Thanks.Īlso important: real life situations are significantly more complicated than the exposition below, and there is no unanimous agreement among scholars regarding theory, terminology, and/or specific scenarios. This not a place to discuss Mary Robinette Kowal’s story, which I have not read. In the interests of full disclosure, I am 1) an academic working in this area, 2) a multilingual directly affected by processes of language attrition and death.Ĭaveat: This is a discussion of languages in contact. There are other models of languagage generation, language suppression, attrition, and death – if this is of interest, let me know, because this could become a series. Note that this is an entry in specifically about pidgins and creoles.

I feel this is worth reposting here, with slight modifications, to hopefully start a discussion about sociolinguistics and languages in SFF settings, and/or help people think about these issues in more nuanced ways.

Since this is something I happen to know a lot about, I chimed in with comments about language generation through contact, be it in colonial contexts or otherwise. RequiresHate questioned, among many other things, Mary Robinette Kowal’s usage of “patois” in a recent story in Apex magazine.

This started as a discussion on Requires Hate’s blog.

Contact languages pidgins and creoles