firstly in the interaction between the Old Norse of the Danelaw and the Old English of the Southern Counties. These two languages shared a degree of vocabulary, and probably, intelligibility, so monolingual speakers of either could have held some kind of conversation (in a kind of pidgin?) if they met, but their grammars, inflection and word orders were substantially different. No doubt those living in the border regions of the Danelaw began to speak a dialect influenced by both languages, and probably simpler than either - i.e. a kind of creole, reflected in the Modern Midlands accent and dialects, which are intermediate between the Southern and Northern accents/ dialects.
> So I would say Modern Standard English has a large part of its origins in a kind of Norse/ OE creole spoken in the Midlands of England where the two languages interacted, which subsequently became standard and is a large part of the reason English is the least conservative and simplest of all the Germanic languages.


What are your real, solid arguments for both a pidgin and a creole apart from wild speculation?

Frank


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## Hulalessar

helmet83 said:


> If Modern English descended solely from Old English, I think it would resemble Modern Frisian, which, in common with all other Germanic languages, is much more conservative and grammatically complex than Modern English.


 
First, I think we have to understand what we mean by complexity. I take it that what you mean is that Modern English has fewer inflections than Old English. Native speakers of English tend to regard inflections as an indication of a language's complexity, but in fact they are only one aspect of complexity. All languages are equally complex.

Whilst it is likely that Modern English would be more like Modern Frisian if the Viking and Norman invasions had not taken place, I do not think it necessarily follows that it would resemble Modern Frisian. Modern Frisian has moved on from the language that was spoken over a thousand years ago. It has been influenced by Dutch. Even without Dutch influence, it would have changed. Frisian itself has fragmented into mutually unintelligible dialects, mainly because the areas in which it is spoken are geographically separated from each other. The North Sea lies between Britain and Frisia and it is inevitable that, even without contact with Norse and French, English would have gone its own way after more than a thousand years.



helmet83 said:


> Personally I think the driver for this simplification lies firstly in the interaction between the Old Norse of the Danelaw and the Old English of the Southern Counties etc


 
Whilst this may be the case, it is not necessarily the case. Loss of inflection has occurred in many languages without the sort of interaction you suggest. It has indeed happened in the Scandinavian languages. The interaction may have accelerated the loss of inflections, but then again it may not.

Whatever happened, there was never a creole for the simple reason that there was never a pidgin. What may have happened is this: the degree of mutual intelligibility was such that when a Viking met an Angle each had an idea of what the other was talking about, but not exactly what the other as talking about. In particular they may not have got what tense of a verb or what case of a noun was being used. The fact that inflections may have conveyed no meanings, may have encouraged them to be dropped when exchanges took place. It was not I think so much of a case that the two languages mixed, but rather that the invaders then started to speak English without inflections, or at least with less inflections. The language they spoke would have been complete, if not entirely "correct", and so could not have been a pidgin.

The number of Scandinavian words in English is just under a thousand. So, whilst the invasion was significant, it was not overwhelming. What is surprising, and languages are full of surprises that no one can explain, is that some of the very commonest words are Scandinavian including some personal pronouns and the word _are._ English remains a West Germanic language and is not some sort of a hybrid of North and West Germanic languages.


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## Kevin Beach

I find this discussion odd. How many mainstream languages are there that have never been strongly influenced or modified by at least one other? If we were to apply some people's creole criteria to them, wouldn't they all be creoles?


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## Hulalessar

Kevin Beach said:


> I find this discussion odd. How many mainstream languages are there that have never been strongly influenced or modified by at least one other? If we were to apply some people's creole criteria to them, wouldn't they all be creoles?


 
Quite.


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## helmet83

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> If the world would be flat...
> There is a lot that could have happened (and did happen) in a 1000 years.
> You mean morphologically more complex?
> What are your real, solid arguments for both a pidgin and a creole apart from wild speculation?
> 
> Frank


 
Yawn...I detect a pointless, semantic argument here.

Nobody was actually alive during the transition between OE and early modern English, and in the middle/ early modern period there wasn't whole lot of dialectal documentation going on. Everything is speculation, or tell me otherwise? Have you found that mythical 14th century tape recording? What record of regional variety there is suggests those living furthest from the historical Norse/ OE borderlands spoke the most conservative dialects of English, as one might expect. Logical, isn't it? And Midlands English was simpler too - i.e. if not actually a creole then it had aspects of creole. People who lived at the time said it was possible for both Northerner and Southerner to understand the Midland dialect, but often not possible for Northerner to understand Southerner and vice versa.

Plattdeutsch is simpler than either Dutch or High German, with fewer inflections, less differentiation between genders blah blah  blah. It exists where two languages with a degree of intelligibility mix, and it basically forms a continuum, gradully being replaced by more standard forms as one moves east/ west.. Is it beyind the realms of possibility a similar situation existed in early middle England?

There's evidence Modern Standard English descends from Middle English dialects brought to London by a large immigration of Midlanders.

There are documented examples of South Western dialect spoken as late as the 17th century and it still had archaic features and word order - use of the _ge_ prefix to denote past participle for example. - "Ich was here in Gloucester geboren" - "I was born here in Gloucester"



> First, I think we have to understand what we mean by complexity. I take it that what you mean is that Modern English has fewer inflections than Old English. Native speakers of English tend to regard inflections as an indication of a language's complexity, but in fact they are only one aspect of complexity. All languages are equally complex.


 
No they're not. If you speak to most non-English and non-German speakers trying to learn both languages, they would tell you English is easier, unless they already speak another Germanic language, especially Dutch. English has largely dispensed with gender and the complex declensions which still exist in all other Germanic languages. Even literate, educated Germans struggle to get German right.



> Whilst it is likely that Modern English would be more like Modern Frisian if the Viking and Norman invasions had not taken place, I do not think it necessarily follows that it would resemble Modern Frisian. Modern Frisian has moved on from the language that was spoken over a thousand years ago. It has been influenced by Dutch. Even without Dutch influence, it would have changed. Frisian itself has fragmented into mutually unintelligible dialects, mainly because the areas in which it is spoken are geographically separated from each other. The North Sea lies between Britain and Frisia and it is inevitable that, even without contact with Norse and French, English would have gone its own way after more than a thousand years.


Contemporaneous chronicles suggest OE and Frisian were mutually intelligible until the 12 century at least, whereas the language of the Flemings (i.e. Old Dutch) was not. Modern English without French/ Norse influence would probably resemble Frisian more than other Germanic languages, just as Modern English _with _those influences does, and modern English without French influence would be more Germanic...it would resemble Frisian.




> Whilst this may be the case, it is not necessarily the case. Loss of inflection has occurred in many languages without the sort of interaction you suggest. It has indeed happened in the Scandinavian languages. The interaction may have accelerated the loss of inflections, but then again it may not.


Yes. The loss of inflection has been far greater in English than in other Germanic languages. I agree, Modern Swedish, for example, is far less inflected than Old Norse, but it's also far more inflected than modern English.



> Whatever happened, there was never a creole for the simple reason that there was never a pidgin. What may have happened is this: the degree of mutual intelligibility was such that when a Viking met an Angle each had an idea of what the other was talking about, but not exactly what the other as talking about. In particular they may not have got what tense of a verb or what case of a noun was being used. The fact that inflections may have conveyed no meanings, may have encouraged them to be dropped when exchanges took place. It was not I think so much of a case that the two languages mixed, but rather that the invaders then started to speak English without inflections, or at least with less inflections. The language they spoke would have been complete, if not entirely "correct", and so could not have been a pidgin.


OK, perhaps a pidgin and creole is too strong a term. A simplification then.



> The number of Scandinavian words in English is just under a thousand. So, whilst the invasion was significant, it was not overwhelming. What is surprising, and languages are full of surprises that no one can explain, is that some of the very commonest words are Scandinavian including some personal pronouns and the word _are._ English remains a West Germanic language and is not some sort of a hybrid of North and West Germanic languages.


That's kind of an arbitrary figure. Old Norse and Old English shared 80% of their vocabulary at least, so the only words we can definitely atrtribute to Norse are those which we know did not exist in OE but have equivalents in Norse/ modern Scandinavian languages, or words such as "starve" and "die", which had direct equivalents in both Norse and OE, with slightly different meanings, and in mdoern English the Norse meaning has been assumed (i.e. to die of lack of food - in Old English starve just meant to die, as Starben does in mdoern German).

It does seem modern Standard English descends from simplified Midland dialects of early Middle English which came from the traditional Danelaw borderlands. There was a well documented migration of Midland speakers to London in the 13-1400s, and it is also known that their dialects became very prominent in court and commerce during that period.

The evidence that does exist (which isn't huge) suggests that highly inflected, conservative varieties of English were spoken in places such as the south west right up until the 17th century, which, incidentally, is around the time that linguists first recognise and actual English standard.

So this is evidence that the simplified Midlands dialect is the basis of standard English. And the drive behind that simplification was probably the interaction between Norse and OE. What else could it have been?

If you read Chaucer, who spoke a variety of English which was becoming recognisably modern, he documents that 14th-15th century southerners and northerners could barely understand each other, where as Midland dialect was more or less accessible to all. Midland dialect was probably a logical dialect to use to ensure everyone could understand you, hence its eventual adoption as standard.

Maybe pidgin and creole are terms which are too strong to describe the origins of English, but English _has_ undergone far more simplification than other Germanic languages, and modern English _does_ seem to descend from a dialect originating at a linguistic border. The interaction at that border probably accelerated the simplification of English from its highly inflected root languages into the much simpler modern standard.

So don't underestimate the influence of the Norse on modern English. Without the French, English vocabulary would still be 90% Germanic, but without the Norse I believe English grammar would still be as complex as that of continental Germanic languages.


----------



## Frank06

Hi,



helmet83 said:


> Yawn...I detect a pointless, semantic argument here.


Try to use the widely accepted terminology in a proper way and we can avoid what you call "pointless semantic arguments".



> Nobody was actually alive during the transition between OE and early modern English, and in the middle/ early modern period there wasn't whole lot of dialectal documentation going on. Everything is speculation, or tell me otherwise? Have you found that mythical 14th century tape recording? What record of regional variety there is suggests those living furthest from the historical Norse/ OE borderlands spoke the most conservative dialects of English, as one might expect. Logical, isn't it? And Midlands english was simpler too - i.e. if not actually a creole then it had aspects of creole.


If we're going to label every result of a morphological simplification (with syntactic implications) as "a creole", then e.g. every IE language is a creole v.a.v PIE. But that makes your usage of the term "creole" rather pointless, no?
Anyway, if I understood well, I notice a semantic shift from "definitely a creole" to "aspects of a creole", and from creolisation to (morphological) simplification.



> If you speak to most non-English and non-german speakers trying to learn both languages, they would tell you English is easier, unless they already speak another Germanic language, especially Dutch. English has largely dispensed with gender and the complex declensions which still exist in all other Germanic languages. Even literate, educated Germans struggle to get German right.


Try to keep it on topic, please?
 But if I understood well, a lot of Germans, educated or not, don't stick to the grammatical rules of modern standard German, but that's something else than "don't get German right". Are they also creolising their tongue?

Frank


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## dinji

Hulalessar said:


> Whatever happened, there was never a creole for the simple reason that there was never a pidgin.


I think you state a very simple fact here, which is irreproachable unless you change the definitions.


----------



## helmet83

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> 
> Try to use the widely accepted terminology in a proper way and we can avoid what you call "pointless semantic arguments".
> 
> If we're going to label every result of a morphological simplification (with syntactic implications) as "a creole", then e.g. every IE language is a creole v.a.v PIE. But that makes your usage of the term "creole" rather pointless, no?
> Anyway, if I understood well, I notice a semantic shift from "definitely a creole" to "aspects of a creole".


 
That's not what I'm saying. All modern Germanic languages are much simpler than the archaic Germanic languages they descend from, but basic English is the most simplified and least conservative of them all. Evidence? A monolingual German or a Dutchman can read and understand Beowulf in OE, inflections and all, much better than a monolingual Englishman.

Old Norse and Old English shared 80%+ of their vocab. The primary barriers to communication (excepting accent) would have been declension, genders, articles, associated prefixes and suffixes. It probably wasn't a conscious decision, but to aid communication these complicated gramatical rules were probably done away with, leaving a much simpler, more neutral dialect which then formed the basis of standard English.

Whether there was ever an OE/ON pidgin is a matter for speculation. Possibly not, but in its loosest sense creolisation is the development of a simpler language from two mutually unintelligible tongues. 

This appears to be what happened in the late Old/Early Middle English period, and it happened where OE and ON met.

So does English descend from a creole? Perhaps the non controversial viewpoint is that its development has more aspects of creolisation than other Germanic standards.



> Try to keep it on topic, please?
> But if I understood well, a lot of Germans, educated or not, don't stick to the grammatical rules of modern standard German, but that's something else than "don't get German right". Are they also creolising their tongue?
> 
> Frank


This is a relevant point to show that English _is _simpler than other Germanic languages. To establish that English has undergone some kind of creolisation we need to establish that.

No Germans are not creolising their tongue. They simplify it because its range of genders, prefixes, suffixes, declensions etc. is mind bogglingly complex, even to educated people. It's barely possible to use the correct article all the time. They are not simplifying their language because of a need to communicate with another group of people, they're doing it because they are lazy, like the rest of us.

If the Dutch and Germans lived on an Island together, with no way off, would interaction result in a dialect, and would that dialect be somewhat simpler than either root language?

Probably. 

Is that creolisation? Maybe not, but it's something similar....

And that, I believe, is how modern standard English arose, in the Midlands, around the 13th century, where Norse met Old English.....


----------



## dinji

helmet83 said:


> Is that creolisation? Maybe not, but it's something similar....
> 
> And that, I believe, is how modern standard English arose, in the Midlands, around the 13th century, where Norse met Old English.....


What you describe is essentially no different from what happened to Danish and Swedish when confronted with the Middle Low German of the Hanseatic league. Cases were confused and reduced to two, genders to two and the vocabulary underwent a transfusion, intruding into core vocabulary like _stå_ 'to stand', _gå_ 'to go', _bliva_ 'to become', _förstå_ 'to understand', _betala_ 'pay', _förgäta_ 'to forget', created new morphemes such as _be-,_ _för-_ as well as particles such as _men_ 'but' and even affected sound laws (mophtongisation of _au_, _öy_ and _äi)_ etc. etc. The list is endless. 

The language contact happened in largely bilingual hanseatic towns.

What English went through is not as unparallelled as you want to make us think. And it has little to do with creolisation unless you identify the speakers (celts and francophone normands?) who did not know either Anglosaxon nor Norse but took up a mixture as a vehicle to understand each other. But this is not what you are claiming.


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## helmet83

dinji said:


> What you describe is essentially no different from what happened to Danish and Swedish when confronted with the Middle Low German of the Hanseatic league. Cases were confused and reduced to two, genders to two and the vocabulary underwent a transfusion, intruding into core vocabulary like _stå_ 'to stand', _gå_ 'to go', _bliva_ 'to become', _förstå_ 'to understand', _betala_ 'pay', _förgäta_ 'to forget', created new morphemes such as _be-,_ _för-_ as well as particles such as _men_ 'but' and even affected sound laws (mophtongisation of _au_, _öy_ and _äi)_ etc. etc. The list is endless.
> 
> The language contact happened in largely bilingual hanseatic towns.
> 
> What English went through is not as unparallelled as you want to make us think. And it has little to do with creolisation unless you identify the speakers (celts and francophone normands?) who did not know either Anglosaxon nor Norse but took up a mixture as a vehicle to understand each other. But this is not what you are claiming.



Well, who knows? English is grammatically a very simple language compared to its Germanic cousins. It does have complexity - areas where it is _more_ complex than its cousins, but those areas lie in nuance and vocabulary....

What is amazing about the development of English, is that, if one examines 11th century texts, for example, the English in them is very conservative, highly inflected, very Germanic, basically completely unintelligible to a modern English speaker and much more similar to modern German.

Yet a mere 300 years later, Chaucer was writing English which is, basically, intelligible to the modern reader....

It's difficult to believe a change of that magnitude could have occurred in that time frame without all sorts of intermediate patois, dialects, creoles etc. etc. etc.


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## sokol

I won't try and argue for or against any of the arguments above, because there's one strong argument against the claim that English were a creole:
Creoles, by definition, emerge from pidgins which are no one's mother tongue; and the creolisation process is, by definition, the development of a pidgin into a creole.

With English, as with many other languages, there was never such a sharp break of tradition; at no point in the history of English language, to our best knowledge, English (Anglo-Saxon) was only a pidgin - with simplified grammar, and no native speakers.
There always were native speakers of Anglo-Saxon, and plenty, since Germanic tribes settled in Britain.

Of course the influence of language contact was particularily strong with English, that much we know for sure (not only Normannic French but also Norse had a great impact).
Same goes for Farsi where something similar happened. Same for Bavarian/Austrian dialects who were influenced by neighbouring Romance and Slavic languages, etc.
But this process of languages having "more than one parent" is not quite the same as creolisation - because the latter is, by definition, a *very* specific situation.


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## helmet83

sokol said:


> I won't try and argue for or against any of the arguments above, because there's one strong argument against the claim that English were a creole:
> Creoles, by definition, emerge from pidgins which are no one's mother tongue; and the creolisation process is, by definition, the development of a pidgin into a creole.
> 
> With English, as with many other languages, there was never such a sharp break of tradition; at no point in the history of English language, to our best knowledge, English (Anglo-Saxon) was only a pidgin - with simplified grammar, and no native speakers.
> There always were native speakers of Anglo-Saxon, and plenty, since Germanic tribes settled in Britain.
> 
> Of course the influence of language contact was particularily strong with English, that much we know for sure (not only Normannic French but also Norse had a great impact).
> Same goes for Farsi where something similar happened. Same for Bavarian/Austrian dialects who were influenced by neighbouring Romance and Slavic languages, etc.
> But this process of languages having "more than one parent" is not quite the same as creolisation - because the latter is, by definition, a *very* specific situation.


 
When you say things like "There were always native speakers of anglo-saxon" I think you're underestimating the importance of Old Norse in the development of the English standard....... 

_Half_ of England was ruled by Denmark. Genetic studies cannot throw light on how many Danes actually emigrated to England, as it's not possible to seperate Danes from those living in Schleswig Holstein - the Saxon homeland, so it has not been possible to estimate the level of Danish colonisation in Northern England. The Northern English do, however, have a significantly higher incidence of Northern German/ Danish Y chromosomes than people in Southern England, so this indicates there was some colonisation of the Danelaw by Danes.

Is it fair to assume that when Danish colonist and Angle met, they developed a contact language, and was that contact language a kind of pidgin, or were OE and ON similar enough to preclude the neccessity of a pidgin?

There is evidence that standard English derives from dialects spoken in the Dane/ Angle contact area - i.e. the Midlands.

Was the Midlands dialect influenced or even descended from a Norse/ OE pidgin?

It seems contact between the two languages evoked a simplification. At what point is this simplified dialect graduate from Pidgin to Language?

It seems arbitrary to me.

Also, there have not always been native speakers of Anglo-Saxon. Nobody speaks Anglo-Saxon now - there are no conservative English dialects that I know of. No monolingual Modern English speaker could even understand Anglo-Saxon, and the transition from unintelligible Anglo-Saxon to the kind of English Chaucer spoke took only around 3 centuries......

I can hardly believe that degree of change in that time frame did not involve simple contact languages and pidgins... I mean...it must have been hard for grandarents to understand their grandchildren when the language was changing that fast......


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## Kevin Beach

I have always understood that the transition from Old English to Middle English occurred basically in two stages, but over a longer period than three hundred years.

Danish attacks on the British coast started in the early 9th century. Their settlements began just after the middle of the century. By A.D. 885 the Danelaw boundaries were established and a large part of England was under Danish rule.

It was in that century that English and Danish would have begun to influence each other. Most members of both groups were illiterate and would never have recorded their conversations. However, by A.D 900 they were developing a common language based on their shared root vocabularies but with dissimilar inflections removed.

  Written language always develops more slowly than speech. Classical Latin was still in common written use long after the Vulgate started parting company with it. Even now, many people write English in styles that were common in speech more than a century ago, yet they are almost unintelligible to young Urban English Streetspeakers. It is no surprise then that written Old English (which was exclusive to the best-educated of the time) continued in its fully inflected form until the late 11th Century, while ordinary speech was completing the first stage of transition.

  William the Conqueror rigidly imposed Norman culture on the country within the first 20 years after the Battle of Hastings. Therefore the second stage of change was almost force-grown. Not only was English abrading against Norman French, but the conflict between the invaders and the English (whether Saxon or Danish) urgently necessitated a common language for the oppressed. Further, the First Crusade had started within 30 years of the conquest. English and Normans of all ranks travelled across Europe to the east, experiencing many languages on the way. Any enduring division between Saxons and Danes had to give way rapidly to a unified language, to match political realities. French was intermingled through forced usage.

  The written form of what we now call Middle English started in the early 12th century and flowered into the rich language of Chaucer within 250 years. But Middle English’s gestation was almost 500 years before Chaucer’s.


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## Hulalessar

helmet83 said:


> No they're not [complex]. If you speak to most non-English and non-German speakers trying to learn both languages, they would tell you English is easier, unless they already speak another Germanic language, especially Dutch. English has largely dispensed with gender and the complex declensions which still exist in all other Germanic languages.


 
This is not the thread to discuss complexity or difficulty. You may wish to look at these two threads which discuss them:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=714874&highlight=complexity

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1215025&highlight=complexity

Even so, pidgins are by definition simple, but then they are not proper languages. Creoles are not simple, although some of them may lack the "add-ons" that most languages have.


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## Athaulf

helmet83 said:


> If Modern English descended solely from Old English, I think it would resemble Modern Frisian, which, in common with all other Germanic languages, is much more conservative and grammatically complex than Modern English.
> 
> Personally I think the driver for this simplification lies firstly in the interaction between the Old Norse of the Danelaw and the Old English of the Southern Counties.



So then why did the grammar of the Old Norse dialects spoken in continental Scandinavia evolve in pretty much the same direction as English in the last thousand years? Your theory fails the Occam's Razor test in this regard, since very similar grammatical changes can obviously happen in a similar time period without any analogous external influences. It fails the test in the other direction too, since you can find many places where analogous scenarios of language contact happened without any similar consequences (e.g. Slavic languages offer a wealth of such examples). Thus, it's devoid of any predictive power and belongs to the domain of speculation. 

Also, as others have already noted, it makes no sense to call one language "more grammatically complex" than another. Yes, the inflectional morphology of English is relatively simple, but there is nothing simple about its overall grammar unless you're a native speaker. 



> No they're not. If you speak to most non-English and non-German speakers trying to learn both languages, they would tell you English is easier, unless they already speak another Germanic language, especially Dutch.


I am a non-English and non-German speaker who tried to learn both languages, and I certainly didn't find English any easier than any other language I've ever tried learning. (I don't speak any other Germanic languages either.) 

We've discussed this topic many times in this forum. See e.g. this old thread (and specifically post #45 where I wrote about my own theory for why so many people insist on the absurd claim that English is somehow "easy"):
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=994521



> The loss of inflection has been far greater in English than in other Germanic languages. I agree, Modern Swedish, for example, is far less inflected than Old Norse, but it's also far more inflected than modern English.


Now you're nitpicking. Modern Continental Scandinavian languages certainly demonstrate that radical language change in the analytic direction can happen without any external influence comparable to what English has gone through. Compared to Old Norse, they've changed only somewhat less than English in the same period. Besides, I don't think any of these languages have preserved more inflectional morphology than the Middle English of, say, Chaucer, which was spoken long after these external influences on English happened.


----------



## Athaulf

sokol said:


> I won't try and argue for or against any of the arguments above, because there's one strong argument against the claim that English were a creole:
> Creoles, by definition, emerge from pidgins which are no one's mother tongue; and the creolisation process is, by definition, the development of a pidgin into a creole.
> 
> With English, as with many other languages, there was never such a sharp break of tradition; at no point in the history of English language, to our best knowledge, English (Anglo-Saxon) was only a pidgin - with simplified grammar, and no native speakers.



Another powerful argument against the creole hypothesis is the survival of many grammatical forms in English that normally don't survive the creolization process. Two such examples are the strong/weak adjective declensions, whose remnants survived well into the Middle English period, and the ablauted irregular verbs, which are alive and kicking even nowadays.


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## helmet83

> Now you're nitpicking. Modern Continental Scandinavian languages certainly demonstrate that radical language change in the analytic direction can happen without any external influence comparable to what English has gone through. Compared to Old Norse, they've changed only somewhat less than English in the same period. Besides, I don't think any of these languages have preserved more inflectional morphology than the Middle English of, say, Chaucer, which was spoken long after these external influences on English happened.


 
Well, as was pointed out earlier a lot of Swedish simplification occurred at the time of the Hanseatic league, when major Swedish commerce centres had a large influx of German immigrants. Sweden was the main power in Scandinavia for centuries and influenced the other Scandinavian languages probably more than it was influenced by them.

I really think the question to settle whether English underwent proper creolisation, is whether the Old Norse and Old English, upon meeting each other for the first time, would have spoken a kind of pidgin, or were their languages similar enough for the average Joe (or Aethelstan and Gorm!   (i.e., not a language professor!) to hold a conversation?

What happens when monolingual French people meet and try to communicate with monolingual Italians....? Do they converse freely? Do they speak slowly, use simple words? That kind of exercise might give an insight....


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## helmet83

Kevin Beach said:


> I have always understood that the transition from Old English to Middle English occurred basically in two stages, but over a longer period than three hundred years.
> 
> Danish attacks on the British coast started in the early 9th century. Their settlements began just after the middle of the century. By A.D. 885 the Danelaw boundaries were established and a large part of England was under Danish rule.
> 
> It was in that century that English and Danish would have begun to influence each other. Most members of both groups were illiterate and would never have recorded their conversations. However, by A.D 900 they were developing a common language based on their shared root vocabularies but with dissimilar inflections removed.
> 
> Written language always develops more slowly than speech. Classical Latin was still in common written use long after the Vulgate started parting company with it. Even now, many people write English in styles that were common in speech more than a century ago, yet they are almost unintelligible to young Urban English Streetspeakers. It is no surprise then that written Old English (which was exclusive to the best-educated of the time) continued in its fully inflected form until the late 11th Century, while ordinary speech was completing the first stage of transition.
> 
> William the Conqueror rigidly imposed Norman culture on the country within the first 20 years after the Battle of Hastings. Therefore the second stage of change was almost force-grown. Not only was English abrading against Norman French, but the conflict between the invaders and the English (whether Saxon or Danish) urgently necessitated a common language for the oppressed. Further, the First Crusade had started within 30 years of the conquest. English and Normans of all ranks travelled across Europe to the east, experiencing many languages on the way. Any enduring division between Saxons and Danes had to give way rapidly to a unified language, to match political realities. French was intermingled through forced usage.
> 
> The written form of what we now call Middle English started in the early 12th century and flowered into the rich language of Chaucer within 250 years. But Middle English’s gestation was almost 500 years before Chaucer’s.


 
Yes...if only we had a tape recorder.....
English, more than most other European languages, is a product of mass migration and language contact. I really believe this is why it's so uninflected.

The question is....would interaction between OE and ON have resulted in a pidgin, or were they similar enough to preclude this?


----------



## Kevin Beach

helmet83 said:


> Yes...if only we had a tape recorder.....
> English, more than most other European languages, is a product of mass migration and language contact. I really believe this is why it's so uninflected.
> 
> The question is....would interaction between OE and ON have resulted in a pidgin, or were they similar enough to preclude this?


Those are not the only possibilities. Another is that OE remained the dominant language, modified by the interaction with ON. The proportion of recognisably OE vocabulary in ModE, compared with the much smaller range of ON vocabulary, suggests strongly that this is what happened.


----------



## sokol

helmet83 said:


> Is it fair to assume that when Danish colonist and Angle met, they developed a contact language, and was that contact language a kind of pidgin, or were OE and ON similar enough to preclude the neccessity of a pidgin?


Yes, I guess they were *way *too similar to produce a _real _pidgin.

I am no specialist of this time and region but of course I know that there was heavy Nordic influence (I didn't know that there exist theories that Danish had such a huge impact on modern standard English - I take it though that these are _theories _only, right? that is, still doubted by some linguists).
Still, those contact varieties - whatever they were exactly, if they existed at all - certainly weren't nearly as reduced in grammar as any pidgin we know of (here "pidgin" of course is used in the classical definition).

The same thing - influence between closely related languages - happened in many places all over the world: if two related languages or dialects are in contact this should be called mixing of dialects rather than pidgin: a pidgin typically is a highly simplified contact variety based on two (or more) languages which are unintelligible to each other.

And as to what the point is between differentiating "hard-core pidgins" from "dialect mixing" - that's a simple question to answer.
Of course we *could *say that any contact variety - be it a "mild" one like old Anglo-Saxon*) or a "hard-core" pidgin like Tok Pisin (now a Creole already) - is something of a creole, developped from a pidgin. But if we do that linguists still would like to have a special term for those "hard-core" pidgins (and creoles), because there is a big difference between languages like Tok Pisin and modern English.
So if we say that "everything is a creole" a special term for "hard-core creoles" still would make much sense, especially as "creole" then would be broadened to include most languages of the world while those "hard-core creoles" only evolved from *very special* language contact situations.
Thus I don't see what we would gain from broadening the definitions of pidgins and creoles: better leave them as they are now, and instead create new terms for cases like English.

*) Here I'd like to add: the degree of influence of Nordic languages and Normannic French (or Celtic, for that matter) on English is discussed controversely, as far as I know, but the _degree _of influence is not really the point here.


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## helmet83

sokol said:


> Yes, I guess they were *way *too similar to produce a _real _pidgin.
> 
> I am no specialist of this time and region but of course I know that there was heavy Nordic influence (I didn't know that there exist theories that Danish had such a huge impact on modern standard English - I take it though that these are _theories _only, right? that is, still doubted by some linguists).
> Still, those contact varieties - whatever they were exactly, if they existed at all - certainly weren't nearly as reduced in grammar as any pidgin we know of (here "pidgin" of course is used in the classical definition).
> 
> The same thing - influence between closely related languages - happened in many places all over the world: if two related languages or dialects are in contact this should be called mixing of dialects rather than pidgin: a pidgin typically is a highly simplified contact variety based on two (or more) languages which are unintelligible to each other.
> 
> And as to what the point is between differentiating "hard-core pidgins" from "dialect mixing" - that's a simple question to answer.
> Of course we *could *say that any contact variety - be it a "mild" one like old Anglo-Saxon*) or a "hard-core" pidgin like Tok Pisin (now a Creole already) - is something of a creole, developped from a pidgin. But if we do that linguists still would like to have a special term for those "hard-core" pidgins (and creoles), because there is a big difference between languages like Tok Pisin and modern English.
> So if we say that "everything is a creole" a special term for "hard-core creoles" still would make much sense, especially as "creole" then would be broadened to include most languages of the world while those "hard-core creoles" only evolved from *very special* language contact situations.
> Thus I don't see what we would gain from broadening the definitions of pidgins and creoles: better leave them as they are now, and instead create new terms for cases like English.
> 
> *) Here I'd like to add: the degree of influence of Nordic languages and Normannic French (or Celtic, for that matter) on English is discussed controversely, as far as I know, but the _degree _of influence is not really the point here.


 
Yes, you may well be right, although I'm sure I remember reading about Norn speaking Shetlanders and Faroese fisherman developed a contact language in the 17th century which was basically a pidgin, despite the two languages being directly descended from Old Norse.

One thing which is unusual in the development of English (by European standards, anyway) is that it occurred on an Island, and immigrants to the Island were thrust into direct contact with the people already there, who spoke several different and sometimes unrelated languages.

In continental Europe, this occurred less. For example, the disctinction between Dutchmen and Germans, for example, is tribal rather than geographical. They've lived side by side since the dark ages, and Dutch - Low German - High German is arguaby a dialect continuum.

Similar languages exist at the borders of other related languages which have existed and evolved side by side. There are Romance languages along the borders of almost every linguistic meeting point between them which incorproate mixed features of the languages around them, such as Catalan. Similar situations exist in the Slavonic languges - e.g. Czech, Slovak and Polish.

These languages have evolved alongside each other for years and perhaps represent a continuum.

Modern English, by contrast, seems to have evolved very quickly, following the arrival of migrant groups speaking related languages,which had not evolved alongside each other and were thrust into direct contact with each other.

It's unusual in Europe. Perhaps this merging of languages has aspects of creolisation.....


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## Hulalessar

sokol said:


> Thus I don't see what we would gain from broadening the definitions of pidgins and creoles: better leave them as they are now, and instead create new terms for cases like English.


 
I think that that is exactly the point. It is a bit like insisting that a colour with 999,999 parts red and one part white must be pink because it has white in it. As I said above, there are not necessarily any clear dividing lines between creoles and non-creoles and "creole" is as much, if not more, a description of how a language came about as what it is like. When it comes to many languages the historical record is very short and when it comes to all languages is very short compared to the time that languages have been around. For all we know, Proto-Indo-European may be a creole!


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## sokol

helmet83 said:


> It's unusual in Europe. Perhaps this merging of languages has aspects of creolisation.....


No doubt, English certainly is unique in Europe (Farsi supposedly had a similar history, with grave influences and huge changes; I'm no expert on Farsi though).

And yes, some aspects of the development _do _remind one of creolisation processes. Still, I'd prefer to keep creoles separate from cases like English, as argued above.
I didn't know about those pidgin-like contact languages on Shetland (nor do I know wether they are pidgins in the "stricter" definition) but I guess they aren't relevant to English language development except that they indicate that such contact languages might have developped on the British mainland; still, that's all hypothetical - we can't know for sure.


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## Athaulf

helmet83 said:


> Well, as was pointed out earlier a lot of Swedish simplification occurred at the time of the Hanseatic league, when major Swedish commerce centres had a large influx of German immigrants. Sweden was the main power in Scandinavia for centuries and influenced the other Scandinavian languages probably more than it was influenced by them.



But again, such theories explain everything and nothing at the same time. You can always come up with some such _ex post facto_ explanation for why change in the analytic direction did or did not happen in each particular place and time. However, such theories are devoid of predictive power, and represent pure speculation and just-so stories. 



> I really think the question to settle whether English underwent proper creolisation, is whether the Old Norse and Old English, upon meeting each other for the first time, would have spoken a kind of pidgin, or were their languages similar enough for the average Joe (or Aethelstan and Gorm!   (i.e., not a language professor!) to hold a conversation?


Assuming English underwent full creolisation, how do you explain the fact that it preserved irregular verbs with ablaut, and even remnants of strong/weak adjectives for centuries after this supposed creolization should have taken place? Creole languages normally don't preserve that sort of thing. (Just look at the present-day creoles.)


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## dinji

May be I don't remember all the postings in detail and may be I am not the biggest specialts in pidgins etc... ..but allow me a stupid question: 
Isn't it a minimum requirement for the definition of a pidgin that none of the speakers has the superstrate language as their mother tongue? So for Middle English to be a creole there should have been a pidgin used by mother tongue speakers of Celtic, Normand French and may be Norse, but NOT of Old English. If the latter participated the definition does not apply.

For the type of contact language between realted languages that Helmet83 is describing there should be another terminology?

By the way today there is such a contact language called Scandinavian. In terms of sociolinguistics it rather contradicts the assumptions of Helmet83. What tends to happen is that each speaker slows down his/her speach and substitutes some difficult lexical items but no adaptation is normally made to the less concious deep structures of the language: phonology and syntax. Morphology is typically also not altered.


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## sokol

dinji said:


> Isn't it a minimum requirement for the definition of a pidgin that none of the speakers has the superstrate language as their mother tongue?


I am not aware of such a definition - it applies for most pidgins (so, usually none of the speakers of a pidgin has the superstrate language as mother tongue), but in some cases it is difficult to judge what is superstrate and what is substrate.

As for example when two populations mix which have no language in common and develop a pidgin which is a wild mix between both languages - probably Russenorsk (the link is in German, sorry for that ) falls into that category, if I look at the sample sentences (search for "Textproben") I find it difficult to say what is superstrate here, and what substrate - probably it is rather a case of two adstrates.

But then again, I think Russenorsk is a good example to demonstrate what a Pidgin is: it really is a *very *special case of language contact and language change, significantly different - I'd like to emphasise again - from the case of English.



dinji said:


> By the way today there is such a contact language called Scandinavian. In terms of sociolinguistics it rather contradicts the assumptions of Helmet83. What tends to happen is that each speaker slows down his/her speach and substitutes some difficult lexical items but no adaptation is normally made to the less concious deep structures of the language: phonology and syntax. Morphology is typically also not altered.


Ah, now I get it: so this is the reason why Norwegians, Swedes and Danes always claim to perfectly understand each other even when speaking their "mother tongues". 

This is a different case, and this "Scandinavian" also isn't quite a pidgin. Similar processes happen when different dialect speakers of German meet: they avoid words which (as they know) are specific for their dialect and replace them with words which (they think) will be understood more easily, but basically syntax and morphology remain unchanged.
I would call that case simply "language mix".


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## ajr1971

Kevin Beach said:


> William the Conqueror rigidly imposed Norman culture on the country within the first 20 years after the Battle of Hastings. Therefore the second stage of change was almost force-grown. Not only was English abrading against Norman French, but the conflict between the invaders and the English (whether Saxon or Danish) urgently necessitated a common language for the oppressed. Further, the First Crusade had started within 30 years of the conquest. English and Normans of all ranks travelled across Europe to the east, experiencing many languages on the way. Any enduring division between Saxons and Danes had to give way rapidly to a unified language, to match political realities. French was intermingled through forced usage.



I think it's misleading to say Norman language and culture were _forced_ on the English. There actually was no concerted effort by William or any of his successors to impose Norman French on the English people. William the Conqueror, in fact, tried to learn English himself, although he was not successful. His proclamations were written not only in Norman French and in Latin, but also in English. Norman French's influence on English was due to a mingling co-existence between the two, in which English eventually won out. Norman French was the language of only the tiniest minority of the nobility. Had there been a concerted effort to force the French language on the English, the result would have been quite different.


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## Kevin Beach

ajr1971 said:


> I think it's misleading to say Norman language and culture were _forced_ on the English. There actually was no concerted effort by William or any of his successors to impose Norman French on the English people. William the Conqueror, in fact, tried to learn English himself, although he was not successful. His proclamations were written not only in Norman French and in Latin, but also in English. Norman French's influence on English was due to a mingling co-existence between the two, in which English eventually won out. Norman French was the language of only the tiniest minority of the nobility. Had there been a concerted effort to force the French language on the English, the result would have been quite different.


I think I said only that Norman _culture_ was forced on the country, but I can see why you might interpret my second use of "forced" in the way that you have.

The thrust of my comments was that it was a fast-moving time. By 1074 eighty percent of England had been given to new owners, with their continental ideas of feudalism. The concept of individual duties owed to the community was replaced by a hierarchical dominance, in which all control rested at the top. It wasn't only William's language that mattered, but that of all the Norman counts who took over the land. It would have been impossible to communicate with one's new "Hlaford" without learning something of his language. So, when I say "forced" in relation to the language, I mean the force of circumstances, not power. Sorry to be misleading.


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## berndf

Kevin Beach said:


> However, by A.D 900 they were developing a common language based on their shared root vocabularies but with dissimilar inflections removed.


Interesting. Do you have examples? I am aware of some morphological changed during the late OE period (i.e. between about 800AD and the Norman Conquest) but I never heard about significant morphological simplifications during this time.


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## Kevin Beach

berndf said:


> Interesting. Do you have examples? I am aware of some morphological changed during the late OE period (i.e. between about 800AD and the Norman Conquest) but I never heard about significant morphological simplifications during this time.


As I said, written language changes more slowly than spoken language. All the direct evidence we have is written; that's all we have to go on. It is impossible to give examples for which there is no written evidence. However, from the later written evidence we can deduce that the spoken changes began earlier.

If we know that a journey began at A and ended at Z; that it started at about noon and was completed by 6.0 pm; and that it proceeded at a speed that can be approximately calculated; but the only confirmed evidence of its progress before its end was at 4.0 pm and 5.0 pm; we can still deduce logically what stage it had more or less reached at various times before 4.0 pm.

By this method, if we know that the change occurred, as you say, between AD 800 and 1066, but the only written evidence of change is in the last 100 to 150 years, we can still infer that there were changes in the first 100 years. Indeed, although we will probably never know the precise relationship in time, I would say that any change in writing is evidence of the same change having occurred earlier in speech.


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## Dr. Fumbles

Ok, I used to think that modern English was a creole.  Not anymore.  In  its core, English is still English.  90% of the core words used are  still English/Germanic. Even though most of the vocabulary is mixed.   More than likely, English is a mixed language, but it is very possible  that it is neither of these.  If rural dialects are of any indication,  the so-called proper grammar is ignored, the word orders and made-up  rules.  Who'd you get that for? or British Who'd tha get that for?  Not  For whom did you get that?, a Latinate grammatical structure.  Also the  best evidence against English being a creole is Tok Pisin.  It shows how  the English language was stripped bare down to its very skeleton, and  then built back up.  Or for a more vivid example, in the Sixth Element,  Tok Pisin when it was still a pidgin is the glove they found in the  wreckage, Tok Pisin is the recreated body of the pilot.  Whereas, Modern  English is the pilot if she'd never been killed in the wreck.  More or  less.  But Tok Pisin in reality is still English, just in a radically  new format.  English on the other hand, with all the outside influences,  never got broken down to the extent that Tok Pisin did.  I hope that  that explain my line of thinking, or Ic hope hit gerecere (recount,  relate) mín thotes líne. (and it is explain, it's in the subjunctive.)

Also,  Japanese is a good indicator as well, the vocabulary is around 50%  Mandarin yet Japanese is still Japanese.  Yet we don't consider it a  creole, and the grammar is more or less simple as well, verbs don't  conjugate for number or person at all.  hanasemasu can be I, thou, he,  she, it, we, ye, they talk/are talking.  or I, thou, etc will/shall  talk.  Moreover, the past tense, I can't remember the form, can mean I  talked, I have talked, so in some respects, Japanese is even simpler  than English.  Also there is no number in the nouns, if it needs to be  indicated tachi can be attached.    Basically, English to me looks like a  very altered form of Old English or a mixed language, because of little  pieces from both French and English being attached to both French and  English words for example: royal from Old French roial being combined  with ly from Old English lic giving us royal-ly or royally, and then  there's aforementioned a three parter: afore from Old English onforan,  mention from Old French mencion, and ed from ed, ad, od.  So that's my  take on it, take if for what you will and I welcome all opinions, if you  see anything you disagree with let me know.


Before I forget, it's stated that Old English from Germanic was already dramatically reduced or was already in the process of loosing many inflexions, and this continued to the present day following the path to its logical conclusion almost very little to no inflections.


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## Dr. Fumbles

I've found out some more interesting information which supports my view that English might just be a mixed language.  1) I come to find that in Norwegian, they don't conjugate verbs at all except for some additional words, for instance: each tense has only one form, like Japanese.  2) While French has more or less six written forms, the spoken language has only three, two, or even one spoken form, plus, for the most part they don't have a subjunctive either, maybe French and English had some cross contamination from each other.  Just a thought.


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## Alxmrphi

The "Scandinavian Simplications" started to happen (on an increased degree) from 1200-1300 onwards, when Middle English was beginning to emerge.
Going back to the parent Norse, it had a lot of inflections, full system of verbal conjugation and nominal declension, and full subjunctive (as is all present in Modern Icelandic today). When we come to look at the beginnings of Old English, it, on a comparable scale was already (looking superficially) like a much reduced language in comparison to Common Nordic around 700/800AD, so I'm not 100% sure what a look at Norwegian can cast some light on the fact of English being a creole or not.

I'm not a believer of the creolisation theory, it couldn't have worked on a large-enough scale for me. Even up until the 18th century there were forms of Old(er) English present in South West England that had become levelled centuries before in the East and North parts (i.e. due to Scandinavian influence). I do believe there was significant language contact in areas such as the Danelaw, and maybe even something that can be said to show signs of certain levels of creolisation, but not to the extent of how I imagine that concept properly.



> Ok, I used to think that modern English was a creole.  Not anymore.  In   its core, English is still English.  90% of the core words used are   still English/Germanic.



Over 60-70% of English's vocabularly is just from French alone, but that's not to say that 60-70% of our speech is of Latinate origin, but out of the 10-20% of English/Germanic words that we've kept in our language, out of a statistical analysis (estimation), about 80% of our language use is taken from these words. So the high figure of 'core' words shouldn't be linked to quantity in the language, because English's overall vocabulary today has a fantastically small collection of native words, but it's the frequency of them that is the high number. Obviously the words we want to say all the time (i.e. speak/the/a/is/are/of/talk/give/show/deer/cow/drink) are all of native origin, but if you pulled out a dictionary and a highligher pen that had almost run out, and you needed to highlight all the English words, that pen would probably last. I did just re-read your post and think that's what you meant by 'core'.

Regarding the dialects in England today, that's a really good argument to use (IMO) against the creolisation hypothesis.
Also, creoles typical erase a lot of quirks and things that don't make a lot of sense in the language, and it's impossible to say English isn't without its fair share of anomolies, another good argumenet against it.


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## Dr. Fumbles

Alxmrphi said:


> ... I did just re-read your post and think that's what you meant by 'core'...



When I say core words I mean words such as I, this, that, etc.

By the way, what do you mean by (IMO)?


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## eli7

I think English is a "lingua franca", not a "creole". Lingua franca is a common language to ease communication. When I , as a foreign language user, go to another countries, I hope people of that country know English, because it's an international language.
Creole is a pidgine which is learned even by childern of a country. For example, some africans speak pidgin English among their people, and when it is widespread enough to be learned by the african children, it is said to be a creaole. 
I hope it helps


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## Copperknickers

Dr. Fumbles said:


> When I say core words I mean words such as I, this, that, etc.
> 
> By the way, what do you mean by (IMO)?



'IMO' is an acronym standing for 'in my opinion'. 

But I definitely think that English is a creole-type language. It is comparable to Caribbean English creoles such as that spoken in Jamaica: it is basic English grammar, simplified, and subjected to a barrage of vocabulary changes and additions enacted by speakers of a foreign language. 

If you chart the development of English, its transition from a Germanic language mutually intelligible with Old Dutch and Danish to a unique Latinised language comes in the 13th and 14th Centuries, when the élite switched from being native French speakers with no knowledge of English, to being native English speakers, within just five generations give or take. There are instances of late 14th century noble children being unable to converse with their Francophone grandparents and great grandparents.

It is true that Latin and French were both huge influences in their own rights, but you must remember that they were not separate, they were interlinked: afterall there were few people in Medieval Britain who spoke Latin as an everyday vernacular language, many if not most Latin speakers were Francophones, until the fall of French. If you look at late Old English literature from after the Norman invasion and before the switch from French (and you will notice how hard it is to even find any examples of it, such was the chasm between the literate Romance elite and the largely illiterate Germanic peasants) you will notice a monumental shift in the English language from when it became creolised: the French élite learning the previously unknown language of the peasants as a foreign language, and then making the resulting pidgin into a native tongue. 

Take this example from Layamon's 'Brut', a work written circa 1200, well after the Norman Conquest and into the Middle English period: 

_  'Hofan heore, stefnan streama, drihten, 
   hofan and hlynsadan hludan reorde'. _

Now compare that to some Chaucer, written less than 200 years after, with no alteration but the removal of the Anglo-Saxon runic letters Thorn, Eth and Yogh: 




'Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye'


Now it is true that there had been some considerable shift away from inflection and complex grammar already by that time, and there had been some Latin and Norse introduced, but the Middle English of the élite was almost a different language from the so called Middle English of just 150 years before (look at English from 1800 or even 1700 - is it that different from that of the 2000s ?)

It is clear therefore that today's English is not a true descendant of Old English from a thousand years' unbroken continuity: it is a creole language created by Francophone settlers who imposed their new language upon the lower classes, and which pretty much destroyed Old English except for the immutable core of everyday words. The simplified view of Old English 'developing' through the years into Middle English is a fallacy, it is as simple as that.


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## Ironicus

Well now, I don't agree that English is a creole, but I come late to the discussion so I won't go into it.
I have heard some languages described as creolized pidgins, so if we accept English as a creole, then American English is about to become the first pidginized creole in history!


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## vince

Copperknickers said:


> It is clear therefore that today's English is not a true descendant of Old English from a thousand years' unbroken continuity: it is a creole language created by Francophone settlers who imposed their new language upon the lower classes, and which pretty much destroyed Old English except for the immutable core of everyday words. The simplified view of Old English 'developing' through the years into Middle English is a fallacy, it is as simple as that.



This is what I was arguing when I started this thread back in the 19th century. But if a creole must necessarily develop from a pidgin, then English isn't a creole. It was always the native tongue of the majority of people in England, AFAIK. I don't know whether Norse influence was enough to be the primary cause for English having a simple grammar. Are there really other Indo-European languages that are as "analytic" (as opposed to "synthetic") as English? Are there other languages where more than 50% of vocabulary is not native in origin? (Japanese? Urdu?) Even if English is not a creole, I wonder if there is a special name for a language like English.


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## LilianaB

English is not a creole, if you have in mind literary language, not the International English popular nowadays on the internet, which might be pidgin. It has a lot of loans, but it is not creole since it did not develop from pidgins.


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## mataripis

For me English language is not a creole in the sense that it allows to incorporate loan words from older languages and it become a poly vocab language w/out changes in its sentence patterns. The creole part of English are pronounciation of the words.The pronounciation of english words do not follow the ways (phonemes?)of its sister languages in Europe.


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## Hulalessar

To answer the question: "Is English a creole?" you need first to agree on what is meant by "creole" and then consider whether English fits the definition.

Linguists describe how two or more languages interact in various ways: pidgin, creole, mixed language, code switching, sprachbund and just plain borrowing, and use words such as substrate, superstrate and adstrate. All tend to involve a matter of degree.

Whilst attempts have been made to define creoles in terms of typology, "creole" is more than anything a word which implies how a language came about rather than what it is like.  Where the speakers in Group A (who may speak more than one language) come into contact with the speakers in Group B (who all speak the samelanguage) they may develop a simplified form of communication with elements from the languages in both groups for use in limited contexts. This simplified form of communication is a “pidgin” and is only used for communication between speakers of different languages, whether in Group A or B. If  Group A abandons the language(s) that went to make up the pidgin and the pidgin is developed and eventually becomes the only means of communication between members of group A  it is a “creole” which, if Group B is still around, may or may not be adopted by  Group B as their sole or main means of communication. Whether or not Group B is still around, their language may still survive in the community and if that is the case then there is likely to be a continuum with the creole at oneend and the language of Group B at the other.


Contrasted with that situation is where one language borrows heavily from another but does not change its phonology, morphology or syntax.


The two situations are not mutually exclusive.


Languages generally accepted as creoles are languages whose history is known. Indeed,  the term tends to be restricted to the speech forms of those who forbears were enslaved or colonised by European powers. When it comes to English we simply do not know enough to assert with authority whether the pidgin to creole process described above took place. During the period when any creole would have arisen few people were literate and there was little record made of the way people spoke. Texts were written either in Latin, Norman French or (at least early on) Old English, which by then was essentially a written standard.


It is of course important to remember that the things which have happened to English over the last 1500 or so years – notably loss of inflection and heavy borrowing - have also happened to other languages which are not considered to be creoles. Changes may be explained as being the result of normal language change or contact with other languages. Ignoring borrowings from Latin and the possibility of a Celtic substrate, the language brought to Britain by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes suffered two “assaults”.


The first was when the country was invaded and settled by Norse speakers. Norse and Old English had some degree of mutual intelligibility It is probable that neither community bothered to learn the language of theother and that when communicating they just got on as best as they could. It is possible that communication involved dropping inflections and this may or may not have caused or accelerated the loss of inflection in English. In areas where the two communities interacted regularly younger people may have started to adopt the way older people spoke to Norse speakers as their normal way of speech. So, whilst simplification (meaning reducing inflections) may have been involved, the process would have been gradual; father and son in each succeeding generation would still have essentially been speaking the same language. It cannot be said with certainty that it was a case of Old English and Norse speakers agreeing a common form of simplified speech which was adopted and  built up again.


Whilst English and Norman French were not mutually intelligible, it is possible to imagine a similar process occurring in the years after the Norman conquest.


I would describe a creole as like a soup where all the ingredients have been blended and a language that has borrowed heavily as like a mixed salad. In the former the ingredients cannot be separated and in the latter they can. Modern English is perhaps like minestrone; the ingredients are recognisable, but cannot easily be separated; take away any ingredient and you are left with something incomplete. English is at best only a lightly creolised language.


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## Copperknickers

Ironicus said:


> Well now, I don't agree that English is a creole, but I come late to the discussion so I won't go into it.
> I have heard some languages described as creolized pidgins, so if we accept English as a creole, then American English is about to become the first pidginized creole in history!



Actually, there are quite a lot of pidginised creoles. Most notably, London Multicultural English, which is a pidgin of Jamaican Creole and Cockney dialect English (and in the case of Asians; Panjabi, Urdu or Bengali, which is one of the strangest things could could hope to hear in your life: 'akhi, come we get arms hahs on dem kaffir bhanchods you get me?')


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## COF

*Moderator note: Threads merged.*

I think English is a creole language because it seems to have little directly in common with any other language group in Europe.

English seems a total mix of various elements of other European language groups. Grammatically it has most in common with Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, in terms of vocabulary however its majority French/Norman with more basic words being of Germanic origin, likely as a hang over from Anglo-Saxon.

Like most creoles, English has also become considerably more grammatically simplified than the languages it derives from.

In my opinion English has all the characteristics of being a creole language and as a result I don't get why it isn't classified as one.


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## NorwegianNYC

COF said:


> I think English is a creole language because it seems to have little directly in common with any other language group in Europe.


Although it depends on which definitions you use, English normally not considered a creole language. To become a creole, it must at one point have started as a pidgin, and even if English has been slightly pidginized, it is a hard position to defend based on normal criteria. English has a fairly normal clausal structure, a complex vowel system, consonant clusters, and a high number of irregular forms - verbs in particular (283), which is not a feature of creole languages


> Grammatically it has most in common with Swedish/Danish/Norwegian


Although Scandinavian has influenced English, the basic grammatical structure is common Germanic, and not North Germanic in particular. The fact that English does not look like German, is disregarding the fact that English does not descend from German. If you look at the basic grammatical features of the North Sea-languages, they have a lot in common! English did indeed borrow certain features from Norse, but it might have borrowed important syntactic features from vernacular Brythonic as well. 


> in terms of vocabulary [...] its majority French/Norman


This is largely a myth. If one were to read through an unabridged version of OED then, yes, a great number of words are of Latin and Greek origin. However, the vast majority did not come through the Normans, but entered the language at a later stage (English had also borrow from Latin prior to the invasion). And, very many of these words are technical terms that see only limited use. The majority of the words in a dictionary are words we hardly ever use, but when it comes to the words we actually use on a daily basis, Norman/French/Latin is remarkable scarce. Here is a link to the 1000 most commonly used words in English, and as you will see - it is pretty Germanic in both structure and content!


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## funnyhat

Kevin Beach said:


> I think I said only that Norman _culture_ was forced on the country, but I can see why you might interpret my second use of "forced" in the way that you have.
> 
> The thrust of my comments was that it was a fast-moving time. By 1074 eighty percent of England had been given to new owners, with their continental ideas of feudalism. The concept of individual duties owed to the community was replaced by a hierarchical dominance, in which all control rested at the top. It wasn't only William's language that mattered, but that of all the Norman counts who took over the land. It would have been impossible to communicate with one's new "Hlaford" without learning something of his language. So, when I say "forced" in relation to the language, I mean the force of circumstances, not power. Sorry to be misleading.



We should also note that William was not the last French-born king of England.  Stephen I and Henry II both grew up in France and took the throne of England as adults.  Many linguists believe that the bulk of borrowings from French actually came from Stephen's reign onward.


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## tonyspeed

Copperknickers said:


> 'IMO' is an acronym standing for 'in my opinion'.
> 
> But I definitely think that English is a creole-type language. It is comparable to Caribbean English creoles such as that spoken in Jamaica: it is basic English grammar, simplified, and subjected to a barrage of vocabulary changes and additions enacted by speakers of a foreign language.



I think you misunderstand Jamaican Creole. One of the defining factors of Jamaican creole is that its grammar is not basic English grammar at all; rather, it is substantially different in grammar. The vocabulary, on the other hand, is mostly English which has been passed through a phonetic strainer to fit the sounds reproducible by African langauge speakers.

That change in grammar makes Creole a different language in the eyes of grammaticians.

Contrast that with Urdu and Hindi which both follow the same basic grammar with different vocabulary. At the highest levels, Urdu and Hindi are not mutually intelligible. However, grammaticians view Urdu and Hindi as the same language because the grammar is essentially identical.


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## Heteronym

It's certainly a creole.

What we call modern English begins to take shape in 1066, with the Normand invasion. Suddenly you had natives who spoke what is called Old English and conquerors speaking ancient French. This inevitably resulted in the need for a simplified contact language between the two linguistically different groups, which is the common definition of pidgin. When the first generation of children grew up speaking this pidgin, it became a creole. The only reason people call it a language is because of, as linguist Randolp Quirk said, "A language is a dialect with an army and a flag." English has too much power to be a creole, which we associate with backward African nations. But if we stick to the scientific definitions of pidgin and creole and apply it to the history of modern English, there's no doubt: it's a creole.


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## Hulalessar

Heteronym said:


> It's certainly a creole.
> 
> What we call modern English begins to take shape in 1066, with the Normand invasion. Suddenly you had natives who spoke what is called Old English and conquerors speaking ancient French. This inevitably resulted in the need for a simplified contact language between the two linguistically different groups, which is the common definition of pidgin. When the first generation of children grew up speaking this pidgin, it became a creole. The only reason people call it a language is because of, as linguist Randolp Quirk said, "A language is a dialect with an army and a flag." English has too much power to be a creole, which we associate with backward African nations. But if we stick to the scientific definitions of pidgin and creole and apply it to the history of modern English, there's no doubt: it's a creole.



What are your "scientific definitions of pidgin and creole"?


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## Johnnyjohn

English only lost Gender really during the Middle English period, the Germanic features we all know and can pick out still existed such as V2. word order, become passives, and many more. It wasn't until recently that these features just dropped like nothing, if English has any cause for being simple, it had to due with things falling through the cracks in the more recent past. The normans may have invaded but they were the elite and left English to the masses, and Vikings? Old English was still well in existence after their stint. English was more of a Koine after the Normans left I guess but the real empty simplicity didn't come till later.

This is similar to the Middle Chinese Creole hypothesis where invading Mongols caused what would become Mandarin to be simplified in grammar and tones compared to other dialects, the Mongols kept their distance though, the simplification has more to do with more recent disregard for maintaining features. They can be excused as the PRC is trying to simplify Mandarin, but English speakers have more to do with what happened to their own language than foreigners. Even today a few dialectal speakers in the UK don't pronounce the "Th" sound, more will fall through the cracks, it is inevitable.


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## Kevin Beach

Johnnyjohn said:


> English only lost Gender really during the Middle English period, the Germanic features we all know and can pick out still existed such as V2. word order, become passives, and many more. It wasn't until recently that these features just dropped like nothing, if English has any cause for being simple, it had to due with things falling through the cracks in the more recent past. The normans may have invaded but they were the elite and left English to the masses, and Vikings? Old English was still well in existence after their stint. English was more of a Koine after the Normans left I guess but the real empty simplicity didn't come till later.
> 
> This is similar to the Middle Chinese Creole hypothesis where invading Mongols caused what would become Mandarin to be simplified in grammar and tones compared to other dialects, the Mongols kept their distance though, the simplification has more to do with more recent disregard for maintaining features. They can be excused as the PRC is trying to simplify Mandarin, but English speakers have more to do with what happened to their own language than foreigners. Even today a few dialectal speakers in the UK don't pronounce the "Th" sound, more will fall through the cracks, it is inevitable.



The Normans never left England. Over centuries, they assimilated. I still have my suspicion that the English class system is based on Norman supremacy ....


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## berndf

Kevin Beach said:


> The Normans never left England. Over centuries, they assimilated. I still have my suspicion that the English class system is based on Norman supremacy ....


This is certainly so. The importance of elite family names of Norman origin in modern Britain is conspicuous (see here).

By the way, the Vikings haven't left either. Northern dialects remained very strongly influenced by Old Norse which caused Old North to influence Middle English long after the end of the Danelaw, like e.g. the replacement of the Southern _eft_ by the Northern _again_.


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## Kevin Beach

berndf said:


> This is certainly so. The importance of elite family names of Norman origin in modern Britain is conspicuous (see here).
> 
> By the way, the Vikings haven't left either. Northern dialects remained very strongly influenced by Old Norse which caused Old North to influence Middle English long after the end of the Danelaw, like e.g. the replacement of the Southern _eft_ by the Northern _again_.



Yes. Some Tyneside and Teesside accents still have echoes of sounds from across the North Sea.

However, I think the Hufffpost article that you linked us to diminishes in value when one remembers that "Oxbridge" didn't come into being, in the sense of the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, until the early 13th century at the earliest. Therefore, nobody "attended Oxbridge" from the time of the Conquest.


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## berndf

Kevin Beach said:


> However, I think the Hufffpost article that you linked us to diminishes in value when one remembers that "Oxbridge" didn't come into being, in the sense of the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, until the early 13th century at the earliest. Therefore, nobody "attended Oxbridge" from the time of the Conquest.


You don't need a comparison with the 12th century. The point is that Norman family names are statistically significantly over-represented in elite-environments (Oxbridge-graduates, MPs, etc.) compared to the entire population.

Northumbrian dialects are those that maintained their Anglo-Saxon identity best among the Northern dialects and missed some Middle and Modern English sound shifts (e.g. _hūs_ instead of_ house_). The centre of Viking population in England was York.


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## SonOfAdam

To avoid talking past each other we have to separate the two questions here:

Was Middle English _technically_ a creole?, and
Was Middle English _sociologically_ a creole?

The first question leads you in the direction of asking "What proof is there a pidgin existed? Which langauge(s) were the superstrate/substrate?" and so on, and then back to the technical literature to try to work out definitions of "creole/creolisation" and "pidgin/pidginisation". In the absence of data we end up going for grammatical analyses of known creoles to make generalisations against which to measure Middle English. All very scholarly to be sure, and fascinating. But largely irrelevant in terms of the second question.

(I have a little hypothesis that Middle English is an abrupt creolisation but with an Old English superstrate and a Norman French substrate, not the other way around. It's easy to imagine a scenario where the French nobility, cut off from their roots within a generation or two, resort to mangling the English language to communicate with the peasantry. And guess what, it catches on becoz o la la ma lord is ze coolest guy in ze town, no?)

The second question leads you in a different direction. Sociologically speaking, or to a non-linguist, a creole is a new, simplified, mixed yet distinct language that emerges in a scenario where political and social upheval combines with a widespread lack of education. As a result, creoles are often stigmatised as "not proper languages".

In this sense, Middle English was _practically_ a creole for the simple fact that any reason you can give me for saying that a creole is "not a proper language" applies to Middle English. Simplified grammar? Mixed vocabulary? Language of the great unwashed? Morass of dialects with a lack of any clear standard? Thee namest it, Middle English hath it.

The reason this conversation keeps going round and round is because a lot of us (me included) have an axe to grind, namely that a creole deserves no less respect than any other language. To that end, it would be really really useful to be able to say definitively, "English is a creole", and not just "Middle English was a lot like a creole". But it ain't gonna happen.


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## Hulalessar

To SonOfAdam

You are right that there may be some resistance to the suggestion that English is a creole because the term carries a lot of baggage, including the suggestion that it is a language spoken by the descendants of those who were enslaved or colonised. The real problem though is a lack of an agreed definition. Is it about the way in which two languages interact and what happens when they do or about the social circumstances around when something new arose? Whilst sociohistorical factors cannot be excluded from linguistics, classifying languages according to the circumstances in which they arose does not seem to be very useful and must necessarily leave out many languages simply because their history is unknown.

Up to a point it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. If languages widely designated as creoles because their history is known, even if not perfectly, are described it may be concluded that all or most of them share or lack certain characteristics. The danger then is to go looking at other languages and concluding that if they look like the creoles which have been studied they must be creoles, that is at some time in the past arose in circumstances similar to those known to have existed for the accepted creoles.

Not enough is known about English to form a conclusion. Many of its features can be shown to have arisen in other languages no one considers a creole. I think we just have to accept that languages meet and interact in many different ways which are on a continuum which defies easy classification. All we can say about English is that it got beaten up by French!


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## CitizenEmpty

I don't think English is a creole. It seems that the language had gone through a very hectic series of grammatical and phonological innovations hundreds of years ago.


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## mcorazao

To be clear, the hypothesis that English is a creole is a legitimate theory: see here. However this theory is highly controversial.

For a language to be a true creole, it has to have originated from some sort of _pidgin_ stage where you have speakers trying to imitate a language that they do not really know and invent a new language that superficially resembles the language they are trying to imitate while incorporating the language(s) that they speak natively. An example would be Haitian Kreyol which arose among the African slaves trying unsuccessfully to learn French.

The English creole theory says essentially that old English gradually died out and that the Normans invented a new language in trying to communicate with their subjects. A similar argument has been made regarding the Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French). The Goth conquerors of the Western provinces had learned Latin during the earlier times when they had served in the Roman armies or otherwise traded with the Romans but the language their Latin was more of a pidgin than true Latin. As they took over the Roman lands their bastardized Latin became the basis for the modern languages, which is why the Romance languages resemble each other far more than they resemble Latin. These conjectures, while clearly having some degree of validity, are not completely accepted and scholars therefore do not fully embrace calling these languages creoles.


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## Kevin Beach

mcorazao said:


> To be clear, the hypothesis that English is a creole is a legitimate theory: see here. However this theory is highly controversial.
> 
> For a language to be a true creole, it has to have originated from some sort of _pidgin_ stage where you have speakers trying to imitate a language that they do not really know and invent a new language that superficially resembles the language they are trying to imitate while incorporating the language(s) that they speak natively. An example would be Haitian Kreyol which arose among the African slaves trying unsuccessfully to learn French.
> 
> The English creole theory says essentially that old English gradually died out and that the Normans invented a new language in trying to communicate with their subjects. A similar argument has been made regarding the Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French). The Goth conquerors of the Western provinces had learned Latin during the earlier times when they had served in the Roman armies or otherwise traded with the Romans but the language their Latin was more of a pidgin than true Latin. As they took over the Roman lands their bastardized Latin became the basis for the modern languages, which is why the Romance languages resemble each other far more than they resemble Latin. These conjectures, while clearly having some degree of validity, are not completely accepted and scholars therefore do not fully embrace calling these languages creoles.


This is interesting. It seems to be an argument that a form of Latin evolved, just as Koine Greek evolved.


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## Hulalessar

Is it not an essential feature of a creole, that distinguishes it from other ways languages meet and interact e.g. mixed languages, that two languages meet and are reduced to the absolute minimum needed for basic communication and then a new language arises from the mix with its own features not found in either parent language? The Germanic and Romance elements of English are clearly identifiable. English may have some peculiarities not found in any other language, but what language does not have peculiarities not found in any other language? If the Romance languages are creoles then what about all those languges which have massive borrowings from other languages? I am beginning to think that "creole" is not a useful category.


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## Oranje

The usual argument for English as a creole is that it's a creole of Danish and Old English and not a creole of English and French which is demonstrably false. Danish influence is sometimes used to explain the simplification of English morphology.


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## Pedro y La Torre

Oranje said:


> The usual argument for English as a creole is that it's a creole of Danish and Old English and not a creole of English and French which is demonstrably false. Danish influence is sometimes used to explain the simplification of English morphology.



Old Norse certainly did play a role in the grammatical levelling of English. But I still don't see how that makes it a creole.


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## sumelic

Hulalessar said:


> Is it not an essential feature of a creole, that distinguishes it from other ways languages meet and interact e.g. mixed languages, that two languages meet and are reduced to the absolute minimum needed for basic communication and then a new language arises from the mix with its own features not found in either parent language? The Germanic and Romance elements of English are clearly identifiable. English may have some peculiarities not found in any other language, but what language does not have peculiarities not found in any other language? If the Romance languages are creoles then what about all those languges which have massive borrowings from other languages? I am beginning to think that "creole" is not a useful category.


The Romance elements of English that are clearly identifiable are not evidence against it being a creole, because the standard non-creole account is that English is a Germanic language, not some kind of special mixed language (actual mixed languages are supposed to be very rare), so it shouldn't have any more from French than can be accounted for by borrowings (and my understanding is that creoles, like other languages, can have borrowings).

I think some of the strongest evidence for English not being a creole is that, despite the simplifications that have occured, it still retains a significant amount of Germanic inflections. If we compare it to a stereotypical continental European language, it might seem to have an extremely simplified morpological system, but nonetheless English still retains productive and obligatory number inflection of nouns (including even a few retentions of "irregular" variant plural markers like umlaut or the "en" in "oxen"), person/number inflection of verbs (even though the productive kind only distinguishes two categories, the copula distinguishes a few more), past-present inflection of verbs (with a significant number of "irregular" verbs: more than 100 for sure), and comparative and superlative inflection of a fairly large number of adjectives.

Now, it doesn't seem to be the case that pidgins and creoles are characterized by the complete absence of inflection: in fact, there seems to be a lot of literature exploring the ways that creoles and pidgins may use inflections and other kinds of morphology in ways similar to or different from the source languages. But the retention of irregular inflectional patterns of the source language (like the English ablauting past-tense and past-participle forms) seems to be less common, and something that would be unexpected in a creole.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting the argument for English being a creole seems to me to be the loss of grammatical gender (aside from a "pronominal gender system"): this seems to be a pretty unusual development for a Germanic language and the other Germanic language without gendered nouns that I know of, Afrikaans, also seems to have some complications to its history that might lead some people to wonder if it could be called a creole.

I agree about the non-usefulness of "creole" as a category. A bare statement like "English is a creole" is not very informative without knowing why someone is saying it. It's better to give a description of what particular historical scenario is being proposed for the development of modern English.


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## ahvalj

The majority of these changes, except the complete loss of the gender and of the adjectival endings, are found in Danish, without any of the social aspects of creolization usually cited for English. No language shift or major admixture, no significant foreign domination, no anything. Moreover, most other Germanic languages, comparing with their state reflected in the earliest written records, have passed a long long way in the same direction. So, unfortunately, this is not creolization, that's the natural tendency. Comparing with other analytic languages with vowel reduction (e. g. Gallo-Romance, Brittonic, Iranic, Semitic), Germanic has passed the longest way towards the isolating typology because of its initial stress that has eroded the old grammatical markers more that e. g. in French where the verbal morphology (though much richer from the beginning) has experienced less entropy because many markers remain stressed.


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> No language shift or major admixture, no significant foreign domination, no anything.


Germanic inflexions were especially unstable in the long term due to strong tendencies towards post-tonic vowel reduction (and they happened to be always unstressed already in proto-Germanic).
However, it's hard to deny that the transition from Old English to Middle English was pretty drastic. But it's also noted that the tight contact with the Old Norse (with largely similar vocabularies but different morphology) must have been as important as the Normandian domination. Yet it was the contact between closely related languages, and that factor was rather a mere catalyst (since, undoubtedly, a lot of Old English dialects didn't have any direct contact with Old Norse by the moment they lost the most of their inflexions). So the whole process hardly can count as proper creolization.


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## ahvalj

The devolution in Danish was largely parallel: its grammar took its more or less present shape to the 15th century. I am not sure if these were the Danes returning from Britain who influenced this development after having contacted with the closely related speech there. Likewise, Afrikaans emerged before the British conquest and hence before any serious contact with English speakers. OK, English had foreign domination, Afrikaans had breakup with the old tradition due to emigration, but Danish had nothing of it. Moreover, except Icelandic, Faroese, written German and some mountain dialects in Switzerland and at the Swedish/Norwegian boundary, all other Germanic languages are only about one step behind in this development.


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## Gavril

Another factor sometimes mentioned to cast the "creole" status of languages in doubt is the presence of irregular preposition + verb combinations ("preposition" can be replaced with "affix"/"pospostition"/etc.): for example, the meaning of the verbs _understand_, _look up_, etc. cannot be guessed through the literal interpretation of their parts. English and Scandinavian both have a decent amount of these combinations.

(I'm among those who are unsure about the utility of the term "creole" in general, but the above might be interesting regardless.)


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## Kevin Beach

Perhaps we really should concentrate on the lack of usefulness in the word "creole". Given its likely origins, it perhaps has more of a political or cultural meaning than a philological sense, and would be best left out of analytical discussions:


creole | Origin and meaning of creole by Online Etymology Dictionary

créole - Wiktionary


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## Dymn

I don't know in what useful way could English be considered a creole.

In the case of Haitian Creole, it was African slaves who couldn't communicate between themselves and used a watered-down version of French as a means of communication. The vast majority of Haitian Creole vocabulary is from French through phonemic simplification, even 'function words' which quite often develop from nouns and verbs through grammaticalization.

In the case of English, the creole hypothesis would mean, I guess, that the admixture of Germanic peoples in England couldn't communicate between themselves, and abandoned their languages in favour of a simplified version of Anglo-Norman. I personally see too many flaws in this theory, both from a social and linguistic point of view.

Massive borrowing from a prestige language is nothing rare cross-linguistically, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese did it from English; and I think Arabic and Sanskrit also loaned lots of words to many neighbouring languages.


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## jimquk

Kevin Beach said:


> Perhaps we really should concentrate on the lack of usefulness in the word "creole". Given its likely origins, it perhaps has more of a political or cultural meaning than a philological sense, and would be best left out of analytical discussions:
> 
> 
> creole | Origin and meaning of creole by Online Etymology Dictionary
> 
> créole - Wiktionary



But surely we do need a term to describe these special circumstances of language formation.(As an aside, we might pause to consider how tragic those circumstances generally were.) All other natural languages are inherited through dozens of generations, being modified gradually. Although they may be learned by outsiders who may lose their own language, there is always a core of native speakers.

But creoles arise from pidgins, which have no native speakers. Children exposed to pidgin create from it a natural language, of which they are the first native speakers. Such languages have distinctive features of extremely simplified grammar and phonology, but then can go on to develop idiosyncrasies like any other natural language.

There is of course a confusion in that Creole and Pisin are used to refer to soecific creole languages, but that doesn't mean there is no process needing description here.


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## Hulalessar

jimquk said:


> But surely we do need a term to describe these special circumstances of language formation.(As an aside, we might pause to consider how tragic those circumstances generally were.) All other natural languages are inherited through dozens of generations, being modified gradually. Although they may be learned by outsiders who may lose their own language, there is always a core of native speakers.
> 
> But creoles arise from pidgins, which have no native speakers. Children exposed to pidgin create from it a natural language, of which they are the first native speakers. Such languages have distinctive features of extremely simplified grammar and phonology, but then can go on to develop idiosyncrasies like any other natural language.
> 
> There is of course a confusion in that Creole and Pisin are used to refer to soecific creole languages, but that doesn't mean there is no process needing description here.



I agree with all that, but the problem is that if "creole" describes a process we cannot always be sure when the process was involved - hence such questions as the title to this thread. What has happened is that (a) certain languages whose history is known have been identifed as creoles (b) these creoles are studied and a "creole type" is described (c) other languages are looked at and if found to conform to the type (even if not fully) the question is asked whether they are creoles. Languages meet and mix in all sorts of ways and there is no hard and fast division between the ways. The question is therefore whether "creole" is a useful category if we cannot always tell if a language which looks like a creole is a creole.

The very word creole does of course carry a lot of baggage. Perhaps a better description would be "phoenix language".


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## Dymn

The existence of grey areas doesn't make "black" and "white" useless labels.


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## Hulalessar

Dymn said:


> The existence of grey areas doesn't make "black" and "white" useless labels.



Agreed. However, we need to have a good idea of what the label signifies. Does "creole" signify a process or a type?

If a process does a pidgin stage have to be involved? If it describes a process then its usefulness has to be doubted because the history of most languages is unknown.

If it describes a type then what are the essential features which distingush creoles from non-creoles?

Would it not be better simply to acknowledge that there is a continuum. At one end there are languages which have borrowed little or nothing and at the other languages which have arisen from complex interactions. Attaching a label to any particular zone of the spectrum is in the end arbitrary, even if useful.


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## Dymn

It describes a type, formed through a process.

Various peoples need to understand each other. They mimic the prestige language. This results in a new "version" of the prestige language, mostly analytic and with some influence from substratum languages (I guess that mainly in phonology and maybe syntax), which gradually becomes the native tongue of the entire population.

If this is true, now the question is what happened from Old English to Middle English that could be meaningfully similar to this. I guess some posts have addressed this question, but I can't realistically read the whole thread. Anyway the high proportion of Germanic vocabulary really seems to speak out against the creole hypothesis.


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## Red Arrow

If British people really tried to sound French, they did an absolutely terrible job. English phonology doesn't even remotely resemble French phonology, especially compared to my mother tongue: (Belgian) Dutch. English being a creole sounds absurd to me. Where's gn, u, eu, œu, the nasal vowels etc. Granted, I don't know how French sounded like 1000 years ago, but I doubt it had all those [aɪ]'s.

To me it always looked like the English language never borrows any words from any language, it only borrows _spellings _(written words) and then native speakers are free to pronounce those words however they please, preferably in some odd way.


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## Gavril

Dymn said:


> Various peoples need to understand each other. They mimic the prestige language. This results in a new "version" of the prestige language, mostly analytic and with some influence from substratum languages



No offense, but do you think there might be a more appropriate term than "mimic" here? Maybe what you mean is "pick disparate elements from (the prestige language)"?

(If the people in question really did "mimic", i.e. copy, the language they were hearing, I don't understand why the resulting language would be characterized by the lack of concatenative elements from the source language.)


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## Dymn

Yes, I'm sure there's a better word. Anyway I didn't know "mimic" wasn't a perfect synonym for "imitate":



> To imitate, *especially in order to ridicule*.


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## overdrive1979

As a Spaniard person who speak English as a second language, after reading the whole thread I would say English is not a 100% full creole language, but looks like it suffered some changes as if the earliest step of becoming a creole language took place for a while at anytime in the past until reaching for instance 5% of whole creolle process, then stopped for whatever reasons.

Anyway, I buy the Danelaw theory as well.

I'm guessing if Frisian language suffered the same process as in some ways it resembles somewhat Scandinavian rather than pure continental Western Germanic language, although Modern Frisian it's not a simplified language like Modern English actually is.


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## sound shift

What do the academic linguists say about the matter? I don't read many, but none of those I have read describes English as a creole.


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## Red Arrow

Several people in this thread have mentioned that one reason for calling Enlgish (and Afrikaans) a creole is that it has lost grammatical gender. However, Vestjysk, a dialect of Danish, has lost it as well. Vestjysk's grammar is probably even more "simplified" than that of English, given that Danish verb conjugation is by far the easiest of all Germanic languages.

This somewhat "proves" that a Germanic language can easily turn English-like without having undergoing creolization. Right?

EDIT: According to this book, all countable words have become "common" in Vestjysk, and all uncountable nouns have become "neuter". The word for house (hus) is neuter in Danish (and Dutch, German etc.), but in Vestjysk, it's common because it's countable. The word for snow is normally common in Dutch/Swedish/Danish, but in Vestjysk, it's neuter.


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## mcorazao

Red Arrow :D said:


> Several people in this thread have mentioned that one reason for calling Enlgish (and Afrikaans) a creole is that it has lost grammatical gender. However, Vestjysk, a dialect of Danish, has lost it as well. Vestjysk's grammar is probably even more "simplified" than that of English, given that Danish verb conjugation by far the easiest of all Germanic languages.
> 
> This somewhat "proves" that a Germanic language can easily turn English-like without having undergoing creolization. Right?



I don't know about "prove" but certainly it is definitely true that a language can undergo any type of change without requiring creolization. The main thing to consider is that when you see sudden and dramatic shifts between a parent language and a supposed child language, this often indicates some degree of creolization. Mind you, creolization is not always an all-or-nothing proposition. There can be degrees to it. The loss of gender is only one small part of the shift in the case of English. The nearly complete loss of the case system is even more significant as is the general shift in the grammar/syntax to blend French and Germanic styles (e.g. the fact that English now mostly forms its plurals like French instead of like German). These things in and of themselves do not "prove" that creolization happened either, but it seems difficult to explain such dramatic and abrupt shifts without creolization.


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## Red Arrow

mcorazao said:


> The nearly complete loss of the case system is even more significant as is the general shift in the grammar/syntax to blend French and Germanic styles (e.g. the fact that English now mostly forms its plurals like French instead of like German).


Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Frisian and Afrikaans have also lost the case system. It is typical of Germanic languages. It has got nothing to do with French.


mcorazao said:


> (e.g. the fact that English now mostly forms its plurals like French instead of like German)


Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans also use plural "s", and just like in English, that letter is pronounced. Some Scandinavian languages also used to have plural "s", apparantly.

In French, however, plural "s" is silent. _Garçon _and _garçons_ are pronounced exactly the same. You have to use different articles (des, les) to make clear that it's plural. It is nothing like English.

Unfortunately, I don't know when the "s" become silent in French, or how French was like in 1066.


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## mcorazao

Red Arrow :D said:


> Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Frisian and Afrikaans have also lost the case system. It is typical of Germanic languages. It has got nothing to do with French.
> 
> Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans also use plural "s", and just like in English, that letter is pronounced. Some Scandinavian languages also used to have plural "s", apparantly.
> 
> In French, however, plural "s" is silent. _Garçon _and _garçons_ are pronounced exactly the same. In spoken French, plural is denoted by a different article. It is nothing like English.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't know when the "s" become silent in French, or how French was like in 1066.



Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans only use the 's' plural for some words. In the case of Afrikaans it is specifically because of the influence of English in South Africa. It did not happen independently.

The devoicing of letters in French was a gradual process but in general the devoicing of the final 's' has just in been in the last few hundred years. For what it is worth, the 's' is not entirely devoiced either in French (e.g. _garçon _and _garçons_ are not pronounced the same in all contexts), but that is another rabbit hole ...


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## Red Arrow

mcorazao said:


> Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans only use the 's' plural for some words. In the case of Afrikaans it is specifically because of the influence of English in South Africa. It did not happen independently.


Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch. The Dutch already had that ending before moving to South Africa.

In Dutch, the following words get plural "s":
-words with a schwa in the final syllable
-words that end with a, e, i, o, u, y
-words that end with these suffixes: -aar, -aard, -eur, -ier, -oor (a long vowel + r)
-recent loanwords from English
-words that end with the Greek suffix -foon

Low German also uses plural "s". It ultimately comes from Germanic case endings.


mcorazao said:


> The devoicing of letters in French was a gradual process but in general the devoicing of the final 's' has just in been in the last few hundred years. For what it is worth, the 's' is not entirely devoiced either in French (e.g. _garçon _and _garçons_ are not pronounced the same in all contexts), but that is another rabbit hole ...


Devoicing means "not trilling your voice box". I think you mean "dropping".


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## Red Arrow

So far I can only conclude that this sentence is wrong:


mcorazao said:


> These things in and of themselves do not "prove" that creolization happened either, but it seems difficult to explain such dramatic and abrupt shifts without creolization.


All of these "dramatic and abrupt shifts" happened in several other Germanic languages as well.


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## mcorazao

Red Arrow :D said:


> Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch. The Dutch already had that ending before moving to South Africa.
> 
> In Dutch, the following words get plural "s":
> -words with a schwa in the final syllable
> -words that end with a, e, i, o, u, y
> -words that end with these suffixes: -aar, -aard, -eur, -ier, -oor (a long vowel + r)
> -recent loanwords from English
> -words that end with the Greek suffix -foon



Yes, the point is that the limited use of 's' endings for plural forms in some Germanic languages are different issue from the fact that English picked up the almost exclusive use of 's' endings from French. The two really do not seem to have had anything to do with each other. This major shift in the language, coupled with several others, having occurred over such a tiny span of time, seem inconsistent with normal evolution of a language, even in the presence of a strong influence like the Normans.

Mind you, something similar can be (and has been) said of the Western Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.). The shift from classical Latin to Romance Latin was striking and abrupt. Germanic syntax suddenly entered Latin and the grammar was suddenly dramatically simplified. All these point to a creolization caused by the Goths and other Germanic peoples. Again, is there definitive proof? Not really, but then what sort of proof would you expect to find?


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## mcorazao

Red Arrow :D said:


> So far I can only conclude that this sentence is wrong:
> 
> All of these "dramatic and abrupt shifts" happened in several other Germanic languages as well.



I think most scholars would disagree. English is quite unique among Germanic languages, though certainly you can see smaller shifts that have some similarities to English.

Again, the creole hypothesis is still little more than conjecture, even among its supporters. I'm not arguing that anybody says it must be true, only that there are reasons to say it cannot be easily dismissed.


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## Pedro y La Torre

mcorazao said:


> Mind you, something similar can be (and has been) said of the Western Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.). The shift from classical Latin to Romance Latin was striking and abrupt. Germanic syntax suddenly entered Latin and the grammar was suddenly dramatically simplified. All these point to a creolization caused by the Goths and other Germanic peoples. Again, is there definitive proof? Not really, but then what sort of proof would you expect to find?



There was no dramatic shift from Classical Latin (which even in Cicero's time was markedly different from the Latin spoken by the masses) to so-called Romance Latin and no influx of Germanic syntax. French is not a creole in any way nor is English for that matter.


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## mcorazao

Pedro y La Torre said:


> There was no dramatic shift from Classical Latin (which even in Cicero's time was markedly different from the Latin spoken by the masses) to so-called Romance Latin and no influx of Germanic syntax.



Well, the Germanic shifts and the radical changes are well documented. But I guess you have your reasons for asserting otherwise.


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## Pedro y La Torre

mcorazao said:


> Well, the Germanic shifts and the radical changes are well documented. But I guess you have your reasons for asserting otherwise.



You will, of course, provide evidence for this claim.


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## Red Arrow

mcorazao said:


> Yes, the point is that the limited use of 's' endings for plural forms in some Germanic languages are different issue from the fact that English picked up the almost exclusive use of 's' endings from French. *The two really do not seem to have had anything to do with each other.*


This is a fallacy and I will try to explain why.

Dutch uses plural 's' in about half of all possible words that can be made. Engllish in almost all of them.

You are making it look like both endings have different origins because the rules are different. That is utter nonsense. The French verb être is used about twice as much as the Spanish verb estar. (simply because Spanish has got a second verb: ser) According to your logic, estar and être must have different origins!

Both English 's' and Dutch 's' are a renmant of the Germanic case system. The only difference is that Dutch retained a second plural 'en', but that doesn't change the origin of plural 's'.


mcorazao said:


> This major shift in the language, coupled with *several others*, having occurred over such a tiny span of time, seem inconsistent with normal evolution of a language, even in the presence of a strong influence like the Normans.


Like?

Dutch grammar got "simplified" every time people moved together, for instance when new towns were made. That is how we got rid of the case system. Same for Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Low German got almost rid of it. (Low German only had cases for singular masculine words, as discussed somewhere else on the forum)

Only High German and Icelandic retained the case system. Maybe it has got something to do with their geography? Both are quite mountainous. Iceland is completely isolated. High German was also isolated by mountains, French and Italian.


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## Olaszinhok

Does Dutch have as many verb tenses/forms as English, I mean: _I speak, I do speak, I'm speaking, I spoke, I have spoken, I have been speaking, I will speak, I will be speaking, I'll have been speaking and so on._ Obviously, most of them are analytical tenses but their proper usage is not easy at all...
For instance, German is far more simplified than English in this regard.


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## Red Arrow

No, we don't have that many.

We do have "I'm speaking", though. I am not sure if German has got that tense. (It is only used to stress that you're doing something right now, much like in French: je suis en train de parler)


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> We do have "I'm speaking", though.


Like what?


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## Olaszinhok

Yes, German has something similar, they use the adverb _gerade; Ich spreche gerade_, _je suis en train de parler_, I'm speaking, but its use is not so strict as in English.


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## sound shift

German also has "Ich bin beim Arbeiten".


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## Red Arrow

berndf said:


> Like what?


Leave me alone, I'm reading.
Laat me met rust, ik ben aan 't lezen.


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> Leave me alone, I'm reading.
> Laat me met rust, ik ben aan 't lezen.


An it would be wrong to say_ Laat me met rust, ik lees?_


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## Stoggler

mcorazao said:


> Yes, the point is that the limited use of 's' endings for plural forms in some Germanic languages are different issue from the fact that English picked up the almost exclusive use of 's' endings from French



The -s ending already existed in English before the Norman conquest: strong masculine nouns ended -as in the nominative and accusative, the most common ending and the form that became the only productive one for new words; this plural marker ended up spreading to other nouns over time.  

Incidentally, does anyone know if plural endings of Norman French in the 11th and 12th centuries were mostly regular -s endings, like modern standard French?


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## Red Arrow

berndf said:


> An it would be wrong to say_ Laat me met rust, ik lees?_


I don't think it is ever said that way. I don't know if it is "wrong", though.

The Dutch continuous construction (_aan het_ + infinitive) is not as strict as in English, as I said earlier, but in a situation like this, you really want to stress that you are reading right now and don't want to be disturbed.

-Where are the children?
-They are playing in the garden.

_-Waar zijn de kinderen?
-Die spelen in de tuin. / Die zijn in de tuin aan het spelen._

No difference here. You can choose, although I am pretty sure most people around me would still use the continuous construction.


Stoggler said:


> The -s ending already existed in English before the Norman conquest: strong masculine nouns ended -as in the nominative and accusative, the most common ending and the form that became the only productive one for new words; this plural marker ended up spreading to other nouns over time.
> 
> Incidentally, does anyone know if plural endings of Norman French in the 11th and 12th centuries were mostly regular -s endings, like modern standard French?


According to Wikipedia, the -s and -z endings were used for both singular and plural forms in Old French, depending on whether it's nominative or oblique, and whether it's a masculine or feminine word. I don't know if it was like that in Norman French as well, but the article is about the oïl languages in the North and Norman French was one of them.


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> High German was also isolated by mountains, French and Italian.


High German was never isolated. That is a very weak argument. Most High German (I.e Central and Upper German) dialects underwent about the same case reduction as Low German: Only nominative and objective cases being systematically distinguished, complete loss of the genitive and rudiments of a dative-accusative distinction. The main reason why standard German retained the Middle High German case system in its full glory is because it is was a commercial, literary and learned language. Standard German as a language of everyday conversation is a relatively new phenomenon.


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## Red Arrow

Sorry, you are right, as usual. I had no idea most High German dialects underwent the same case reduction.


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## berndf

Red Arrow :D said:


> I don't think it is ever said that way. I don't know if it is "wrong", though.
> 
> The Dutch continuous construction (_aan het_ + infinitive) is not as strict as in English, as I said earlier, but in a situation like this, you really want to stress that you are reading right now and don't want to be disturbed.
> 
> -Where are the children?
> -They are playing in the garden.
> 
> _-Waar zijn de kinderen?
> -Die spelen in de tuin. / Die zijn in de tuin aan het spelen._
> 
> No difference here. You can choose, although I am pretty sure most people around me would still use the continuous construction.


That sounds pretty much like the situation in Lower Rhinish and Ripuarian colloquial varieties of German with an "almost" grammaticalized continuous form (_Was machst Du grade? Ich bin die Blumen am gießen_): It is not really "wrong" not to use it in progressive contexts but unusual. Roughly like in 18th century English.


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## Mikbro

Ok so I know this is pretty old but as a speaker of a creole language I think this entire thing was just people pushing disagreements in definition further and further back towards the fundamentals. In any case if a Pidgin is strictly a language a contact language with no L1 speakers then why is that special. Firstly can we even say something like this reliably existed for established creole languages like my own? Can we genuinely say that the process of language change was really in a single generation with monolinguals of any of the languages with input would fail to understand? Furthermore even if it was what's so special about that? What makes this language any different from any other? Mine has an English lexifier but retains features like associative plurality, focusing through fronting and a focus marker that were present in majority of the West African Substrates and had emergent features like marking tense and aspect with preverbal particles for example. But my point is why should this simplification and changed be regarded any differently or considered special because all changes took place within a single generation rather than over 2 or 3 or 7 or 300 for that matter?


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## Mikbro

Hulalessar said:


> I think that that is exactly the point. It is a bit like insisting that a colour with 999,999 parts red and one part white must be pink because it has white in it. As I said above, there are not necessarily any clear dividing lines between creoles and non-creoles and "creole" is as much, if not more, a description of how a language came about as what it is like. When it comes to many languages the historical record is very short and when it comes to all languages is very short compared to the time that languages have been around. For all we know, Proto-Indo-European may be a creole!



Sorry I think you're missing the point here people have longed moved on from talking about what English was like to whether r not there was an OE ON pidgin or whether or not there was enough intelligibility to speak freely. And furthermore I like the argument that included the geography that English was formed on an island and these people basically had to interact with each other independently of the mainland continua that they came from. In which case does it really matter if the bridge between unintelligible forms of speech was made over 1 generation or 4? That I believe to be the nature of the issue at hand that caused this rift. 

PS there is no reason I'm singling you out here. I'm just commenting to back my previous reply and this comment happens to be the on that's at the end of my first page.


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## Mikbro

Athaulf said:


> Assuming English underwent full creolisation, how do you explain the fact that it preserved irregular verbs with ablaut, and even remnants of strong/weak adjectives for centuries after this supposed creolization should have taken place? Creole languages normally don't preserve that sort of thing. (Just look at the present-day creoles.)



Sorry what sorts of things do creole languages tend to preserve If you're saying it's too complex to preserve then I'm not convinced that's true. What makes a feature too complex? Why is changing vowels too complex and not a 4-3 copula verbal system seen in many Euro-West African creoles (Three off the top of my head are Jamaican Patwa-English lexifier, Haitian Kreyol- French lexifier, Papiamento- Portuguese lexifier)? And if the argument is that it's a feature that has not been observed to be retained then are modern creoles even comparable? How many of them were formed between just two languages where both languages had a traceable common ancestor?


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## Mikbro

Copperknickers said:


> But I definitely think that English is a creole-type language. It is comparable to Caribbean English creoles such as that spoken in Jamaica: it is basic English grammar, simplified, and subjected to a barrage of vocabulary changes and additions enacted by speakers of a foreign language.



I do not share this sentiment. Also I don't think my grammar is anything like English


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## Mikbro

Hulalessar said:


> To SonOfAdam
> 
> You are right that there may be some resistance to the suggestion that English is a creole because the term carries a lot of baggage, including the suggestion that it is a language spoken by the descendants of those who were enslaved or colonised. The real problem though is a lack of an agreed definition. Is it about the way in which two languages interact and what happens when they do or about the social circumstances around when something new arose? Whilst sociohistorical factors cannot be excluded from linguistics, classifying languages according to the circumstances in which they arose does not seem to be very useful and must necessarily leave out many languages simply because their history is unknown.
> 
> Up to a point it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. If languages widely designated as creoles because their history is known, even if not perfectly, are described it may be concluded that all or most of them share or lack certain characteristics. The danger then is to go looking at other languages and concluding that if they look like the creoles which have been studied they must be creoles, that is at some time in the past arose in circumstances similar to those known to have existed for the accepted creoles.
> 
> Not enough is known about English to form a conclusion. Many of its features can be shown to have arisen in other languages no one considers a creole. I think we just have to accept that languages meet and interact in many different ways which are on a continuum which defies easy classification. All we can say about English is that it got beaten up by French!


 
Ok here it is. This is what I was searching for. This reply that really made me consider whether or not it should really matter whether this bridging occurred in a single generation or not. It seems like just another way of trying to shove a square peg into a round hole (or a vast multidimensional system of communication into a binary), which is neither necessary nor insightful.

PS: This is the message I meant to reply to initially after I read this entire thing but for the life of me I could not find it.


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## Mikbro

Dymn said:


> It describes a type, formed through a process.
> 
> Various peoples need to understand each other. They mimic the prestige language. This results in a new "version" of the prestige language, mostly analytic and with some influence from substratum languages (I guess that mainly in phonology and maybe syntax), which gradually becomes the native tongue of the entire population.



I might want to take issue with the use of the word mimic here, not on a personal level, but that based on what I understand a lot of this vocabulary change was forced in the case of new world creoles which I don't find to be beyond belief. Many things have been forced that have since been accepted as prestige. Anglican churches in Jamaica for example still hold government ceremonies. Another example is that nobody here in Jamaica retained a name associated with family from Africa; my own name being of Scottish origin and though I do genuinely very likely have a paternal forefather from Scotland, I doubt that's true of the entire country. Curiously though Akan day names (Like Kofi) still survived (though they lost their meaning of being related to the day of birth). 

Anyway the point of that tangent is just to say the creoles of the new world didn't necessarily develop through free adoption of a prestige vocabulary and if similar forcing was not present in the ON OE case I would not suppose that if a pidgin existed one can conclude that there should've been a more visible impact on vocabulary.



Dymn said:


> If this is true, now the question is what happened from Old English to Middle English that could be meaningfully similar to this. I guess some posts have addressed this question, but I can't realistically read the whole thread. Anyway the high proportion of Germanic vocabulary really seems to speak out against the creole hypothesis.



Uh you can, I just did, Twice and I have school in a few hours, I should really go to bed now.
But this was an insightful read and I thank you all for sharing your perspectives.


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## Hulalessar

To Mikbro

Languages are considered and accordingly classified from various angles. I think we are agreed that languages meet and mix in different ways and that there is no hard and fast distinction between the ways. However, I do not think that that necessarily means that we cannot make broad distinctions including distinctions which focus on how quickly changes take place.

We know that in historical times the following has happened in various places:

1. Two or more groups of people speaking mutually unintelligible languages have come together and a rudimentary language combining elements of the languages involved has emerged which is used for very basic communication.

2. Within a comparatively short period the rudimentary language has developed into a language which is spoken as a mother tongue capable of expressing everything its speakers need or want to say.

At least in historical times the majority of languages have not evolved in this way so it is not unreasonable to give those that have a name. "Creole" is an unfortunate name as it also has the meaning of a person of mixed European and African descent from the Caribbean and by no means all creoles arose in the Caribbean.

Creoles are of interest to linguists as they may give a clue to how language developed. The fact that the situation moves very quickly from rudimentary to fully developed language without anyone consciously making up any rules is something worth thinking about. It is not the same as a situation where an already developed language changes by absorbing elements from another language. The speed with which creoles develop suggests that once language got started among humans it may have developed exponentially. Creoles are not evidence of that, but they do make for interesting speculation.

I think it is pointless to speculate on whether languages are creoles if the relevant social history is not known in sufficient detail. The concept must always be a loose one, but sufficiently clear so as to leave room for other types of language mixing even if the boundaries are permeable.


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## jimquk

Mikbro said:


> I might want to take issue with the use of the word mimic here, not on a personal level, but that based on what I understand a lot of this vocabulary change was forced in the case of new world creoles which I don't find to be beyond belief.


I think this is an important reminder of the brutal circumstances in which pidgen languages developed, which have little in common with Old English/Old Norse. 

In one case, a language was imposed on people who were speakers of many different languages, who were essentially stripped of their own languages and forced to bring up their children with the imposed language.

In ninth century England, two closely related languages were brought into contact, and modified each other, producing the various dialects from which modern English emerged. 

Whether one calls this creolisation is a moot point, but both the social and linguistic circumstances seem quite different. 

Of course, the development of Creoles from pidgens is fascinating, and has much to tell us about the universality of human language, and the resilience of human beings, who could collectively reconstruct language when it had been taken away from them.

If we want a more modern example of a pidgen, we could look to the "Camp German" mentioned by Primo Levi and others which developed at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.


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## Hulalessar

jimquk said:


> ...but both the social and linguistic circumstances seem quite different.



Quite. I think that if "creole" is to be a useful term it has to involve the following:

· The meeting of two (and possibly more) groups speaking different languages
· The emergence of a rudimentary form of communication based on the languages involved
· The rapid development of the rudimentary language into a fully developed language 
· The adoption of the fully developed language by at least one group which abandons the language it used to speak


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## dihydrogen monoxide

How come Tok pisin didn't become a creole?


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## Awwal12

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> How come Tok pisin didn't become a creole?


Didn't it?


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## Stoggler

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> How come Tok pisin didn't become a creole?



It is a creole: it’s one of the official languages of PNG.


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## Hulalessar

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> How come Tok pisin didn't become a creole?



It is a creole. As I said somewhere above, somewhat confusingly some creoles have a name which includes the word "pidgin". See here: Pidgin - Wikipedia


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Hulalessar said:


> It is a creole. As I said somewhere above, somewhat confusingly some creoles have a name which includes the word "pidgin". See here: Pidgin - Wikipedia



Yes, that's what confused me. I always thought it was a pidgin because it had pidgin in its name. Are there any pidgins that didn't become a creole or are there new pidgins emerging?


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## Mikbro

Hulalessar said:


> To Mikbro
> 
> Languages are considered and accordingly classified from various angles. I think we are agreed that languages meet and mix in different ways and that there is no hard and fast distinction between the ways. However, I do not think that that necessarily means that we cannot make broad distinctions including distinctions which focus on how quickly changes take place.
> 
> We know that in historical times the following has happened in various places:
> 
> 1. Two or more groups of people speaking mutually unintelligible languages have come together and a rudimentary language combining elements of the languages involved has emerged which is used for very basic communication.
> 
> 2. Within a comparatively short period the rudimentary language has developed into a language which is spoken as a mother tongue capable of expressing everything its speakers need or want to say.
> 
> At least in historical times the majority of languages have not evolved in this way so it is not unreasonable to give those that have a name. "Creole" is an unfortunate name as it also has the meaning of a person of mixed European and African descent from the Caribbean and by no means all creoles arose in the Caribbean.
> 
> Creoles are of interest to linguists as they may give a clue to how language developed. The fact that the situation moves very quickly from rudimentary to fully developed language without anyone consciously making up any rules is something worth thinking about. It is not the same as a situation where an already developed language changes by absorbing elements from another language. The speed with which creoles develop suggests that once language got started among humans it may have developed exponentially. Creoles are not evidence of that, but they do make for interesting speculation.
> 
> I think it is pointless to speculate on whether languages are creoles if the relevant social history is not known in sufficient detail. The concept must always be a loose one, but sufficiently clear so as to leave room for other types of language mixing even if the boundaries are permeable.



I know this but I'm asking whether or not this conceptualization is importantly distinct among contact languages I'm aware of the existence of non-Caribbean creoles. I think the majority of creoles are non-Caribbean. However, I think the idea of the mechanism is at least a little weird. A single language used for basic communication can't become a general language without either developing and/or borrowing vocabulary and structures. What constitutes a pidgin in the first place? How rudimentary or how complex is a pidgin? This process certainly didn't happen in a single generation. My language is still adopting structures from English now. I remember when I was much younger and only exposed to English and at most the "Middle class" version of Patwa, I simply could not understand my grandparents. That changed with exposure and the realization that how we speak really isn't that different, but I have peers who would not understand my grandparents.


I'm not commenting on whether or not English is a creole, that's a pointless debate.


However I'm not certain the idea of a single generation break in intelligibility is any more special than one that occurs in 2 to 5. What's the difference if the child speaks in a way that would be unintelligible to their grandparents or in a way that their great grandparents would not be able to understand in any right, but which their grandparents could partially understand and still communicate with. And then given that, is it not more useful to conceptualize contact languages as one thing with varying degrees of rate of loss of intelligibility. And then if that is the case make conclusions about them based on how quickly intelligibility breaks. That really is my question here.

Furthermore, if Creoles really came about from a single pidginization then would one not expect each local isolated area to experience it's own pidginization? Then what explains why globally English and French creoles are so syntactically similar. I suppose each could have had come from a single pidginization on the coast of West Africa but then why the similarities with Pacific creoles? The entire process as described is just a bit fuzzy to me. Perhaps there are tendencies in how pidginization occurs given a single lexifier? I don't know but I have significant doubt about whether or not actually known creoles match the idea of a pidgin quickly becoming a language and whether or not that even is that useful a distinction to make.

As to the idea of rules being made up without conscious thought, that (at least for my language) seems a bit of an exaggeration, the majority of the features I see in my language I could ascribe to either being inherited from English or one of or multiple of the West African languages. It is not uncommon to see phrases or proverbs that are just West African but using English words so I don't think it was so much unconscious. In any case it is an interesting idea and worth investigating.


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## Hulalessar

To Mikbro

When two different ways of speaking meet things can happen without the conscious input of the speakers. Different ways of speaking in England are still very much around, but dialect/regional speech is starting to level out. Going back some 50 years the differences were more noticeable. I knew someone who joined the Fleet Air Arm. Recruits were from all over the country, some with strong regional accents. Over time the differences decreased. There was no collective decision to harmonise speech - it just happened. A similar process happens all the time in different contexts. Indeed change happens even when the meeting of varieties is not involved. I do not think anyone fully understands how or why. There seem to be two possibilities. One is that someone makes a change and everyone else decides to follow. The other is that everyone makes the same change at the same time. Both look unlikely, but the fact is that languages change.

The absolute basic point about language is that it is a form of communication. If people need to communicate they will find a way to do it. If they only need to communicate to buy and sell in a market or give instructions on simple tasks the language will be very basic. Pidgins have rules but are not complete forms of communication. If people want to communicate at a higher level they will find a way to do so and so quickly. That new speech varieties emerge over significant areas is amazing, but it happens.


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