Linguistic worldbuilding can be fairly simple—like making up and incorporating a few slang words or insults based on whatever your fictional culture finds profane—or it can be elaborate, like inventing an entire new language and writing poetry in it (hi, J.R.R. Tolkien!), or anywhere in between. We’ve already discussed an example of a technique around the midpoint of the spectrum in Cherryh’s Hunter of Worlds, so now I’d like to explore something on the more elaborate end: Belter creole in The Expanse.
This will first require a discussion of what creole languages are, as well as their key characteristics. I must note here that I am not a creolist by any means, so please forgive (and correct!) me if I misstate something. I took a class in contact linguistics, where we covered the basics of pidgins and creoles, among other things, and in preparation for this essay, I read John McWhorter’s The Creole Debate1 (2018). To avoid any potential confusion, please also note that this is a discussion of the concept of creole languages, and not the concept of creolization as it relates to ethnicity and Creole peoples. It was just my luck that Ars Technica published an interview with Nick Farmer about his work on the TV version of Belter while I was putting the edits on this post.
What I learned about creoles in Contact Ling was that they are the result of a pidgin developing a full grammar and being acquired and spoken as a native language. A pidgin is an ad hoc language that typically arises in situations where people who don’t speak the same native language have to communicate with each other, such as trade with a new partner or (all too frequently) as a result of colonization or enslavement. A pidgin doesn’t have grammar per se, but it has very basic syntax. Nouns can come from any of the languages in contact with each other, as can verbs, adjectives, etc, although vocabulary most often comes from the dominant language (i.e. that of the people in power).
So, how does a creole evolve and develop from this? It’s an interesting question—apparently some people disagree with what I thought was a settled matter (again: not a creolist), as I learned from McWhorter’s book. He is a proponent of the pidgin-creole lifecycle hypothesis, which he refers to as Creole Exceptionalism, and I think he lays out an excellent case for his argument. A break in transmission of the parent languages is a key aspect in the formation of a creole, because when adults learn a second language (in a non-classroom setting, as would be seen in this type of situation), some of the more complex features are lost, and when these adults transmit the languages to their children, those features aren’t there. So the children take features from the languages and construct a new grammar, which becomes a creole.
Buy the Book
The Last Emperox
The main opposing view is that pidginization is not necessary because creoles are mixed or hybrid languages, created by speakers choosing from a “feature pool” of the source languages to build new morphology, where similar features combine in a least-common-denominator-type arrangement. There is no break in transmission of the source languages. In relation to plantation creoles, for example, the Feature Pool Hypothesis suggests that, as multiple waves of slaves were brought to the Americas, they learned a non-native version of the languages, which approaches equilibrium over time. This is a pretty neat idea, and it goes along well with the Chomskyan/generativist trend in formal linguistics, but, according to McWhorter, there is no evidence at all whatsoever for this hypothesis. The FPH advocates only study one or two creoles, when there are in reality hundreds of them, and claim that CEH advocates aren’t scientific because they aren’t using generativist theories.
The Feature Pool isn’t the first hypothesis to make use of generativist ideas. In the 1980s, Bickerton proposed the Bioprogram Hypothesis, based on Chomsky’s conception of Universal Grammar (that brains come inherently equipped with computer-like 1/0 settings for principles and parameters, which are set as the languages are acquired). According to this hypothesis, “creoles instantiate Universal Grammar with parameters unset, the ‘default’ of language, produced by children under the unusual circumstance of acquiring language with insufficient input” (McWhorter 1). It was a pretty cool idea at the time and would have done a lot to support the UG hypothesis, but, unfortunately, evidence contradicted this premise, as studies were published that showed that children who created creoles (in this case, Hawaiian Creole English) did not have insufficient input, because they spoke English at school and their parents’ languages at home (McWhorter 2). So today, in creolist circles, the Bioprogram Hypothesis is basically disproven, but it provides a theoretical heritage, of sorts, to the Feature Pool.
For our purposes, the rest of this article assumes that the CE hypothesis is correct. Now for some definitions: Every creole has a lexifier, which provides the majority of vocabulary. The lexifier is often, but not required to be, the superstrate, the dominant language or language of power. There is also one or more substrates, the minority language which has an effect on the superstrate. Within a creole, there is an acrolect, which is most similar to the lexifier, a basilect, which is most different from the lexifier, and a mesolect, which is in-between. (This is really a spectrum, rather than a three-point line.)
A really cool but rare result of language contact is a mixed language. These are true hybrid languages, where two languages are intertwined. The two most well-known of these are Media Lengua, which combines a Spanish lexicon with Quechua phonology, morphology, and syntax, and Michif, which combines French nouns and nominal morphology with Cree verbs and verbal morphology. Pidginization was not involved. These languages developed among fluent bilinguals.
Common Features of Creoles
Creoles frequently omit the copula. This is the linking verb ‘to be.’ If the lexifier uses a copula, the creole often lacks it, or only uses it in certain instances. European languages are the most frequent lexifiers (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), and all of these languages use a form of ‘to be’ to link the subject with the predicate: The sky is blue. I am a woman. In a creole, ‘is’ and ‘am’ would often be omitted: the sky blue2 .
Verbal inflection is minimized. Inflection is the changing of a word form to mark person, number, gender, case, etc. In creoles, this often takes the form of generalizing the infinitive. While English doesn’t have much verbal morphology, and the verb often looks like the infinitive, the Romance languages have extensive verbal inflection. Since I don’t speak any Romance languages, I’ll turn to English and German to invent examples. For standard English, we have ‘I go’ but ‘she goes.’ Generalizing the infinitive would be ‘she go.’ German has different inflectional forms, ‘ich gehe,’ ‘du gehst,’ ‘er geht,’ ‘wir gehen,’ ‘ihr geht,’ ‘sie gehen.’ Generalizing the infinitive would give ‘ich/du/er/wir/ihr/sie gehen.’
Case distinction is lost in lexifier pronouns. Rather than I/me, or he/him, you find ‘me’ or ‘him’ extended to all cases: think Harry Belafonte, “daylight come and me wan’ go home.”
To negate a verb, the lexifier’s negator is placed before the verb. McWhorter gives an example from Sranan Creole English, spoken in Suriname (5), which includes multiple creole features:
A hondiman no ben e bai wan oso gi mi
the hunter NEG PAST PROG buy a house give me
“The hunter was not buying a house for me.”
Tense, mood, and aspect are simplified in comparison to the lexifier and substrate languages. “Practically all of the Atlantic English-lexicon creoles, for instance, employ a Past tense derived from been, a Future derived from go, and a Terminative Perfect expressed by done” (Winford 324).
Creoles: A Summary
Creoles emerge from language contact situations where people need to communicate with speakers of other languages. They begin as a pidgin, which is an ad hoc language with minimal morphology and basic syntax, and children develop them into a full language, and the next generation speaks it as their native language. Creoles have some common grammatical features, like preposed negation and simplified morphology.
The Expanse
The Expanse is an ongoing novel series by James S.A. Corey (the collaborative pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck); currently at eight doorstop-sized volumes, it was adapted for TV by SyFy, cancelled, and rescued by Amazon Prime. The background pits three main factions against each other: Earth, Mars, and “the Belt,” which is everything past the asteroid belt. The Belters consider Earth and Mars to be equally bad and refer to them as the Inners. Earth and Mars have a very tentative alliance that could come crashing down at the least provocation. Both of the inner planets use the Belt as a source of resources, in an extractive economy. Earth and Mars have a financial interest in the colonies in the Belt, and Belters typically work for companies owned by Inners. The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA) is a very loose collection of factions who want the Belt to be independent from the Inners, each with its own preferred methods of getting there and vision of what an independent Belt would look like.
Earth and Mars have their own insults for each other and the Belters, but they speak similar standard languages, with some lexical variation akin to U.S. vs. British English. Out in the Belt, though, people from a lot of different countries who spoke a lot of different languages came together to build colonies or mine asteroids or fly cargo ships. This is exactly the type of situation where we’d expect a pidgin to develop, then eventually a creole.
I didn’t write every example of belta in my notes as I read, and the ones I took are primarily from the first two books. I also noted some examples from the first two seasons of the TV adaptation. (So there aren’t spoilers for anything past the opening of book 3, Abaddon’s Gate.)
The two most easily identifiable (to me) non-English languages involved in lang belta appear to be German and Spanish, with que/ke, pendejo, agua, nichts, dir, and bist. Other source languages include French (bien, dieu), Japanese (shikata ga nai), and Mandarin (dui3 ), along with other languages that I didn’t recognize because I don’t know them. These languages blend together, so you get things like “sabez nichts” (know/s nothing), “bist bien” (am/are good), and “kept top bunk á dir” (for you). I don’t know how many real-world creoles are composed of a lexifier plus five or more substrate languages (I think the one McWhorter mentions with the most substrate languages is Mauritian Creole French, at six substrates), but it is certainly possible, especially in a space-future where people from dozens of countries are thrown together and have to communicate.
Lang belta shows some features of creoles, and, given what I’ve read about the size of the worldbuilding bible for this novel series, it’s likely they did the research (A+). For the TV adaptation, they recruited the linguist Nick Farmer to consult and develop the creole further (see the Ars Technica post linked above), and he put his linguistic skills to work imagining what curses and insults people would use in space and how body language would look.
Examples of Belta
In Leviathan Wakes, chapter six, Detective Miller, a Belter who works for an Earth-based security company, is talking to a man who’s inciting a riot on Ceres. The man says, “Inners kibble you, bitch. You they dog.” This demonstrates both copula deletion and loss of case distinctions (no possessive marking), as well as the verbing of the noun “kibble.”
It’s easy to notice examples of verbal simplification. Throughout the books, people say “bist bien,” which uses the German du-form (2nd person singular) of “to be” for all people and numbers, and “sabez nichts,” which also extends the 2nd person singular form of “to know.” Many creoles extend the infinitive form, but that doesn’t mean this one is impossible. The you-form of verbs would be pretty frequently used in this kind of situation, and it’s plausible that this would be the most salient, noticeable form for learners, which they then would pick up and use as the only verb form.
Sociolinguistic Factors
There are also various sociolinguistic factors in evidence in belta. These are not specifically tied to creoles; these are factors that we all use every day when we speak, write, listen, and read. We link particular traits to accents, dialects, and slangs (among other things), and we choose, consciously or not, our own ways of writing or speaking depending on our audience. You write a chat message to a friend differently than a quarterly report for your boss or a letter to your grandma. You can choose to use a different dialect or a particular type of slang to show that you belong to a particular group (this is often called code-switching), either out of solidarity with your interlocutor or to reject your interlocutor’s familiarity and emphasize your difference. Diglossia occurs when two dialects or languages exist in the same space and are spoken within a language community. For a real-world, US-based example, we have Standard American English (what you learn in school) and African-American Vernacular English (which has its own separate rules). (Sociolinguistics is the fun part: it’s the “why do people do the thing?” and “what does it mean when they do the thing?” Many of my friends and colleagues prefer formal linguistics, which is cool I guess, and someone has to study phonetics and morphology and syntax, and I’m glad it’s not me.)
The narrators explicitly mention social aspects of belta multiple times. This means that people in-universe are aware of the language as a marker of Belter identity. Early on in the book, Miller and his partner are interviewing a witness to a crime. Miller is from the Belt, and he and the witness speak together in belta. His partner, from Earth, remarks that it’s “Belters keeping the Earther out,” but Miller corrects him: it’s poor folks keeping the educated guy out. This idea of Belters using their language for privacy and to assert identity—people who associate most strongly with Belter independence ideals use belta more often, and often a deeper lect of it—repeats throughout the series.
Together on the Roci, the crew and Miller are discussing the reasons that Protogen, the Earth-based company, believed that they could use Eros as a testing facility for their protomolecule. (They don’t consider Belters fully human.) Naomi and Miller explain to the three Inners in the room that people and society are different in the Belt. Miller even remarks, “We’ve practically got our own language now.” Amos, despite being from Baltimore, has spent twenty-five years on ships and has learned to understand Belter talk, which he demonstrates when Naomi breaks out with “tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido.” He translates this as “Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks.” A more literal translation might be “you run spinward, tube your way up and gone.”
Belters like Naomi can make use of their bilingualism and code switch to show solidarity, which Naomi is also shown to do in the TV adaptation (season 2, episode 6, around 35 minutes in). Drummer doesn’t believe that Naomi is on her side, so Naomi answers her in the belta basilect.
Is it a creole?
I think you could call lang belta a (constructed) creole, because it hits many of the common features of a creole, and if similar conditions were mapped onto a real-world situation, the social aspects would be highly amenable to creole formation. The question remains as to whether modern tools like Google Translate or Duolingo would have an effect in this situation. Machine translation could potentially limit the need for a pidgin to form, but machine translation is only as good as its programming. It’s gotten better, but it has quite a ways to go. As a language teacher, I have to say I’m not fond of Duolingo’s pedagogical methods (other people have discussed the topic here and here), so I am skeptical of its utility in this kind of hypothetical situation.
Sociolinguistically, lang belta functions as a typical language in a diglossic situation. Belters use the standard language when they have to talk to people not from the Belt, and belta to communicate with the in-group. Nick Farmer discusses that in the interview with AT:
Some characters speak pure Belter, but most speak about half-English, half-Belter, adjusting their vocabulary for each situation. If they’re holding a separatist rally to protest Earther rule, Belter is the order of the day. If they’re trying to talk to a boss, English makes more sense. In everyday chit-chat, they’ll probably switch back and forth without thinking about it.
So, beratna: What are your thoughts on belta? Do you want to learn it? There are plenty of other linguistic worldbuilding features I didn’t cover in depth, like Inners’ slang and Belter body language, so please feel free to discuss those below as well!
References
- McWhorter, John. (2018) The Creole Debate. Cambridge University Press.
- Winford, Donald. (2003) An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Blackwell Publishing.
Additional Resources
- Thomason, Sarah and Terrence Kaufman. (1988) Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press.
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke.
[1]If you are a fan of the genre of Academic High Dudgeon, as I am, I can highly recommend this book. The first chapter outlines his stance, then he spends the next four explaining why his critics are wrong. With a lot of examples.
[2]Copula omission is not exclusively a creole feature. For example, Russian and Bengali regularly omit the copula in the present tense.
[3]A twitter user pointed out that dui is Mandarin; my google search was fruitless, since it turned up pages and pages of lawyers for drunk drivers.
Great article on a fascinating topic!
I can highly recommend John McWhorter’s podcast Lexicon Valley, where he spins entertaining tales of linguistics intermingled with dad jokes and musical theater numbers.
Naomi’s code-switching is more frequent in the third season. I think there’s even a scene where she talks in standard English to someone in person, then immediately talks in Belter to someone on the radio.
@CD: ” vocabulary most often comes from the dominant language (i.e. that of the people in power).” and “Miller corrects him: it’s poor folks keeping the educated guy out.”
This is the crux of it for me. Language changes seem to be class related, or at least function-in-society related.
A couple decades ago I was noticing a pidgin lang emerging among a working-class population of Romanian immigrants. Assimilation had begun, so they were substituting English verbs for Romanian ones. Their word for “painted” was “vopsit.” They substituted “paint” as the root and added the suffix, so a new word emerged, “paintuit.” This didn’t seem to happen with Romanians with some degree of formal education. They wanted to assimilate also, but kept the two languages apart and spoke pretty accentless SAE.
I’d guess the process continues today, although immigration patterns have changed. But perhaps a true creole doesn’t form when a population is in the process of assimilating.
Creole grammar isn’t really simpler, it just uses modifiers instead of inflection (e.g. belong instead of genitive). Often there are additional grammatical features that are missing in the superstrate, like dual or exclusive/inclusive we distinctions. It’s just the prejudices of linguists who try to force Latin grammar on all languages that make non-inflectional languages look “primitive”. English also lost most of its inflections in a creolization in the Danelaw area, where people speaking different Germanic languages met.
Is Englsh a Creole language stemming from Norman (French) and Angle/Saxon (old English)?
There was, for a while, a very popular but extremely wrong* theory that Middle English was a creole. The situation in the Danelaw was very extensive and deep contact, due to both power in the hands of the Danes and to intermarriage, but because Old English and Old Norse were both Germanic languages, they were typologically very similar, so any effects of one on the other would be hard to suss out. We know that Old English experienced strong cultural pressure from ON (Sarah Thomason’s borrowing scale), because some core vocabulary was replaced, notably sister. English is a West Germanic language, and the West Gmc form is swester or schwester. Sister comes from the North Gmc systir. (In addition to taking both OE and ON, I read some pretty cool papers on language contact in the Danelaw for my MA exam.) (Thomason has some papers online: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~thomason/papers/papers.html)
*https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327601.001.0001/acprof-9780195327601-chapter-4
What I like, reading the books, is that as somebody who grew up with Jamaican patois, belta slang feels familiar in terms of syntax. It feels natural. The actors don’t feel as convincing though. Their speech doesn’t quite flow like a native speaker’s would.
That’s my 2 cents.
I would love to learn belta. I really enjoy the cadence of it.
It doesn’t come up in this article, but IIRC, there’s a physical aspect to belta that’s discussed in at least the first three books and touched on in the first season of the show. (We see it when Miller’s partner takes lessons in hand signs from a prostitute.) I think it got de-emphasized pretty quickly in the show, probably because it would have been confusing, but I don’t remember it coming up very often in Abaddon’s Gate. (That’s the furthest I’ve read so far.)
I’d be curious if there’s much study of that physical aspect alongside the study of creoles.
@2: IIRC it happens a lot. It kind of amused me to hear the official, formal-sounding military English translated into Belter in real time, and then the response coming back. The juxtaposition is funny, as well as the idea that it’s one guy stuck playing telephone in the middle of a war.
This is by far the nerdiest article I’ve read on this website. 10/10 would read again.
@Hector Thanks? I’m glad I can put my degrees to work ;)
@Sunspear Language change is SO cool and interesting, and there’s an entire subfield dedicated to studying the cultural/sociological aspects (sociolinguistics), which has a further subfield that looks at variation and what that means (variationist socio). Bill Labov’s New York department store study (fourth floor) was if not the earliest, certainly among the first, paper published in this field, and that was 1968. (the book chapter linked was published later.) In the last 50-odd years, the techniques have been refined and it’s just SO COOL.
@Taberius Rex I think they still mention the belter nod being a shake of the hand (which I imagine like ASL yes) later in the series, but it isn’t emphasized as much. That could be related to the belter body language already being established and the authors not wanting to ‘waste’ space on saying something they’ve said 300 times already (because there is a LOT of plot in the latest book, so more space for that).
@thumb I think I agree about the actors. The book feels natural but the show feels less convincing on occasion, though I don’t have the ear for it that you do.
Didn’t Firefly try this a bit with Chinese English
Nice article. The writer knows her chops. More juicy articles by her in the site, one about weaponised language in Blindsight. Yay! What a feast for the mind. Thanks for writing all this.
English is a creolization of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. That’s the point where Anglo-Saxon shed a lot of its inflections and was shifted from a predominantly agglutinative language to a more syntactic language. Remember, the “Danes” (Old Norse speakers) controlled a huge swath of central England (Danelaw) during the 9th-11th centuries. There was a whole lot more linguistic fallout from that “occupation” than there was from the Norman conquest.
@CD Covington — You’d love C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series — assuming you haven’t already read it.
@WOL hmmmmmmm, OE was already becoming analytical before the Danes, and the other modern Germanic languages also became more analytical than synthetic on their own without Danish influence or the suggestion that they’re creoles. (I am very skeptical about English as any sort of creole. There is absolutely contact influence from both ON and middle(?) French, but a lot of the changes can’t be distinguished from regular change that the rest of the Germanic family underwent.)
Gothic had demonstrative pronouns which were not equivalent to definite articles, but in OE and OHG they sometimes were. OE nominal morphology was already collapsing (see the paradigm for, e.g. ceaster), so articles took the place of inflection. Verbal morphology was also leveling – see the unified plural. It simplified further, yes, and more than most of its cousins – with Dutch having the next-simplest, at 3 verb forms (1, 2/3, plural). Modern German has 5 (1/3 plural are identical). The synthetic passive was already almost gone in Gothic and was being replaced by the periphrastic (equivalent of) werden + participle that we see in modern German.
I have read Foreigner, and Cherryh is one of my favorite authors :D
(As a side note, I find listening to Dutch extremely frustrating because it sounds like words I should know but I don’t and it’s so close to being understandable. I can sort of read Dutch if I pretend it’s weirdly-spelled German, but Dutch pronunciation is Very Different.)
LOL. I was in the Netherlands last week, for the first time in decades, with my wife who’s never been there before, and I warned her of exactly that. So much of it is very like English, but just when you’re sure you’re getting the gist, you find you’ve made a (possibly dangerous) assumption! Fortunately, we didn’t encounter a single person who didn’t speak English as well as we do!
Dutch is just a German dialect that is called a language because it happens to be spoken in a different country.
@17 – Dutch is indeed a language, not a dialect. It’s a Germanic language (just like English and a host of others), so there are strong similarities between all of them, but that still doesn’t make one a dialect of the other, much like Portuguese isn’t a dialect of Spanish even though they’re both Romance languages, or (going back to the Germanic side of the Indo European family tree), Norwegian isn’t a dialect of Swedish.
There’s a linguistic continuum in Western Europe that’s been around much longer than the current national borders. The local dialects spoken in the Eastern parts of the Netherlands and Belgium (i.e. bordering Germany) have strong similarities to German (e.g. in Limburg, they pronounce standard Dutch “ik” as “ich” and “appel” as “apfel”), but other parts of those countries have other local dialects that don’t and are in fact so wildly different from each other that people from one end of the country can have serious difficulties understanding people from the other end. All those dialects are still considered Dutch, much like the various local dialects in Germany and other German-speaking countries are all considered part of the German language.
Arguing the other way, people have at various times tried making the argument that Flemish, a version of Dutch spoken in large parts of northern Belgium, is a distinct language from Dutch. Much like “Dutch is just a dialect of German,” the motivation behind this reasoning is often more political than linguistic. Nationalism and language are often linked in odd ways: Just like larger neighbors have been known to claim that a smaller neighbor’s language is just a dialect—occasionally to assert dominance—smaller enclaves inside a country’s borders will often try to claim their own dialect or regiolect as a distinct language to assert independence. In some cases there’s a consensus behind this—everyone agrees Basque is a completely distinct language inside Spain’s (and France’s) borders—but in some cases political sentiment gets ahead of linguistics, e.g. when people argue passionately that Catalan is just a dialect of Spanish.
@18/Stefan: There is no clear boundary between dialect and language. “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
@19 – I’d actually included, then deleted, that line in an earlier version of my previous comment, as yet another example of people mixing politics and linguistics. The distinction is obviously much more complex. There’s literally an entire field of study devoted to it. The aphorism you quoted is a famous one—it was originally used in reference to Yiddish, which would be an interesting discussion in itself. It’s also a great way to get a room full of linguists to argue for a few hours. (I’m probably getting waaay too deep in the academic weeds here, but a German linguist named Heinz Kloss devised a way to classify the criteria we use to determine what qualifies as a language or dialect, separating the linguistic criteria from the socio-political ones. That’s just one approach out of dozens, but maybe the most interesting one to google for people who are interested in exploring this in more depth.)
@20/Stefan: “I’d actually included, then deleted, that line […] as yet another example of people mixing politics and linguistics.”
I quote that line a lot when people ask about the difference between dialect and language, expecting some clear boundary that doesn’t exist. It illustrates that linguistic distance isn’t the whole story. Of course politics isn’t the whole story either, but everybody knows that anyway.
Thanks for the link. I studied linguistics as a secondary subject thirty years ago, but never heard of abstand and ausbau languages.
Speaking about linguistic distance, do you happen to know whether Low German is closer related to Dutch or to High German? I used to assume that Dutch and Low German were closely related, but that may just be wishful thinking (“If Low German dies out, at least there’s still Dutch”).
@21/Jana – Low German is closer to Dutch, I think. I remember being told in class that people often misunderstand the terms, thinking that the “High” and “Low” refer to either geographic location (“High” being North) or to some kind of class or value distinction (like Low would be the common vernacular and High the more formal language), but apparently it has to do with elevation—as in Low German being spoken in the lowlands, closer to Belgium/NL, and High German in the more hilly, mountainous south.
@8 & @11,
The use of hand signs for Belters is that when you’re working in space, head gestures and facial expressions aren’t a valid means of communication when working in space and wearing a space suit. So they use hand signs for simple communication.
Also, great article. I’m still working my way through!
I thought that the absence of gendered nouns and verbs was one of the stronger arguments for Middle English as an emergent creole language. It’s strikingly different in this regard from other Indo-European languages, as well as OE.
@22/Stefan Not Sure absolut the High/Low description. As I recall the High-German refers to the “Standard-German” mainly started with the german translated bible by Luther.
As low-german (Plattdeutsch) is my motherlanguage (do you call it that in english?!) I can say yes and no to the similarity of low-german/dutch. As I grew up just about 7 kilometers from the border we went a lot to the Netherlands (having family there makes you
) and when we went there I basically continued speaking “Platt” and me and the Dutch from the border-area with their variant of Dutch (Twentse) understood nearly perfect. But when travelling further from the border this easy understanding got more difficult.
I too can confirm the very feeling of the sociolinguistic “power-politics” included. Platt was considered (80s in North-Western Germany) the language of the uneducated und simple people. That let teachers to try to convince my parents to change our family language to “High German” as they genuinely thought speaking “Platt” at home would hinder our education.
(But I have the impression that this has changed. I see a lot of interest in conservating even reviving “Platt” in my hometown/region. I’d even call it an paradigmatic shift.)
And to speak “Platt” with people around who didn’t understand gave a sense of belonging/seperation/solidarity. Often with a kind of stubborness/proudness/oppositional feel to it (Sorry for the lack of exact words. Hope I get the feel/mood across).
Thank you for the interesting read! I have been aware of your articles for a few months due to a friend, and I was wondering if you would do an article on The Expanse.
I’ve been studying Lang Belta from the TV show for over a year now and one thing that your article does is treat it the same as the Belter creole of the books. However, they have many features that are quite different, from the phonological constraints to the syntax. I wouldn’t be able to understand the Book Belter if you gave me a phrase.
For example, for “are you ready?”
Book Belter: Dangsin-eun junbiga?
Lang Belta: To gútegow ke?
For “I’m sorry”:
Book Belter: Üzgün
Lang Belta: Mi du sensa.
Now, there are a few terms that are the same between the creoles, like gut “good” or beratna “brother”, or sound the same but have different glossed, like pampa “uncle” (pampaw “grandfather” in the books). But overall, I wouldn’t treat them like the same language.
If at any point you would like to learn more about the show’s Lang Belta, we have groups on Discord and Reddit, and have resources for you, such as fan spreadsheets, a fan-made Memrise course, and lots of links from Farmer’s Tweets about Lang Belta. Farmer also has his own Patreon page, where we can ask him questions to help expand our knowledge of Lang Belta.
Patreon: //www.patreon.com/Nfarmer
Farmer’s Twitter: @Nfarmerlinguist
Memrise course: https://www.memrise.com/course/1476694/lang-belta-belter-creole-phrasebook/
Linguists use low German for the flat areas in the north and High German for the mountainous south, but since High German is closer to standard German many non-linguists associate high with standard and low with less-respected (northern) dialects.
@27 Birgit Thx Birgit. I’ve never known the linguistic categorization. Just been educated
How about an article like this on the languages of “The 100”? (If only the show spent as much effort on the basic science and technology of, everything else.)
I second, 3rd, 4th, nth, the idea of an article on the Atevi language in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books.
For “The Expanse” fans who crave similar hard SF I highly recommend Felix R. Savage’s “Sol System Renegades” series. It too spans the Solar System but with 100% less alien stuff. IMHO it also needs to be a big fancy TV series.
@22/Stefan: Thanks!
@24/Opally: Do you mean gendered nouns and adjectives, or participles? Verbs aren’t gendered in any Indo-European language I know.
@25/Achim: “As low-german I can say yes and no to the similarity of low-german/dutch.”
That’s interesting. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that Twentse is a variant of Dutch Low Saxon, which isn’t Dutch but Low German. Now I wonder if the Dutch from the Dutch-speaking regions understand their Eastern compatriots when they are speaking their local dialect.
“Platt was considered (80s in North-Western Germany) the language of the uneducated und simple people.”
What a pity. I used to think that the paradigmatic shift you mentioned had taken place earlier. When I grew up in Westphalia in the late 70s/early 80s, my parents told me that my grandfather had been speaking Standard German at home and Platt with his workers, but that he hadn’t taught it to his children because at the time, it was considered uneducated, and that this was a real shame.
I guess a thing only becomes valued when it’s endangered.
30. JanaJansen Yes, you’re right. I meant nouns and adjectives, not verbs. I was thinking of Hebrew!
Still, wouldn’t you agree that it’s a striking indicator of a major change in Middle English, suggesting a simplification of grammar that occurs when languages are blended and borrowed?
Living in Abu Dhabi for the better part of a decade, I witnessed an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand, anybody who did not speak Arabic made do with repeating what they meant using simpler and simpler words until the meaning came across. To add local color, everything was peppered with a few token Arabic words.
But completely parallel to this, a pidgin called “taxi Arabic” is developing (https://www.thenational.ae/uae/emirati-films-draw-attention-to-unique-taxi-arabic-1.235100) between the Emirati ruling class and workers from the subcontinent, exactly as CD Covington describes, mixing Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, Hindi … The funny thing is, not knowing any of those languages, I was under the impression for a long time that Taxi drivers in AD were really fluent in Arabic!
Unfortunately, having experienced this linguistic hodgepodge where every interaction is a discovery, I find the Expanse’s efforts a bit two dimensional. I know that’s absolutely unfair to them: the effort and attention to details are extraordinary, and frankly, the TV adaptation is stellar in bringing the feeling to life. But i always have a little nagging demon on my shoulder saying “Beratna, bist too much facíl, sa sa ke”
@31/Opally: Gendered verbs sound cool! Sadly, I never managed to learn any non-Indo-European languages.
“Still, wouldn’t you agree that it’s a striking indicator of a major change in Middle English, suggesting a simplification of grammar that occurs when languages are blended and borrowed?”
Oh yes, absolutely. But that doesn’t necessarily make it a creole.
I’m not an expert, neither on Middle English nor on creole languages. I heard about creole languages in my linguistics introductory course, more than thirty years ago, and now again in this post. CD Covington is much more of an expert, and she said in comment #15 that she’s skeptical about English as a creole.
That said, some thoughts of my own:
Perhaps the answer depends on the definition of creole/the theory of creolisation you use. The article mentions the Creole Exceptionalism Hypothesis vs. the Feature Pool Hypothesis. Under the Creole Exceptionalism Hypothesis, you’d have to have a pidgin first, a language without grammar. But English still retains some very old grammatical elements, e.g. ablaut verbs: sing-sang-sung, drink-drank-drunk, etc. Those are the same in German, by the way: singen-sang-gesungen, trinken-trank-getrunken. There was no complete breakdown of grammar, thus it seems wrong to call English a creole.
I had never heard about the Feature Pool Hypothesis before reading this article, i.e. the view that “creoles are mixed or hybrid languages”. It sounds to me as if creoles, under this view, are simply an extreme case of something that happens all the time, namely languages borrowing from each other and getting simplified through language contact. Still not an expert, but if this is what “creole” means, I can imagine English as a creole.
I did some reading on the Internet, and apparently there are other languages that have lost their gender system, and it always involved language contact: Afrikaans, Ossetic, and Cappadocian Greek.
I’ve spotted Slavic (sabaka) and Hindi (suffix -wala) elements.
Great article!
When I started watching the show, I was disappointed that they didn’t use the Belter-specific gestures as much, but I guess it would be hard for the viewers to keep track which gesture means what, whereas in the book they can simply write “she gestured yes”.
This article also got me thinking about something I noticed in the last years in my country (Bulgaria). Since most young people constantly read and watch English and for many of us English is the main language at work, you can hear more and more English words in the language. However, they often get gendered or get the endings specific for verbs and nouns in Bulgarian, e.g. someone will say “checknah si maila”, meaning “I checked my mail” (in pure Bulgarian it will be “proverih si poshtata”, so the words are not even close). So I guess it is an unofficial creole forming up ;)