Contact Linguistics. Chap

Exercise: Consider the following sentences from Abdulaziz & Osinde (1997: 55, 59). Example (a) is Sheng, with a Swahili ML frame and some English words (E). [My sincere thanks to David Odden for providing me with a full gloss and translation for this sentence.].Example (b) is Engsh, with an English ML frame and some words from Swahili (S) and Kikuyu (K). Compare the patterns of mixture in these examples with that in Media Lengua. What similarities and differences do you find?

a. Woyee tichee u-si-ni-ruand-e buu ndio i-li-ni-leit-isha

Exclam. teacher (E) 2sg-NEG-me-beat-SUBJ; bus it-is cl.9-PAST-1obj-late(E)-CAUS
Hey, teacher, don’t beat me, it is the bus that made me late.”

b. I will be gothie-ing rurayas moros.

I will be go(K)-ing abroad (S) tomorrow (E)
“I will be going abroad tomorrow.”


4. Michif.

Michif is another well known and well-documented bilingual mixed language which combines, roughly speaking, Plains Cree VP structure with (Métis) French NP structure, though, as we shall see, this is somewhat of an oversimplification. The language apparently arose sometime during the early 19th century as a result of contact between mostly French-speaking European men and Indian women in the Red River area, near present-day Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba, Canada.

4.1. Sociohistorical background.

The history of this contact situation goes back to the beginnings of the colonization of Canada by the British in the later 17th century. The British Hudson Bay Company (HBC) established trading posts on the eastern and western shores of Hudson Bay some time between 1668 and 1725. Sustained contact between the Europeans and the Indians increased during the period 1731 to 1753, when fur-trading posts managed by groups of 20-30 men were established. Most of these men apparently came from Scotland and spoke varieties of Scots English and Gaelic. There are no records of any contact vernaculars used by them for trading with the Indians. In 1784, the North West Company (NWC) was founded, and its employees were mostly speakers of French who served as guides, interpreters, canoe-men, servants and the like, and especially as traders. The takeover of the NWC by the HBC in 1821 forced many NWC employees to settle in the Red River area. These French voyageurs and traders cohabited with Cree women, producing a new population of mixed racial descent, referred to as Métis, a modern French term that means a person of mixed race, a mestizo. The term Métis itself is derived from Older French Métif/Mitif, from which Michif ([mit∫if]) - the name of the language - is derived (Bakker 1994:14).

The Métis today number around 100,000 and live in various rural and urban communities in Manitoba and other Canadian provinces west of it, as well as in North Dakota, Montana and Oregon in the United States. Most Métis speak only English, though some also speak Indian languages like Plains Cree and Ojibwe, and many in Canada speak French. According to Bakker (1994:14) speakers of Michif today number perhaps 1000, though the Métis themselves put the number as high as 5000. Bakker (1997:3) suggests that the number of speakers was probably several thousands at the turn of the century, though never much higher than this. The language is spokin in scattered communities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan (Canada) as well as North Dakota and Montana (USA), with pockets of speakers elsewhere. Most Michif speakers are over 60 years of age, and the language is no longer being acquired as a first language.
Bakker (1997:13) argues that Michif arose as an expression of the separate identity of the Métis, who viewed themselves as a new people of mixed ancestry. Other cases involving cohabitation between groups of men and women speaking different languages have produced similar bilingual mixtures that serve as the language of the descendants of such unions. Examples include the Island Caribs (Arawak mothers and Carib fathers), the Krojos (Javanese mothers, Dutch fathers) and the Griekwas and Basters of South Africa (Khoekhoes mothers and Afrikaans fathers). (See Bakker 1997:206-2208 for discussion). The creation of Michif seems to have been brought about especially by the coming together of Métis who traveled west from Manitoba to engage in bison hunting after 1821. The Métis apparently started to regard themselves as a distinct people in the 1820's, and according to Métis oral tradition, the Michif language was already in use between 1820 and 1840 (Bakker 1997:26). Some of the communities in which Michif is spoken today may well have been first established as winter camps for buffalo hunting. Bakker (1997:190) suggests that Michif may have originated between 1812 (the emergence of a separate ethnic identity of the Métis) and 1820 (the beginning of the large bison hunts).


4.2. Sources of Michif structure.

As noted earlier, the source languages of Michif are Métis French and Plains Cree. The former contributed most (roughly 90%) of the nouns as well as the NP structure, while the latter contributed practically all of the verbs and their inflections, along with grammatical categories such as question words, personal pronouns, postpositions and so on. The following piece of a narrative recorded by Bakker (1997:78) in Brandon, Manitoba illustrates the nature of the mixture. French items are italicized.

(7) e:gwanêgi li: sava:z ki:pa:∫amwak la vyâd

they the Indians dried the meat


la vjâd Orêja:l, la vjâdi ∫ovrø, tut ki:pa:∫amwak
the meat moose, the meat-of deer, all they-dried it.


da: dibc&ca:k ki:a:∫ta:wak mana
in little-bags they-put-it usually

“These Indians dried the meat. Moose meat, deer meat, they dried it all.

They used to put it in little bags.”
Table 4, adapted from Bakker (1997:117) provides a summary of the sources of Michif grammatical categories (I have amended his table somewhat by including categories like articles, adjectives and copulas that were omitted in the original).


Table 4: Sources of grammatical categories of Michif.


Category Source languages.