Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The words Creole and creolization have been used in many different contexts and generally in an inconsistent way. “Creole” was possibly derived from the Latin creara (“created originally”). The most common historical use was the Spanish criollo , which described the children of Spanish colonizers born in the Caribbean. The French transformed the word to créole . However, the racially exclusive definition, which confined the term to whites in colonial societies, had already been challenged in the early eighteenth century and referred also to indigenous people and other immigrants who had acquired metropolitan manners, cultures, and sensibilities. The major form of acculturation was to adapt the language of the superordinate group – principally the French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Portuguese. Using a European acrolect and an African or indigenous basilect generated many Creole languages. These are different from pidgins (simple contact languages) in that they have an elaborated lexicon and become mother tongues. “Creole” has adjectivally been applied to music (especially jazz), dancing, cuisine, clothing, architecture, literature, and art; there are even creole fish, flowers, and pigs. More recently sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies theorists have seen that creolization can be used in a much richer sense, alluding to all kinds of cross-fertilization that ... log in or subscribe to read full text