Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts (DEPiCT)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Magnus Huber
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269945690

The Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts (DEPiCT) assembles early attestations and descriptions of mainly English- and Dutch-lexified contact languages collected by individual creolists. The texts are annotated according to a standard system and made available online in a searchable electronic database. In addition to linguistic data, other important contextual and sociolinguistic information is annotated, such as the location and situation of the utterance, socio-biographical information on the speakers, the domains of use for the language, and the attitudes towards the language. This will allow for entirely new avenues for research: DEPiCT will be available as a standard reference database for historical linguistic studies on contact languages, both for individual languages as well as for comparative linguistic studies, and both from structural as well as from sociolinguistic perspectives. The considerable advantages of assembling into DEPiCT the collections that are at present spread among individual researchers extend, inter alia, to the following areas: By gathering scattered text collections, DEPiCT offers a more complete overview and more comprehensive documentation of the development and history of individual contact languages. Annotation of linguistic data as 1. morphologically segmented text, 2. orthographic equivalence in the lexifier, 3. source language, 5. gloss, 6. word class annotation und 7. free translation makes the database maximally searchable and allows for comparison between individual texts.Annotation on sociolinguistic information facilitates systematic research on the circumstances of the emergence and use of contact languages, as well as contextualizing linguistic data and correlating it with sociolinguistic parameters. By allowing direct comparison between texts, DEPiCT makes it possible to evaluate the reliability of early sources. DEPiCT serves as an online backup and archive for posteriority, by collecting and electronically saving data which at present is distributed in various formats with individual researchers. Based on DEPiCT a handbook on the individual contact varieties will be put together. The chapters of the individual varieties will each contain a section on sources, an overview of previous diachronic studies, as well as a description of relevant aspects of the diachronic sociolinguistic and structural development, with concrete examples drawn from the database. In addition to this, the handbook will include cross-linguistic typological chapters on the development of specific linguistic features and sociolinguistic parameters, on the role of early contact varieties in various regions of the world, as well as on processes of grammaticalization and degrammaticalization (the latter with respect to pidginization in particular).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants