ABSTRACT
Among the large-scale dislocations in the modern world that have had tangible sociolinguistic consequences, two stand out particularly: the forced migration associated with slavery, and the semi-forced migrations associated with the system known as indenture. The first section of this chapter will deal with the slave trade and its consequences for language maintenance and new language formation. To keep a tight focus, the section will concentrate on slavery from out of Africa into the ‘New World’ as controlled by Europeans from the 15th century on. The resulting field of pidgin and creole linguistics remains one of the major branches of contact linguistics and sociolinguistics. The chapter will examine slavery in the light of migration and summarise current linguistic thinking about the origins and development of pidgins and creoles. This is a complex field in which it is rare to find major scholars in agreement over conceptualizations of contact and its outcomes. The main theories that will be outlined are the Life Cycle theory (Robert A. Hall Jr.), the Bioprogramme (Derek Bickerton), Gradualism (John Singler, Philip Baker, Jacques Arends), Genetic Parallelism (Salikoko Mufwene), Anti-exceptionalism (Michel DeGraff), and its opposite, Exceptionalism (as espoused by John McWhorter). For all the internal disagreements, pidgin and creole linguistics affords us with the best tools for understanding language contact among large groups of migrants. The second major section of the chapter will survey the semi-forced movements of indentured labourers from South Asia into European colonies in different parts of the world, often into the very terrains from which slaves had been freed in the early 19th century. This time language maintenance was possible, and South Asian languages survived in new forms that showed robust traces of migration, social realignments, and language and dialect contact. Chief focus will fall on comparative research on Bhojpuri, the major language of the indentured Indian diaspora. The chapter will conclude with a brief reflection on lessons for applied linguistic research and practice.
