Saramaccan, a maroon creole of Suriname, shows evidence of having a split lexicon where the majority of its words are marked for pitch accent but an important minority are marked for tone. The basic origins of this split would appear to be clear: pitch-accented words represent transfer of a European-like accent system, while tonal words represent transfer of an African-like tone system. If this is the right account, its apparent simplicity raises an important question: Why didn’t it happen more often? While a definitive answer cannot yet be given, it is suggested that a likely explanation is that the split lexicon was not a product of creolization but, rather, the result of a restricted kind of language mixing, which took place after marronage, and that this mixing was employed as a means of establishing a distinct speech variety for the nascent Saramaccan community.
2023. Word prosody of African versus European-origin words in Afro-European creoles. Linguistic Typology 27:2 ► pp. 481 ff.
Lai, Li-Fang & Shelome Gooden
2022. Language Contact, Language Ecology, and Intonational Variation in the Yami Community. Language and Speech 65:4 ► pp. 791 ff.
Agostinho, Ana Lívia & Larry M. Hyman
2021. Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?. Probus 33:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
Agostinho, Ana Lívia & Larry M. Hyman
2021. Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?. Probus 33:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
Yakpo, Kofi
2021. Creole Prosodic Systems Are Areal, Not Simple. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Bakker, Peter
2017. Typology of Mixed Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology, ► pp. 217 ff.
Bakker, Peter & Aymeric Daval-Markussen
2017. Creole typology I. In Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, ► pp. 79 ff.
Gooden, Shelome & Kathy-Ann Drayton
2017. The Caribbean. In Listening to the Past, ► pp. 414 ff.
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