Pour une nouvelle lecture des anciens documents en langues créoles : qui écrit, pour qui, quoi et comment ?
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 Creo...
Salvato in:
| Autore principale: | |
|---|---|
| Natura: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lingua: | Français |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
|
| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Riassunto: | 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. |
|---|