The Elephant and the Whale Speak Creole: Comparative linguistic analysis of a folktale from Mauritius and Louisiana

Abstract

This study with Oliver Mayeux undertakes a comparative analysis of two historical folktales, one in Mauritian Creole (MC) and the other in Louisiana Creole (LC). The Mauritian story comes from Charles Baissac’s (1888) collection Le Folk-lore de l’Ile-Maurice: texte créole et traduction française, comprising 28 folktales, traditional Mauritian riddles (sirandann) and songs. The Louisiana collection by Alcée Fortier (1895): Louisiana Folk-tales in French dialect and English translation is remarkably similar, comprising 27 animal stories and folktales. One folktale in both collections, assumed to be of West-African origin, retells a strikingly similar story involving an elephant and a whale: this point of convergence between the two geographically and historically distinct contexts serves as a basis for our analysis. We compare the texts in terms of their provenance, content and structure before focusing on their linguistic insights. In both Louisiana and Mauritius, the respective Creoles have been in contact with French and English: our study aims to investigate the differing contact outcomes in each contact, considering the respective influence of these lexifier and non-lexifier superstrates. We provide a brief overview of differences in phonemic inventory, morphology, syntax, and lexicon in the texts. Although on the surface the two languages diverge in fairly obvious ways, a more considered examination of the verbal domain reveals particularities and questions for the diachrony of LC and MC and French-lexifier Creoles in general. For example, ccontemporary MC and LC both feature long/short verbal alternation, a phenomenon with divergent diachronic explanations: in MC, it is attributed to a Bantu substrate during creolization (Van Der Wal & Veenstra, 2015), while in LC it has been attributed to the French superstrate during decreolization (Neumann, 1985). We find that verbal alternation is present throughout the MC text, while in the LC text this phenomenon appears only sporadically; we explore the roles of grammaticalization and contact in explaining verbal alternation in each context, with implications for our understanding of the diachrony of both languages and of verbal alternation in Creoles in general. Ultimately, the study reveals how a single folktale can illuminate both the shared heritage and divergent trajectories of two French-lexifier Creole languages and provides scope to expand this kind of study to a wider range of texts and Creoles.