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: 2,3, 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.