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The Low Countries are famous for their radically changing landscape over the last 1,000 years. Like the landscape, the linguistic situation has also undergone major changes. In Holland, an early form of Frisian was spoken until, very roughly, 1100, and in parts of North Holland it disappeared even later. The hunt for traces of Frisian or Ingvaeonic in the dialects of the western Low Countries has been going on for around 150 years, but a synthesis of the available evidence has never appeared. The main aim of this book is to fill that gap. It follows the lead of many recent studies on the nature and effects of language contact situations in the past. The topic is approached from two different angles: Dutch dialectology, in all its geographic and diachronic variation, and comparative Germanic linguistics. In the end, the minute details and the bigger picture merge into one possible account of the early and high medieval processes that determined the make-up of western Dutch.

Historical linguistics, Germanic languages, Dutch

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This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity.

Linguistics, Anthropology, Antropological linguistics, Austronesian languages

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The present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Missing Spanish Creoles, the current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of black slavery. This book proposes the 'Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis', which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.

Theoretical linguistics, Contact linguistics, Creole languages, Spanish

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This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

Theoretical linguistics, Historical linguistics, Pidgin and Creole languages, Contact linguistics, Language typology