Project description
The project analyzes the sociolinguistic and structural development of Romance-based Creoles in diasporic contexts. We are currently starting off by analyzing selected examples of French-based Creoles, but will also extend the project to Spanish- and Portuguese-based Creoles in the medium term.
Over the past decades, Romance contact linguistics has focused on studying Romance-based contact languages and varieties in situ, i.e. in regions in which they arose originally, as a result of colonial or postcolonial settings. In response to individual as well as global migrational movements, the discipline of migrational linguistics evolved from the 1990s onwards (cf. Krefeld 2004, Stehl 2011). This discipline took to the analysis of languages in motu, i.e. languages that have been transplanted from their traditional local environments to new ones. However, what has not been investigated so far is the structural and sociolinguistic development of contact languages in motu – despite the fact that the majority of creole speakers live in diasporic contexts. Our project tries to fill this gap by analyzing the development of Romance-based Creoles on the basis of the following questions:
- What happens from a sociolinguistic point of view when creole languages, often already stigmatized in their home countries, enter diasporic contexts in which they may face a situation of “double stigmatization“?
- Are there differences in the development of French-based Creoles, depending on whether the respective diasporic environment is a francophone or a non-francophone one (France, Montréal, French Guiana, etc. vs. Germany)?
- What are identifiable factors that produce divergent developments of a given Creole in different diasporic settings?
- Are there any fundamental differences in the development of Creoles and other languages that enter diasporic contexts?
By analyzing these and other related questions the project seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental principles regarding the origin and development of linguistic varieties arising in migrational contexts.