Reimagining Creole Communities

This volume undertakes a reimagination of Creole communities in the Caribbean and beyond by addressing the persistent disconnect between contemporary research on Creole communities and Sociolinguistics. While it acknowledges that early interactions between these fields have been fruitful, especially in understanding variation, Creole grammars and their relationship to their input languages, research on Creole communities subsequently prioritised typological and genealogical research, neglecting social meaning, speaker agency, and stylistic variation.

The book advocates for a ‘social turn’ in research on Creole communities, urging a (re)connection with contemporary sociolinguistic concepts to normalise Creoles and their lexifiers, such as English, as objects of study within broader paradigms. It embraces post-structuralist approaches, focusing on language ideologies, identity work, and indexicality, and capitalise on concepts such as ‘forcefields’ and ‘(semiotic) assemblages’ to analyse the complex interplay of linguistic, social, political, economic, and ideological influences. The exploration challenges binary or linear framings of the linguistic landscape in Creole communities, such as diglossia or (post-)Creole continua, which often fail to capture the fluid, messy realities of language use. Crucially, we critique the ‘myth of orderly multilingualism’, an ideology that misrepresents the diverseness of linguistic practices in Creole contexts by assuming languages can be neatly separated.

Drawing on insights from the English-official Caribbean, Guiana region, and the Pacific, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in Pidgin and Creole Studies, contact linguistics, World Englishes, and sociolinguistics.