Pour une nouvelle lecture des anciens documents en langues créoles

Early written documents are of high value for understanding the history and evolution of Creole languages. The problem is that they were not written by monolingual Creole speakers but by educated European people, and the language itself is closer to the European lexifier language than to modern Creole languages. In search for a sounder evaluation and understanding of these documents, the present paper is approaching them with four questions: Who are the authors of the documents? Who are the intended readers? What are the topics of the texts? And finally, how do they write? The study is based on documents from several French based Creoles and from Carriolse or VIDC (formerly called Negerhollands), the Dutch based Creole of the formerly Danish Virgin Islands, a now extinct Creole which was written and documented in missionary contexts in the 1740ies, earlier than the French based Creoles. The result of our study is that the ancient texts do not reflect the “true Creole” as it was spoken by the slaves, but rather a “Europeanized” version, intended to be understood by European readers. This does not diminish the value of the texts, but it must be taken into account for their reading and interpretation. A question which arises here is if the written Creole could have influenced the evolution of spoken Creole; if, for instances, it might have contributed to the loss of African words which the writers of the documents did not write because they did not know how to write them

Context (archaeology) · Exposition (narrative) · Presentation (obstetrics) · Subject (documents) · Cultural Identity and Heritage · Diverse Cultural and Historical Studies · Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies

• The Early Stages of Creolization

  Jacques Arends•Early Stages of Creolization•1996

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• Early Creole Writing and its Effects on the Discovery of Creole Language Structure

  P Stein•Early Stages of Creolization•1996

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• Language Contact in the Danish West Indies

  Robin Sabino•Language contact in the Danish…•2012

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