Emergence of Creole Languages (2012), edited by Dr. Nicholas Faraclas, is a new edition recently published by the Amsterdam-based John Benjamins Publishing Company. The essays center on how certain historically-new Caribbean, Pacific, and Houma-French languages originated.

Lasana M. Sekou (Offshore Editing Services) reports that leading St. Martin linguist Dr. Rhoda Arrindell has co-authored two chapters of the new book. The two chapters she co-authored are “Sociétés de cohabitation and the similarities between the English lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic and the Pacific: The case for diffusion from the Afro-Atlantic to the Pacific” (with Faraclas) and “Marginalized peoples and Creole Genesis: Sociétés de cohabitation and the Founder Principle” (with Cándida González-López). Dr. Arrindell, the former minister of education and culture of St. Martin (South), wrote her doctoral thesis on language, culture and identity in St. Martin.

The other joint authors of the two essays, along with the lead authors and Dr. Arrindell, are Micah Corum, Jean Ourdy Pierre, Lourdes González Cotto, Pier Angeli LeCompte Zambrana, Diana Ursulin Mopsus, and Marta Viada Bellido de Luna.

Agency in the Emergence of Creole Languages explores and discusses “The role of women, renegades, and people of African and indigenous descent in the emergence of the colonial era creoles,” according to Dr. Faraclas. A professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Faraclas is an internationally respected linguist.

According to an interview with Sekou, the book presents fresh perspectives on the process of creolization of language. It also “focuses on peoples that are often made invisible in colonial and neo-colonial history, and that have too often been silenced in linguistic accounts of how creoles—such as Haitian, Papiamento, Kwéyòls of the eastern Caribbean, and Sranan Tongo—came about.”

For original article, see http://notes.marist.edu/mail4/iromero.nsf/0/dac110928020150f100e925e5d6c4b4c/Body/M2.2/OESnews12-DrArrindell_EssaysInBook.pdf?OpenElement

For more information, see http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/cll.45/main