The Creolistics Workshop series started as an initiative launched by the late Philip Baker in April 1994 with a conference at the University of Westminster, London, to provide a forum of exchange and mutual inspiration for the creolist community. The conference has since been held in London (UK), Amsterdam (NL), Giessen (D) and Aarhus (DK). After a period of inactivity, we will resume this long tradition by organising a Creolistics Workshop in Aarhus in December 2025.
The workshops are traditionally low threshold, with no registration fees and no invited keynote speakers, for an optimal and liberal exchange of opinions. Several publications by the University of Westminster Press and Battlebridge resulted from these previous meetings,
This workshop is dedicated to the memory of Philip Baker, the initiator of the Creolistic Workshop series and the man behind affordable books about creole languages at a time when Open Access research did not yet exist.
For this twelfth edition, the main focus will be on diachronic aspects of language contact, primarily in creoles, but also in other types of contact languages.
While the diachronic dimension has long been at the forefront of creole studies,
in recent years, the field has witnessed a shift away from historical considerations to favour a range of other questions. However, historical aspects remain among the most challenging and most debated issues in the field.
Aarhus University is currently hosting the project "Digital demography, creole creation, light on letters", which investigates the development of Carriols (aka Virgin Islands Dutch Creole), from the founding of the Danish colony of St. Thomas in 1672 to the death of the last speaker in 1987. This provides an obvious opportunity to host this workshop.
Therefore, the aim of this workshop will be to renew with the tradition of looking at contact-induced phenomena from a historical point of view.
