Basilects in Creole Literatures: Examples from Sranan, Capeverdian Crioulo and Antillean Kréyol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Language and dialect choice are frequently thematized in creole literature, notably in Alfred Parépou's 1885 Guianese novelAtipa. The concept of the basilect has accordingly played an important role in creole writing, critical thinking, and polemic. Given the assimilative pressure exerted by the superstrate, writers and critics often argue that the ideal creole literary dialect should be as divergent from it as possible. During the 1980s the P.A.I.C.V. government in Cape Verde tried to promote a revolutionary literature in what was described as the deep, original dialect of Crioulo, that of the hinterland of Santiago Island. Of particular interest were the agency of theInstitutu Kauberdianu di Livruin Praia and the intellectual work of Manuel Veiga, especially hisDikrison Strutural di Lingua Kabuverdianu. Around the same time, writers in Martinique, most prominently Raphaël Confiant, embraced the vision of a literary basilect ‘maximally deviant’ from standard French, which Jean Bernabé defined as a ‘nuclear creole.’ This article concludes with an extract from one of Confiant's novels in which ‘hyper-acrolectal’ French is humorously contrasted with the author's figuration of deep Kréyol.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".