Our country, which is today the Dominican Republic, is a Spanish speaking country due to the historical and well known fact that the then Hispaniola Island or Santo Domingo was split into two different colonies by effect of the Aranjuez Treaty (1777), held between the two Colonial Metropolis of Spain and France thus establishing the French…

The present work is a historical/linguistic account of an unprecedented fact regarding the existence of two English Speaking Communities [British English and American English], in our country the Dominican Republic, where Spanish is the official and most used language, to the extent of being considered a monolingual nation or country. It is…

On the French Guiana-Suriname border, a hybrid space, members of the same population groups engage in circular mobility but little is known about the practices of these transnational communities. We explore how traditional emic social distinctions, modern states' language ideologies and emerging discourses in the urban context shape Maroon's…

The Vanuatu government has recently implemented a policy of vernacular literacy. Children are now to receive the first three years of schooling in a vernacular language. Needless to say, in a country with less than 300,000 people [Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2016 Accessed January 4, 2016. http://vnso.gov.vu/] and more than 100 indigenous…

Linguists use the concept of "diglossia" to describe any sociolinguistic situation where a low-prestige dialect coexists with a high-prestige one and these dialects are used in different social spheres. Recent observations on Reunion Island have challenged this view because people mix French and Creole extensively in the same utterance…

Negotiating their double identity as Mauritians and Muslims in multilingual and in multiethnic Mauritius, Mauritian Muslims have been socialised into reading and writing in Kreol in madrassahs, while they have never been exposed to Kreol literacy in mainstream education. At the point where Kreol is being introduced as an optional school subject,…

This article discusses the linguistic and sociolinguistic relationship between French and Haitian Creole, dealing specifically with: 1) linguistic similarities or differences between the two, 2) overlapping between the two languages as seen in social and stylistic variation in Creole, and 3) attitudes of Haitians towards the two languages. (Text…

Examines the process of creolization in French-based Creoles, and presents a hypothesis concerning a distinction between "nativization," or the stabilization of a pidgin when learned as a first language by children, and "elaboration," or stabilization of a pidgin when learned as a second language by adults. (AM)

This is a progress report on the first year of an experimental bilingual education project for primary education in Haiti, sponsored by the Centre Haitien d' Investigation en Sciences Sociales (CHISS), The center's goal was to carry out a scientific project, to secure the facts from emotional and political prejudice. The point is to show the…

Traces the history of the description of French Creoles, and discusses various issues in Creole description, including the notions of "mixed languages" and substratum, the relationship between Creole and French, language standardization, and the teaching of Creoles. (AM)

Explores the claims of the "dynamic" model of variation by testing against data recorded in Avion, Northern France. Parallels are drawn between "langue d'oil" areas of France and decreolization situations in which proponents of the dynamic model have generally worked. (Author/VWL)

Examines factors common to the various dialects of the French employed in Africa and demonstrates how these factors (1) determine the uniqueness of these dialects with relation to standard French, and (2) the resemblance of these dialects to African French-based Creoles. (AM)

In traditional classifications of languages by inflectional subsystems, both creole languages and the results of untutored SLA (interlanguages) are classified as isolating. We focus on remnants of verbal inflectional morphology in French-related creoles and ask: (a) Can the properties of verbal morphology be attributed to SLA, and (b) what does…

This study continues a series of reports on the work of the team which has carried out a sociolinguistic survey of multilingual communities. This study deals with an early sample of the results of the St. Lucian survey, and in particular with the extent to which they provide support for the theoretical model of linguistic choice and change, and…

This annotated bibliography of pidgin and creole languages is divided into seventeen major sections. They are: bibliographies; collective works; general and miscellaneous works; works concerning pidgins and creoles that are Italian-based, Portuguese-based, Brazilian Portuguese-based, Spanish-based, French-based, Dutch-based, English-based,…