Mapping and Research of Emerging Oral and Linguistic Expressions in Caribbean Creoles from the 17th to the 19th Century – CREOLES

The CREOLES project aims to trace the historical evolution of French-lexicon Creoles in the Caribbean from the 17th to the 19th century, relying on a corpus of historical texts and an innovative Digital Humanities approach. It simultaneously analyzes discourses produced in Creole and discourses about Creole, incorporating a critical perspective on linguistic ideologies that have influenced their perception and documentation. Our project seeks to provide a critical assessment of Hazaël-Massieux’s (2008) hypothesis, which must be confirmed, rejected, or nuanced. This hypothesis posits that the second half of the 19th century marked the transition from a single, variable Antillean Creole to a set of stabilized varieties across the Caribbean. To test this hypothesis, CREOLES adopts an interdisciplinary methodology, combining historical linguistics, creolistics, and Digital Humanities. CREOLES project is based on an international collaboration between the Université des Antilles (France) and FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), with the participation of researchers from Haiti, the United States, and Austria.
The project's main objectives are:
1. Mapping the linguistic features of Creoles over time and space through an interactive digital atlas, which will serve as a key resource for visualizing the spatial and temporal evolution of their linguistic features. Digital Humanities will enable the processing of a vast corpus of texts using automated analysis tools, linguistic cartography, and the modeling of lexical and syntactic evolutions, facilitating comparative studies of Creoles.
2. Analyzing metalinguistic discourses to understand how Creoles were perceived, named, and defined in colonial and postcolonial texts.
3. Developing an innovative methodology combining quantitative and qualitative approaches for historical variational linguistics. The quantitative approach will leverage statistical tools to measure linguistic variations across a large corpus of texts, while the qualitative approach will focus on the interpretation of discursive and ideological dynamics influencing Creole evolution.
4. Building an enriched corpus, incorporating underexplored sources (diasporic texts and lesser-known archives).
Expected outcomes include around fifteen scientific articles, an interactive linguistic atlas of Caribbean Creoles, and a significant contribution to the decolonization of Creole studies, by integrating historically marginalized perspectives. By interconnecting linguistic and discursive analyses, CREOLES aims to renew our understanding of the formation and evolution of French-lexicon Creoles and highlight the role of linguistic ideologies in their historical development.