1. Invited speaker: Margot van den Berg (Utrecht University)

What’s in a grammar? Rethinking our ways in the study of contact languages

Sranan and Carriols are generally claimed to be the best documented contact languages in the world as historical sources in and on these languages date back to the early 18th century. In the case of Sranan, there is a long tradition of language description and language research in both Suriname and the Netherlands (Arends 2017). Drawing from the research on these historical sources as well as on research on contemporary Sranan and multilingual language use in both Suriname and the Netherlands, I will present a kind of three-act discussion on agency in language documentation. In the first act, we will reflect on the reliability and representativeness of the historical sources and how they impact present-day knowledge and awareness about Sranan, Carriols and contact languages in general. In the second act, we will discuss what happens when it is no longer the linguist but members of a speaker community who direct linguistic research, based on four years of experience with Community Engaged Learning in collaboration with KENK-I in the linguistics program at the University of Utrecht. In the third act, which will be interactive, we will combine our experiences and insights on co-creative knowledge production with those of the conference participants, aiming to co-create a succinct overview of best practices and practices to be desired that will contribute to futureproofing the field of contact linguistics.

2. Invited speaker: Ana Lívia Agostinho (UFSC, Brazil)

Pitch Perfect? Tonogenesis in the Gulf of Guinea Creoles

The common expectation is that tone will be eliminated in contact situations between tone and stress languages (Downing, 2017; Steien and Yakpo, 2020). However, this is not always the case.

This talk is concerned with the tonogenesis in the Gulf of Guinea Creoles (GGCs), in which the interaction between the European (stress) and African (tone) origins has led to the emergence of a tone system. Two key factors were identified as crucial for this tonogenesis process: (i) the historical influence of Portuguese’s liquid coda via the Proto-Creole of the Gulf of Guinea (PGG) (Hagemeijer, 2011; Bandeira, 2017) and (ii) the adaptation of part of the lexicon as not having a H tone, mainly in African-origin nouns and ideophones, and in verbs (Agostinho, 2025). 

I will focus on three GGCs: Lung’Ie, Fa d’Ambô and Santome. The data demonstrates a unique interaction between tone, stress, and syllabic structure, in which both strata were crucial for the emerging systems. Thus, this paper contributes to a broader understanding of tonogenesis in contact situations. 

The relation between the GGCs’ word-prosodic systems and historical liquid consonants has been noticed by several authors (Traill and Ferraz, 1981; Maurer, 2008, 2009; Agostinho and Araujo, 2021; Agostinho and Hyman, 2021, 2023), as well as the relation between liquids and long vowels (Traill and Ferraz, 1981; Maurer, 2009; Agostinho, 2015, 2016; Bandeira, 2017; Agostinho and Hyman, 2021; Bandeira, Agostinho and Freitas, 2021). The loss of a historical Portuguese liquid (via PGG) in the second position of a complex onset results in a flat or rising contour, whereas the loss of a liquid in coda position results in a pitch drop.

Another factor that must be taken into consideration in explaining tonogenesis in the GGCs is that part of the lexicon lacks a H tone. This is true for a small subset of the nouns (generally those of African origin, and the majority of ideophones and verbs. One could also argue for an “accent” vs. toneless split system (Good, 2004a, 2004b; Agostinho, 2023), but the tone dominance in the ecology (Yakpo, 2021) and the synchronic GGCs’ systems seem to be better accounted for in a tonal analysis. 

Also, it is not unexpected that the speakers would interpret phonetic cues associated with stress in the lexifier, such as pitch, into a phonological property of the emerging system, through stress-to-tone alignment (Good, 2008; Steien and Yakpo, 2020; Agostinho and Hyman, 2021). Therefore, creoles that have a tone system usually mark the original stress of the lexifier as a culminative H.

This case illustrates the kinds of insights that can emerge from the investigation of underdescribed contact languages. As has been argued in the literature, contact languages may present unique outcomes of language contact (Good, 2004a, 2009a, 2009b; Lee, 2018; Agostinho and Hyman, 2021; Agostinho, 2023), such as the interaction between tone, stress, and syllable structure described here. 

Finally, I turn to the implications of linguistic work for language planning, revitalization, and reclamation of the GGCs in São Tomé and Príncipe, focusing on Lung’Ie.

References:

Agostinho, A.L. (2015) Fonologia e método pedagógico do lung’Ie. Tese de Doutorado em Filologia e Língua Portuguesa. Universidade de São Paulo.

Agostinho, A.L. (2016) Fonologia do lung’Ie. München: LINCOM (Studies in Pidgin & Creole Linguistics 15).

Agostinho, A.L. (2023) “Word prosody of African versus European-origin words in Afro-European creoles,” Linguistic Typology, 27(2), pp. 481–507. Available at: doi.orghttps://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2022-0043.

Agostinho, A.L. (2025) “Tonogenesis in the Gulf of Guinea Creoles,” Diachronica, 42(3–4), pp. 278–304. Available at: doi.orghttps://doi.org/10.1075/dia.24041.ago.

Agostinho, A.L. and Araujo, G.A. de (2021) “Playing with language: Three language games in the Gulf of Guinea,” Language Documentation & Conservation, 15, pp. 219–238.

Agostinho, A.L. and Hyman, L.M. (2021) “Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?,” Probus, 33(1), pp. 57–93. Available at: doi.orghttps://doi.org/10.1515/PRBS-2021-0002.

Agostinho, A.L. and Hyman, L.M. (2023) “Interpreting non-canonical word-prosody in Afro-European contact,” in J. van de Weijer (ed.) Representing phonological detail, Part II: Syllable, stress, and sign. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 151–169. Available at: doi.orghttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110730081-008.

Bandeira, M. (2017) Reconstrução fonológica e lexical do protocrioulo do Golfo da Guiné. Tese de Doutorado em Filologia e Língua Portuguesa. Universidade de São Paulo.

Bandeira, M., Agostinho, A.L. and Freitas, S. (2021) “Aspectos Fonético-Fonológicos Do Angolar Moderno,” Alfa: Revista de Linguística (São José do Rio Preto), 65, pp. 1–31. Available at: doi.org/10.1590/1981-5794-e13177.

Downing, L.J. (2017) “Convergence of prosody under contact: two African case studies,” in A. Castro et al. (eds.) Språkens magi: Festskrift for Ingmar Söhrman. Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet, Institutionen för Språk och Litterarturer, pp. 29–40.

Good, J. (2004a) “Split prosody and creole simplicity: The case of Saramaccan,” Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 3(2), pp. 11–30. Available at: doi.org/10.5334/jpl.9.

Good, J. (2004b) “Tone and accent in Saramaccan: Charting a deep split in the phonology of a language,” Lingua, 114(5), pp. 575–619. Available at: doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(03)00062-7.

Good, J. (2008) “Stress, tone, and intonation in creoles and contact languages,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 23(1), pp. 156–160. Available at: doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.23.1.14goo.

Good, J. (2009a) “A twice-mixed creole? Tracing the history of a prosodic split in the Saramaccan lexicon,” Studies in Language, 33(2), pp. 459–498. Available at: doi.org/10.1075/sl.33.2.09goo.

Good, J. (2009b) “Loanwords in Saramaccan, an English-based Atlantic creole of Suriname,” in M. Haspelmath and U. Tadmor (eds.) Loanwords in the World’s Languages. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 918–943.

Hagemeijer, T. (2011) “The Gulf of Guinea Creoles: Genetic and Typological Relations,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 26(1), pp. 111–154. Available at: doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.26.1.05hag.

Lee, N.H. (2018) “Contact languages around the world and their levels of endangerment,” Language Documentation and Conservation, 12, pp. 53–79.

Maurer, P. (2008) “A first step towards the analysis of tone in Santomense,” in S. Michaelis (ed.) Roots of Creole Structures. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 253–261.

Maurer, P. (2009) Principense (Lung’Ie). London: Battlebridge Publications.

Steien, G.B. and Yakpo, K. (2020) “Romancing with tone: On the outcomes of prosodic contact,” Language, 96(1), pp. 1–41.

Traill, A. and Ferraz, L. (1981) “The Interpretation of Tone in Principense Creole,” Studies in African Linguistics, 12(2), pp. 205–215.

Yakpo, K. (2021) “Creole Prosodic Systems Are Areal, Not Simple,” Frontiers in Psychology, 12, pp. 1–21. Available at: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.690593.

3. Invited speaker: Tuan Raja Naga Ultramar Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang (13th Kabesa or Indigenous Chief of the Kristang people and National University of Singapore)

Resurrection Language: The Reclamation of Kristang Creole-Indigenous Cultural, Linguistic and Epistemic Sovereignty, 1795–Present 

Until recently, a majority of creole languages and their associated cultures and peoples were often, at best, overtly or covertly perceived as the broken, illegitimate, subordinate, transient and/or simplistic by-products of colonial history and European imperial hegemonic overreach, such that even in Western academic analysis, they were often implicitly understood as lacking in depth, complexity or rigour worthy of sustained scholarly investigation. For creole languages and cultures descended from forced or consensual intermarriage between European and Indigenous peoples, the much deeper and often occluded or Unsaid Indigenous components or origins of their history, structure, linguistic ecology and sociolinguistic uses within the community were often thereafter accidentally rendered unparseable or illegible to Western academics and/or observers as a result of this framing, to the degree that creole people eventually reading about their own languages and their attendant histories and descriptions derived from this work often could neither recognise themselves in what had been described, nor make use of what had been described to support themselves in humanising or reedifying ways. 

The rapid, public and large-scale transnational revitalization of the Kristang language (iso 639-3:mcm, estimated in 2026 to be spoken by around 5,400 people in Melaka, Singapore, Perth and Kuala Lumpur) and its associated culture and community (estimated in 2026 to be around 43,200 people worldwide) since 2016 has thus not only been a marked outlier in consistently challenging this paradigm, but in also demonstrating that its schematic foundations were never secure in the first place. As primary linguist and scholarly architect of that revitalization, as well as as the 13th Kabesa or Indigenous Chief of the Kristang people, one of just three teachers of the language worldwide and one of the youngest remaining L1 speakers of Kristang – and with all of these facts and identity markers also publicly consolidated as a result of revitalization – I show that creole languages are not only outcomes of colonial history, but potential engines of postcolonial and post-global collapse Creole-Indigenous sovereignty. I demonstrate that when understood as an epistemically and ontologically discrete category that carries inherent value and distinctiveness, and therefore the potential for sustained epistemic complexity, creole languages can also become the infrastructural foundation for the reclamation of Creole-Indigeneity at scale: moving from reclaiming a creole speech community, to rebuilding or reinvigorating a creole civilisation that distils, incorporates and recognises its own ontology, epistemology, research and scholarly methodologies and axiology, as the Kristang have done under my leadership since late 2022. 

Following the first public emic overview of the language’s sociolinguistic history and ecology between 1795 and the present from an insider perspective, I thereafter proceed to introduce major components of language revitalization that have served as the backbone of the reclamation of community sovereignty, including the historically-attested but previously-unnamed Creole-Indigenous methodology of sunyeskah or dreamfishing for new word and concept creation, the development of a fourth-person and more expanded 16-person pronoun system, tense-mood-aspect (TMA) and deictic system that allows for the indexing of intangible entities, collectives and perspectives specific to Kristang and Southeast Asia, and the consolidation of quaternary grammatical polarity (seng/ngka/irang/ugora = yes/no/both/neither) that now serves as primary infrastructure for Kristang philosophy, metaphysics and psychoemotional trauma processing. Throughout the talk, I also draw parallels to the development of other major European and world languages during and subsequent to the Industrial Revolution, as well as contemporary examples of other languages undergoing revitalization or relexification while being tied to a major cultural or ethnographic identity such as Hawaiian, Hebrew and Icelandic, showing that the revitalization and consolidation of Kristang in this way is actually nothing unique and is paralleled in many other linguistic systems worldwide.

4. Plenary speaker: Mikael Parkvall (Aarhus University)

Restoring creolistics to science

Since the inception of the sub-discipline, creolistics has been no stranger to heated discussions.

Apart from the perennial issue of whether to focus of lexifier or substratal contributions, the debates following in the wake of Derek Bickerton’s bioprogram are particularly noteworthy – Bickerton never received much support from his fellow creolists, but by unwittingly uniting a large proportion of them against his claims, he stimulated an avalanche of fruitful fact-finding and analyses, thereby both revitalising creolistics and bringing it to public attention.

Since the turn of the millennium, the main bone of contention has been the issue of “exceptionalism”, that is whether or not creoles are synchronically distinguishable in terms of their typological make-up, and/or diachronically special by having developed in ways different from the paths taken by traditional languages. The opposing school of thought, the ”uniformitarians”, maintain that creoles stand out in neither of these regards

I have positioned myself in this discussion as supporting one of the camps, but here and now, the goal is not to try to convince the audience that we are correct. Instead, this talk is a plea for a more rule-governed debate. Arguments can and should be taken seriously only to the extent that they conform to established scientific practise, and this is alas not always the case.

The intended message is thus that creolistics needs to be re-integrated into linguistics, and thereby science in order to merit attention from outsiders.