John Holm and Creole Linguistics
Linguists who meet John Holm today, a newly retired Professor Catedratico with a chair in English Linguistics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and one of the most eminent creolists in the world, might imagine that his path to academic prominence must have been the usual sort of straight-line progression: high school to college to graduate school, followed by tenure-track academic employment and a steady climb through the ranks. This would be a mistake. John’s career path has been impressive indeed, but far from ordinary. He came to languages and to creoles early, but mostly not in classrooms. His background doesn’t immediately suggest adventure. John was born in 1943 and grew up in Jackson, Michigan, which is not the most exotic of towns. His family was hardly the monolingual and monocultural Midwestern stereotype, however. His Danish father was a much travelled electrical engineer — he lit up Islamabad — and an ex-sailor; his mother’s family descended from the Volga Germans who were taken to Russia by Catherine the Great, and she made sure her children knew about German culture. Both parents valued the languages of their original home countries, and all the other languages they met on their travels. They also leaned left in their political views, which made life dicult during the Communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s; so at one time they considered moving to Uruguay. This plan inspired the whole family to study Spanish, and John remembers the excitement of using the language to open up new perspectives later during a family vacation trip to Mexico. By the time John reached high school his interest in languages was firmly established, and he studied German, Spanish and Russian. A short-lived summer job in Arizona in 1961 evolved into an impromptu hitch-hiking trip to Mexico and then Nicaragua, where he ran out of money but began his life-long journey into creole linguistics. As he describes it, ‘One of the most amazing things I discovered there was that black people from Nicaragua’s Caribbean
Central American English
This volume is about the Anglophone creoles to be found on the Caribbean coast of Central America (Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama), and its offshore islands (Providencia, San Andres and the Caymans) . The study of these Anglophone varieties is comparatively recent and based on current field work from Belize to Panama. One of the interesting features that emerges is the tentative map of diachronic and synchronic relationsships among the Anglophone creoles of the Caribbean, as illustrated partly by the lexicon and partly by grammatical constructions. The studies in this book are based on phonetic transcriptions of speech acts in their social and linguistic context.
The Relationship of the Speech of American Negroes to the Speech of Whites
ALMOST without exception, any scholar studying American Negro speech, whether as an end in itself or as part of a larger project, must dispose of two widely held superstitions: (1) he must indicate that there is no speech form identifiable as of Negro origin solely on the basis of Negro physical characteristics; (2) he must show that it is probable that some speech forms of Negroes-and even of some whites-may be derived from an African cultural background by the normal processes of cultural transmission. Such a necessity of refuting folk beliefs seldom arises when one is studying the English of other American minority groups. For these, it is generally assumed, though not necessarily in the terms anthropologists would use, that all linguistic patterns are culturally transmitted, that where a group with a foreign-language backgroundsuch as the Pennsylvania Germans-has been speaking a divergent variety of English for several generations in an overwhelmingly English-speaking area, there is nothing in their speech that cannot be explained on the basis of the culture contacts between the speakers of two languages. We are generous in recognizing Scandinavian linguistic survivals in Minnesota and the Dakotas, German in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley. We do not explain this influence on the basis of Scandinavian hair color, German skull configuration, or Dutch mouth shape, but on the grounds that two languages were spoken side by side, so that bilingualism developed in the community.' In forming judgments on the speech of the American Negro, however, the process has been reversed: the cultural transmission of speech forms of African origin has been traditionally denied, and the explanation of