On the role of Malagasy in the creation of the vernaculars of Reunion.

摘要

A respected view (Baker 2000) holds that a language emerged between 1663 and 1720 in the multilingual community of French, Malagasy, Indian, and African origins on the island of Bourbon (called Réunion after 1848). This study provides historical and linguistic evidence for the role of Malagasy in the creation of specific morpho-syntactic traits characteristic of this new vernacular, which likely evolved into different lects by the end of the 18th century. Using Manessy's (1995) model of language creation (vernacularisation), Detges' (2000) cognitive model of creole-specific restructuring, and Frajzynger's (1985) analysis of inherent stativity or non-stativity of the verb in languages, it is shown that these morpho-syntactic traits existed in all the Vernacular Lects of Réunion (VLR) since the late 18 th century. The literature makes rather scant reference to Malagasy influence on their morpho-syntax (Cellier 1985a; Ramassamy 1985; Manessy 1995; Corne 1999; and Baker 2000) in the face of a flat denial by Chaudenson (1974, 1981a, 1992) of any such influence on these lects except for their lexicon. In fact, the literature contains no discussion of actual evidence based on Malagasy data. This study attempts to establish the important role the verb phrase and sentence structure of Malagasy may have played in the creation of the early vernacular. Crucial to this role were bilingualism (or the use of two distinct registers) among the French and bilingualism among the Malagasies, due to the sheer number of the latter. Influential in the much later development of the VLR was the presence of a standard-like spoken French dating back only to the early 1800s. Its increased presence during the 19th and 20th centuries affected the VLR in ways not yet adequately assessed. However, the decreolization it produced, especially since 1848, has done much to overlay their 18th century forms. Essential to the argumentation is clear evidence of a rewriting of the history of the Petits Blancs des Hauts or poor Whites of the highlands (Bourquin 1994; Grondin 1998), which contributed significantly to a distorted view of both their origins and their speech variety.