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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   292 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 27, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

During this holiday season, are you interacting with any far-flung relatives who speak strange creoles/patoises/pidgins of your language? Do you think that such modes of speech should be considered proper languages in which their inhabitants can take pride, or merely disgusting bastardized dialects suitable only for reassimilation into the mother tongue? As a USAian with several relatives (mostly from Trinidad and St. Croix) who speak English with a very thick accent, and at least one (IIRC, from Antigua) who probably can be considered a speaker of creole rather than of English proper, I am inclined toward the latter opinion.

(I'm putting this in the Thursday thread rather than in the Friday thread because it seems like a culture-war topic. See, e. g., the laughs that /pol/ extracted from BBC Pidgin a while ago.)

I don't have an answer to your question because its framing is foreign to my way of thinking, but it reminds me of the fierce reaction to when BEV/AAEV (Black English Vernacular) got its 15 minutes of fame in the 90s as "Ebonics."

The point of linguists was/is that BEV has its own sets of rules and even a consistent grammar (in the same way as other dialects). Once this hit the media, however, the appalled reaction by many in the mainstream was that the eggheads were arguing that we should teach Black English in schools. Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

As I'm sure you're aware, both "pidgin" and "creole" are neutral, descriptive linguistic terms.

Once this hit the media, however, the appalled reaction by many in the mainstream was that the eggheads were arguing that we should teach Black English in schools. Which was not, to my very clear memory of the time, what anyone was actually arguing.

This slippery slope should not be totally written off. Creoles have been made co-official languages by a few Caribbean governments (Haiti and the Dutch "constituent countries" of Aruba and Curaçao), and politicians have seriously proposed doing the same in the most populated Anglophone Caribbean country, Jamaica.

In the case of Papiamento at least, it seems perfectly reasonable to me. It is the mother tongue of pretty much everyone in Aruba and Curacao. It's also not readily mutually intelligible with any other language. Aruba and Curacao have devolved governments - which other language should they pick? It's not as if they don't learn other languages in school.

You can't really compare it to 'Ebonics', which is mutually intelligible with standard English and which is only spoken by a minority, and an already politically fraught one at that.

Though it probably helps that it is a Portuguese-based creole spoken in Dutch territory. Not being a Portuguese colony or ex-colony, they have no specific attachment to standard Portuguese, and it not being a Dutch-based creole means that nobody can pretend it's merely broken Dutch.

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