Short description: A simple language game, enriched by a suitable contact ecology, predicts the emergence of creole languages in agreement with real data.

Abstract:

Creole languages offer an invaluable opportunity to study the

processes leading to the emergence and evolution of Language, thanks

to the short--typically a few generations--and reasonably well defined

time-scales involved in their emergence. In many well-documented

cases, creoles emerged in large segregated sugarcane or rice

plantations on which the slave laborers were the overwhelming

majority. Lacking a common substrate language, slaves were naturally

brought to shift to the economically and politically dominant European

language (often referred to as the lexifier) to bootstrap an effective

communication system among themselves.

Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages

originated in the

contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th

centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic

and Indian Ocean, where detailed census data are available.

Without entering in the details of the creole formation at a

fine-grained linguistic level, we aim at uncovering some of the general mechanisms that determine the emergence of contact languages, and that successfully apply to the case of creole formation.

We demonstrate a dynamical processes leading to the emergence and stabilization of

creole languages,

suggesting ways in which modeling can be

used as a research tool to clarify accounts of where creoles emerged

and what specific ecological factors explain why they did not emerge

elsewhere.

We judged the language games framework as particularly suitable for this

task since it simulates how a population of individuals can bootstrap

linguistic consensus--on cultural timescale--out of the local

interactions of pairs of individuals. Inspired by the Naming Game

(NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about

the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction

network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and

Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to

discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that

did not, with a surprising accuracy (Fig.~\ref{res}).

We submit that these tools

could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena

in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language

competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.

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Citation:

Tria F., Loreto V., Servedio V. and Salikoko S. M. (2016). Modeling The Emergence Of Creole Languages. In S.G. Roberts, C. Cuskley, L. McCrohon, L. Barceló-Coblijn, O. Fehér & T. Verhoef (eds.) The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11). Available online: http://evolang.org/neworleans/papers/89.html