LING430A

Name:

LING430A

Wassink

Library Laboratory Assignment (Due: email to wassink at u-dot-washington-dot-edu by 5pm Friday, January 9)

There are numerous resources available to researchers working on the linguistics of creole and pidgin languages. Many of them may be found only after some hunting, others are as easy as using Google. Not all sources are particularly helpful for linguists. The goal of this lab is to provide you with some resources for “hunting down” information on these types of languages so that you can find relevant, accurate, USEFUL, information on the language you eventually adopt. For this lab, look for the items requested below, and list what you find on this sheet. Links to useful websites (especially those containing soundfiles) will be listed on the course website.

A. Worldwide Web

To complete this part of the assignment, you will need a computer with a connection to the internet.

1. How many Creole languages are listed under the “creole family tree” link at www.Ethnologue.com?

Instructions: Browse to the link above. On the Ethnologue.com home page, click “browse the web version”. Select “Ethnologue language family index”, then scroll down the columns till you reach “creole”. This is one way of locating a listing of mixed languages contained in the Ethnologue. But you should see if you can find OTHER mixed languages not included here, or reach these same languages by clicking on a parent language, by looking at “unclassified” or other categories, etc. Make notes here of other ways of finding creole languages (still limiting your focus to full-fledged mixed languages, not pidgins, as far as possible).

2. List three different languages that are listed among the inventory of Creoles in this list:

Language Name	Country in which language is spoken	Type of creole (e.g., English-based; Afrikaans-based, etc.)

3. List two creoles that have “given birth” to other creoles:

Creole Parent Language	Creole Offspring Language
1.
2.

4. It is possible in today’s technology-forward society to acquire soundfiles for these marginalized languages. This makes it much easier to learn about what these languages sound like than was once possible. Let’s see what we can find on the web. How many resources do you turn up in a Google search on “Pidgin language sound files”? _____ “Creole language sound files”?

(note: you should try several variations on this search phrase, e.g., “pidgin sound files”, “pidgin soundfiles”, “creole .mp3 files”, etc.)

Follow a couple of these soundfile links, and list below ones that you think are useful for scholarly work, and a couple that you think are not going to be useful. For the useless ones, write a few comments for each link, regarding why it is not useful.

Likely to be Useful

Not likely to be useful:

5. Note that the Ethnologue.com webpages for specific creole languages contain helpful listings (typically at the bottom of the screen) on academic publications written about that language. You should get into the habit of referring to these lists as you develop your ideas for languages to adopt for your final project, as scholarly information on many creoles is hard to find collected in a single location.

B. Library Stacks

For this part of the assignment, you will need to GO to the Suzzallo/Odegaard library.

1. Does the UW library system have any GRAMMARS of creole languages? If so, list as many as you can find below (upto 10). GO TO THE STACKS and look at them. Don’t just write down the title and author from the online catalog. To be a good grammar, the work should describe the phonology, syntax, lexicon and sociolinguistic setting of formation. For each one you list, mark a check (√) by each level of the grammar the work covers.

2. Can you locate a good survey grammar (a grammar that describes the structures of a family or set of creole languages)?

	( ).
Author	Year	Title	City/	Publisher