Development and Stages of Pidgins and Creoles towards Decreolization. A Phonological Analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 23 University of Rostock (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik) course: Enriching English language: English abstract: First I will briefly portray the emergence of pidgin and creole languages and their development towards the post-creole continuum. I will examine the different types of pidgin-creole developments and the phenomenon of decreolizing - the approximation of the creole towards the lexifier by using the example of the Hawaiian Creole that I will also portray out of a socio-historical point of view. That creole is officially still called 'Hawai'i Pidgin' by its speakers but I will avoid using that term in my paper. Therefore the term Hawai'i Creole English short HCE is more appropriate. Furthermore I will deal with HCE's phonology especially with its difference to Standard English in detail - due to the question whether HCE is decreolizing or not. As Norval S. H. Smith states creole phonology is a neglected field and younger languages have the tendency to be not as much irregular as elder language tend to be.