Pidgin and Creole Studies: Their Interface with Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics

Abstract Until recently, dialectologists and general linguists with an interest in Hispanic or Lusophone studies essentially ignored pidgin or creole languages (for example, Bozal Spanish, Palenquero, Papiamento, São Tomense, and so on), several of which may be key for an understanding of the evolution of Spanish and Portuguese, especially as regards vernacular registers (including vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, popular Caribbean Spanish, and so forth). This paper first provides an overview of the rise of creolistics as a wellorganized subdiscipline of linguistics from the 1980s to the present. In so doing, the study examines principal theoretical issues and major themes, and shows how several of these are of relevance to Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics. Explanations are offered as to why the two subfields were originally slow to interface with each other, and how and why this state of affairs has recently changed for the better. Section 5 -the core of the paper- reviews a selection of contemporary research endeavors (2005-2010) that have either successfully interfaced Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics with pidgin and creole studies (or vice versa), or concentrated on creole speech areas where Spanish or Portuguese has historically had a significant impact.