Molyé: A Corpus-based Approach to Language Contact in Colonial F rance (2024)

Abstract: Whether or not several Creole languages which developed during the early modern period can be considered genetic descendants of European languages has been the subject of intense debate. This is in large part due to the absence of evidence of intermediate forms. This work introduces a new open corpus, the Molyé corpus, which combines stereotypical representations of three kinds of language variation in Europe with early attestations of French-based Creole languages across a period of 400 years. It is intended to facilitate future research on the continuity between contact situations in Europe and Creolophone (former) colonies.

## introduction between the 15th and 19th centuries, several languages developed in colonized territories, which, while sharing a large amount of vocabulary with existing european languages, differ considerably in morphology and syntax. these languages are often labeled english-based [or lexified] creoles, french-based creoles, portuguese-based creoles, etc., according to the language they share most of their vocabulary with, which is itself called the lexifier. one long standing question has been why the grammars of these languages diverged from their lexifiers to a greater extent than the vocabulary (de @xcite . much of the difficulty in answering this question stems from harsh social conditions discouraging linguistic documentation and environmental conditions destroying much of what had been documented @xcite . for french-based creole languages (fbcls), which developed on islands and isolated continental settlements during the 17th and 18th centuries @xcite 1 , reliable documentation largely dates from the mid-late 18th century onward @xcite . however, we note that the formative period of fbcls coincided 1 except tayo in 19th century new caledonia. with a period of french political and cultural dominance and extensive literary production known as the grand siècle. the cultural works of the period are replete with numerous stereotypes of the speech of several social groups, such as urbanized peasants and swiss soldiers. despite various issues detailed by @xcite , these representations are relevant for fbcls insofar as they demonstrate several interesting morphosyntactic developments. here, we introduce the molyé corpus, which regroups 68 works that contain examples of either the aforementioned stereotypes or early attestations of fbcls. this list has been curated from a larger collection of 301 documents identified at the time of publication. 2 we begin by giving an overview of related corpora and how we approach historical linguistics as an instance of multi-label language identification. after giving some linguistic context, we also explain the process of identifying creole-like features in french literary works, encoding said works into xml-tei, and then compiling groups of quotes into a timeline. finally, we present summary statistics and conclude by giving examples of how our corpus highlights intra-european contact. ## related work in recent years, creole languages have garnered attention in the field of natural language processing. on the one hand, @xcite have explored how these languages challenge the assumed desirability of certain applications. on the other hand, @xcite and @xcite argue that language models for concrete problems may shed light on theoretical issues as well. simultaneously, in computational historical linguistics, @xcite has declared the inferral of morpheme boundaries and the detection of layers of language contact to be major open problems. our work addresses both the paucity of early cre-ole documentation and the issue of multiple layers of language contact through the applied lens of language identification. ## linguistic background the backbone of our corpus is applying multi-label language identification based on disjunctive features across time. in concrete terms, we sought out distinctly "creole" features in europe before and during the colonial expansion. as such, we briefly review a few characteristics of fbcls, followed by french literary stereotypes. ## corpus creation the compilation of the corpus was realized in three overlapping phases. during the first phase, we identified documents which contained n-grams thought to be highly disjunctive between french and various fbcls. after identifying the documents the next step was to convert them relevant samples into the xml-tei schema of a broader project. lastly, we classified the documents by location and period and extracted the relevant quotes into a combined xml document to facilitate the preliminary analysis presented in section 6. ## corpus presentation overall, we found 301 historical works which demonstrate features relevant for the history of fb-cls. we have selected excerpts from 68 of these works to form the basis of the first version of the corpus. the earliest text is "le testament du gentil cossoys", written anonymously around 1509, and the most recent is jules watteuw's "belle réponse", published in 1932. the main corpus consists of a single, publicly available xml file containing bibliographic information for the collection, followed by a body which contains "tei" tags that regroup the relevant selections from each work and are accompanied by their own brief bibliography section. from this file, one can create customized subcorpora that correspond to specific questions by specifying a date range and the language labels that are to be considered. at present, the corpus contains a total of 188,866 tokens (whitespace tokenization), excluding metadata. because of the historical focus of the text, all of the primary sources are in the public domain, and most are readily consultable online. in these cases, we also retain cached copies with additional bibliographic information. in the cases where quotes have been included from printed secondary sources, we do not include metalinguistic commentary. ## preliminary results since the main effort of this work has consisted of gathering and grouping multiple non-standardized varieties, proceeding directly to quantitative methods presents special challenges. for the initial demonstration, we provide a few qualitative observations and show how we can support them through relatively simple frequency-based methods, with a particular focus on the relevance of baragouin 15 . ## conclusion in short, we have introduced the molyé corpus, a new resource which puts french literary stereotypes alongside early forms of several frenchbased creole languages. we have shown that restructuring of the french pronominal and verbal systems are attested throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and specifically associated with speakers of germanic languages. although stereotypes like the conventionalized baragouin only address a fraction of the real linguistic variation of the period, our corpus nevertheless raises important questions about how people communicated in lands where french and germanic languages came into contact. furthermore, it shows that at least some of the divergences between fbcls and french can be traced back to developments which were already underway in europe.