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Connections between sociolinguistics and pidgin–creole studies

If one were to ask what subfield of linguistics the study of pidgins and Creoles was most closely associated with, the most likely answer would be sociolinguistics. Not everyone would agree that this is the ideal classification Bickerton (1976: 170) observed that most pre-1970 work was purely descriptive or concerned with origins, and much current work still falls in these categories — but it is undoubtedly the most common one. In this paper I will attempt to explain and assess the connections which have existed between sociolinguistics and pidgin-creole studies to date and consider their future prospects. One reason for the interconnections between these areas is that many of the leading scholars working on pidgins and Creoles have themselves been sociolinguists or have focused at least part of their work on sociolinguistic issues. The list begins in the late 19th century with Schuchardt, who focused on Creoles as part of a larger interest in processes of language mixture (Meijer and Muysken 1977: 27); it includes John Reinecke and his sociologically oriented M.A. and Ph.D. theses in the 1930s; and it really takes off from the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars like Alleyne, Bickerton, Cassidy, Christie, Craig, DeCamp, Hall, Hancock, LePage, Mühlhäusler, Samarin, Sankoff, Tsuzaki, Valdman, Winford, Wurm, and others begin describing pidgins and Creoles from the perspective of their sociohistorical development, synchronic variation, social status, or educational and political implications. Equally important has been the influence of leading sociolinguists who, although not themselves creolists, turned to pidgins and Creoles for examples of specific sociolinguistic processes and types, or cited them as challenges to dominant, nonsociolinguistic conceptions of language structure and change. This list includes Weinreich, the acknowledged authority on the study of languages in contact; Ferguson, who included Haitian Creole and Standard French (1959) in his defining of cases of diglossia and remains interested in pidgins as part of a more general interest in simplifying registers and foreigner talk; and Labov (Weinreich's student), who has contributed unpublished but influential studies of tense-aspect in Tok Pisin and Hawaiian Creole and