The naming practice of new Englishes (technically, all those varieties that have resulted from the English colonial expansion) has to do more with the racial identity of those who speak them than with how these varieties developed and the extent of their structural deviations. It has little to do with how mutually intelligible they are. Here, I pursue some of these questions of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" offspring, descriptions suggested by how we have distinguished between the different varieties, especially regarding their developments. We have typically downplayed the role of contact in the case of "native" Englishes but have routinely invoked it in the case not only of creoles but also of indigenized Englishes.
The distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" is also negatively correlated with how much we have learned about the development of "new Englishes". I claim that we know more about the varieties which linguists have presented as "illegitimate offspring" or "children out of wedlock," i.e., creoles and the indigenized varieties, than we do about the "legitimate" or "native" varieties. Among the reasons for this disparity seems to be the following: in the case of indigenized Englishes, curiosity about how and why they deviate from the native varieties has led us to investigate all sorts of ecological factors that can account for their structural peculiarities. In the case of native Englishes, we have downplayed their divergence from British English(es) and the role of contact in their development, assuming that they reflect "normal" evolution according to the single-parent filiation suggested by the tradition in genetic linguistics. My
position here is that the same kinds of restructuring processes are involved in the development of both kinds of varieties, subject to varying ecological conditions, in which new dialect and language contacts play an important role. I continue to assume that, although there is no consensus on how creoles have developed, what we have learned in discussing them should help us more adequately approach the development of other English varieties.I see an undeniable correlation of race of speakers with the distinction presented in the title of this session. The legitimate offspring are roughly those varieties spoken typically by descendants of Europeans around the world, whereas the illegitimate ones are those spoken primarily by populations that have not fully descended from Europeans. Those who are not happy with this dichotomic distinction may also consider distinguishing the offspring of English on a continuum. One of its poles consists of varieties which are spoken typically by descendants of Europeans and whose legitimacy has hardly ever been disputed. The other pole consists of English pidgins and creoles, which have been stipulated as separate languages, despite their speakers' claim that they too speak English. In the middle range come varieties characterized as "non-native" or "indigenized." Below, I show how pernicious this practice is, starting with how the different varieties are named.
An insidious naming tradition
The labeling of nonpidgin and noncreole varieties spoken primarily by non-Europeans tells much of the story. The term non-native is one for disfranchising the relevant varieties as not really legitimate offspring of English, because their norms are set by non-native speakers. Indeed most of the children born to such communities, as in India and Nigeria, inherit the norms set by their second-language-speaker parents, thus making clear that native competence has to do more with norm-preserving than with norm-setting. On the other hand, the term indigenized reflects the struggle for legitimizing them, a stand that is consistent with the position that every dialect has its own set of distinctive features and norms by which a speaker is identified as a typical or nontypical member of the community with which it is associated. Within this medium range of the continuum also fall varieties such as African-American vernacular English (AAVE), whose status has been alternately associated with creoles or with nonstandard dialects of English.
I submit that the main reason for this apparently nonlinguistic classification of offspring of English lies in the tradition of genetic linguistics of assuming only a single parent in the filiation of languages. Accordingly, the speciation of mother languages into daughter languages has been discussed under the assumption that no intercourse was necessary with other languages prior to the production of offspring. The typical explanation for innovative or novel structural features has been internally motivated change. That is, the relevant language has generally not been affected by the peculiarities of the other languages it came in contact with. For instance, Sarah G. Thomason and Terrence Kaufman (authors of Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics, 1988) argue that Old English would have undergone several of the changes that affected it independently of its contact with Old Norse and Norman French. Interestingly, Anthony Kroch, Ann Taylor, and Donald Ringe argue just for the opposite conclusion, consistent with the ecological approach to language evolution advocated here.
Even contact among dialects within the relevant languages seems to have been of no significant explanatory interest in traditional genetic accounts of new native Englishes. Accordingly, the Germanic languages are different among themselves presumably by some accident of patterns of speciation. Contact with other genetically unrelated languages (particularly the Celtic languages in whose territory the Germanic populations were dispersing) can putatively be overlooked, because it apparently did not affect their evolution. Neither does it seem to have mattered at all in this tradition that Proto-Germanic itself must have been internally variable, like Proto-Indo-European. Such internal variation must also have been the case later within West-Germanic and subsequently in the languages which the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons brought to England. Little attention has been paid to contacts which these languages came to have with one another in England. They bear on the emergence of Old English, even if we argue that the influence of Celtic languages on these beginnings of the English language are negligible. It is just strange that Anglicists have generally overlooked the fact that the Celts inhabited England before the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons colonized it and imposed their language varieties. Thus, it is disputable that internally motivated change and ecology-free speciation have explained everything about the evolution of English. Unfortunately, the same tradition has led them to suggest in the development of new, "native" and "non-native," Englishes processual differences which are artificial from a genetic point of view.
