Pidgin and Creole languages typically emerge in multilingual settings and result from the multiple, complex social factors and linguistic processes that participate in language emergence, development and change. The original creolophones' diverse linguistic backgrounds account for the unavoidable variability in the input to Pidgins and Creoles and make it necessary to consider variation as one of their inherent attributes (Meyerhoff, 2021).

Marlyse Baptista first presents a socio-historical overview of Upper-Guinea Creoles in this presentation, focusing on the original populations and languages in contact. She then discusses a range of complex processes involved in Creole genesis, including substratal transfer (Siegel, 2008), restructuring (Neumann-Holzschuh & Schneider, 2000) feature recombinations (DeGraff, 1999; Mufwene, 2001; Aboh, 2015), and the role of feature congruence in the formation of Creole functional categories.

Using the Pattern and Matter Mapping model or PMM (Baptista, 2020), she examines diachronic (Schuchardt, 1880) and synchronic data that compare the pronominal system of Upper Guinea Creoles' diverse source languages on both the African (Wolof and Mandinka) and European (Portuguese) sides to those Creoles today. A careful comparative analysis of the forms, functions and distribution of the pronouns (featuring both atonic single subject pronouns and double tonic/atonic subject pronouns) in the source languages will reveal 1) the precise connections between them and the resulting Creoles, 2) to what extent the observable properties are congruent in the languages in contact, and 3) to what extent they diverge and innovate.

In light of the complex picture of Creole emergence drawn by this presentation, she will present the work of lab members Burgess et al. (2024), suggesting concrete guidelines and recommendations in the way that Creoles are discussed and introduced to students of Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, and other fields.