[Bioundgrd] Fwd: New Class: Creole Languages & Caribbean Identities

[Janice Chang]

>
>____________________________________________________
>
>24.919, CREOLE LANGUAGES & CARIBBEAN IDENTITIES
>(HASS Credit)
>Taught by Prof. Michel DeGraff
>Offered in Spring 2005
>Meets on Tuesdays from 2-5 in Bldg. 1-277
>
>The Creole languages spoken in the Caribbean are linguistic
>by-products of the historical events triggered by colonization and the
>slave trade in Africa and the "New World". In a nutshell, these
>languages are the results of language acquisition in the specific
>social settings defined by the history of contact among Africans and
>Europeans in 17th-/18th-century Caribbean colonies.
>
>One of the best known Creole languages, and the one with the largest
>community of speakers, is Haitian Creole. Its lexicon and various
>aspects of its grammar are primarily derived from varieties of French
>as spoken in 17th-/18th-century colonial Haiti. Other aspects of its
>grammar are due to the influence of African languages, mostly from
>West and Central Africa. Yet other properties seem to have no
>analogues in any of the source languages.
>
>Through a sample of linguistic case studies using Haitian Creole and
>other Caribbean Creole languages, we will explore creolization from a
>cognitive, historical and comparative perspective, and we will
>evaluate various hypotheses about the development of Creole languages
>and about the role of first- and second-language acquisition in such
>development.
>
>We will also explore the concept of Creolization in its non-linguistic
>senses---through religion, music, literature, etc. Then we will
>address questions of "Caribbean identities" by examining a sample of
>Creole speakers' beliefs and attitudes about the Creole language and
>the corresponding European language and about the African, European
>and Creole components of their ethnic make-up.
>
>Interestingly, these beliefs and attitudes, many of which are quite
>un-scientific, often find analogues in scholarly texts from the past
>three centuries.  In this vein, the study of Creole languages doubles
>as an insightful case study of how scientific theories are influenced
>by---and in turn influence---both the history of the scientists'
>communities and the history of their scientific "objects".
>
>Comparisons will be made with relevant facets of African-American
>language and culture.
>
>Pre-requisites: This course does not assume any previous course in
>linguistics, though one pre-requisite is the enthusiastic desire to
>learn in class some basic tools for linguistic analysis, mostly in the
>domain of "morphology" (i.e., word structure) and "syntax" (i.e.,
>sentence structure).
>
>
>Jennifer Purdy
>Academic Administrator
>MIT Department of Linguistics & Philosophy
>77 Mass Avenue, Bldg. 32-D808
>Cambridge, MA 02139
>617-253-9372