Joshua Nash
A working definition of pidgin languages derived from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures is that they are non-native languages arising out of forced interethnic contacts like trade, boarding schools, and on plantations where a common language is required. They are not the main or default language of any particular ethnic, social, or political group. Pidgins have structural norms and must be learned.
Pidgins become creoles when they are nativised. Creoles are languages which have evolved in socio-historical settings of, for example, multilingual interethnic plantation societies and similar socioeconomic situations. These languages are used as native languages as they refer and relate to complex social interactions. Children are often considered the creators of creoles because they stabilise the less stable system of the inherited pidgin language. Creoles, then, are not merely hybrids or derivations of the parent languages; rather, they are entirely new languages. They have developed out of creative interpretations in situ where the linguistic needs of a people have commonly become inextricably linked to specific places and behaviours.
In the same way that creoles are not simply reinvented pidgins but entirely different languages, architectural creoles are not merely earlier forms reprised; they are newly developed vernacular forms which have been adapted, accepted, and identified with by a group of creole-speaking people into an architectural creole. This is apparent through local autochthony, embedding, aesthetic endeavouring, and a striving to make sense of a new environment. Similar to linguistic features in spoken creole languages like indefinite articles, gender distinctions in personal pronouns, and the occurrence of nominal plural markers, architectural features like gabled end façades, modular construction, and the use of stone in creole houses can exist and change in parallel with the signifying functions they intend to serve. A question arises: Do creole architectures develop in places where creole languages evolve and vice versa? I propose small island environments where creole languages and creole architectures develop are ideal case studies to measure empirically congruencies between language and architecture.
There are several possible methodological and theoretical parallels between research in the field of linguistics and historiographical architectural analysis. We can equate language development, for example, the idea that pidgins are evolving vernacular ways of speaking, with the use and reinterpretation of vernacular architectural features. Language change, for example, developing new lexicon in order to make linguistic and cultural sense of novel ecologies, can be extended to architecture by observing how inherited, technical expressions like plan, gable, and elevation features might be used more colloquially. And linguistic change and expansion in new environments, for example, how pidgins become creoles through the creolisation and expansion process with observable change in linguistic levels such as morphology, syntax, and semantics, can all be interpreted and extended analogously as a representation and embodiment of architectural change in certain physical and structural facets of domestic building. Adaption to altered environs, the capacity of complex social circumstances to bring about reordering of things, and the function of isolation and abstraction from the original sources of language and architecture are possible drivers of change.
Creole people may take a handed-down architectural pidgin, an architectural vernacular which was not native to them, with which they were entrusted in terms of architectural information and changed it in respect of form—morphology and syntax—and meaning—semantics. The previous pidgin architecture might become creole architecture. Linguistics offers several structural opportunities for analysis as regards the possibility that pidgin architectures could become creole architectures. First, that function creates structure as in functional grammar. Second, that meaning drives and creates structure, e.g. Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor. Third, Chomskyan grammar would have us believe meaning interprets structure. Fourth, Talmy Givón states that meaning is derived from discourse. The position taken here is the first, i.e. that functional objectives, both linguistic and architectural, are the driving forces of change.
These analyses explore a plausible position: architectural styles like spoken languages can change in parallel with the signifying functions they intend to serve. There are several benefits of applying theories of creole linguistics to creole architecture. These potentially offer architectural historians different ways of thinking about cultural change in architectural vernaculars across generations so that linguists, cultural anthropologists, and architectural historians might be able to work together more effectively in future.
Previous research in creole architecture claims that such buildings in the USA and the Caribbean and their broader interpretations elicit specific historic types and forms of architecture which should be analytically separated from European patterns on the basis of their distinctive creole, mixed, or hybrid planning, form, and meaning. Based in the history of creolisation research and work into creole architecture, particularly in light of the fact that some of the most comprehensive and convincing research into creolisation has taken place within creolistics, taking a more definite and exact linguistic position has proven beneficial. Regarding the question ‘how linguistic is the ‘creole’ element of creole architecture?’, it is suggested that research so far has not been overly linguistic at all. This survey advocates that future work in creole architecture should be more aware of the advancements and insights contact language linguistics and creolistics have made to the field of creolisation, and hopefully vice versa, in Australia, the Pacific, and in the Caribbean.
A more linguistically focused characterisation of creole architecture is:
Creole architecture and the process of architectural creolisation is what takes place when a group of people, especially those who themselves are culturally mixed, inherit often due to relocation, a pre-determined and already-built building style as an architectural pidgin. When this pidgin architecture becomes vernacularised through necessary building and cultural adaption and expanded in terms of its meaning (semantics) and size and ordering (syntax), it becomes creole architecture. Further, in locations where there is parallel language development taking place in the architecture makers’ society, it is proposed that the changes in built environment may have parallel linguistic changes, because of the nature of the evolving familial structures and language change. That is, linguistic creolisation appears either to have begotten or have occurred at a similar time as architectural creolisation and vice versa.
Creolistics may offer architectural historians different ways of thinking about cultural change in architectural vernaculars across generations so that linguists and architectural historians might be able to work together more effectively in future. This correspondence should be productive in both directions; creole architecture reasoning could offer much to creolists and linguists working in comparable language-based environments. These exploratory and hypothetical frameworks need to be further tested from the standpoint of both architectural history and linguistics. Such studies would ideally be comparative involving larger samples through across time of both architectural and linguistic documentation to ascertain drivers of creolisation and change.