When two different languages meet for the first time, a third language is created: a pidgin. And when the pidgin speakers have children, a more complex language forms, which is known as a creole.
This is what happened on the Colombian island of San Andrés in the Caribbean. A mixture of people who spoke English, Spanish and the African language families of Kwa and Igbo worked and lived with the native islanders. Through that exchange a creole formed, the San Andrés Creole.
Elena Benedicto, associate professor of linguistics and director of the Indigenous and Endangered Languages Lab, met a speaker of the San Andrés Creole when they were visiting to give a talk at Purdue. Benedicto has a student in her lab that is working on a Ghanaian creole that is almost the same as the San Andrés, because it also derives from English and the same African language families.
Benedicto was, obviously, excited to learn more about the San Andrés Creole, so she visited the island to gather data. She does, however, conduct her research with the "equal-to-equal" philosophy in that whatever data she is able to take from the community, she also wants to give the community something that she can provide in return.
"What I want to do is work with the community and jointly formulate some projects," Benedicto says. "How do they feel about their own cultural and linguistic identity? How can we create projects around taking pride in who they are?"
There is an adage, popularized by sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, about language that helps us understand how power is demonstrated through language.
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy."
The same could be said for creoles, too. A language (or dialect or creole) is a form of communication, but it is also a marker of culture and power. During the age of colonization, and still during the age of globalization, language denotes power.
When the Spaniards arrived to Central America, it was Spanish that became the language of government and business. In the United States, the indigenous people were forbidden to speak their native language and their children were educated in English-speaking schools. Even without a malevolent spirit, dominant languages, such as English, end up killing other languages as their populations assimilate into the dominant culture. This means that, like animal species, there are languages that are endangered and dying every day.
Currently, the San Andrés Creole is only spoken by a third of the island's population. This happened over the years as an influx of tourism and policy changes created an environment where the language didn't have the ability to thrive and be maintained.
Interestingly, some of the best preservationists of the San Andrés Creole are the native women of the island. They, unlike their male counterparts, are less likely to leave the island for work and are less likely to receive formal education in Spanish or English.
Benedicto and the Piknini Foundation is working to preserve the language for its current and future speakers. They want to create a trilingual educational system where Spanish, English and San Andrés Creole are all taught and spoken.
There is hope. In October 2017, the movie "Bad Lucky Goat" was released worldwide. Its main language? San Andrés Creole, of course. In an interview with the Guardian, the director Samir Oliveros said, "We knew from the beginning it was going to be 100 percent in creole, and in [mainland] Colombia, people don't even know that they speak creole in Old Providence.
"We wanted to showcase the island as it is - that's never been done before."
Benedicto said that as an academic, she's profoundly changed whenever she visits a new language and culture.
"They teach you more than you can contribute to them, which is very sobering for an academic," she says. "Academia thinks it is the sole proprietor of knowledge. But that's not true, these communities have their own knowledge, too."
Linguistic Fair organized by the Piknini Foundation
Last modified: December 4, 2023