Viewed from a distance, linguists and anthropologists experience the cultural and linguistic diversity of French Guiana (Guyane française) and that of its neighbour, Suriname, as exciting and enticing – they see the two countries as a little laboratory for studying human diversity. The tourist industry markets French Guiana as exotic, using catchy phrases such as Vous n’en croirez pas vos yeux! [‘You will not believe it[!]’]. Officials from metropolitan France who are charged with running the country do not share these positive feelings. Indeed, educational institutions and the various branches of local and national administration in French Guiana tend to experience the region’s celebrated diversity as a logistical headache.

French Guiana is an eight-hour flight and 7,000 km from metropolitan France. It used to be a French colony but became French ground in Amazonian South America when it was made an overseas region (Département d’Outre-Mer) in 1946. Despite vast differences in the social, cultural and geographic makeup of metropolitan France and French Guiana, French Guiana’s governing institutions exactly replicate those found in metropolitan France. The National Education System (Éducation Nationale), for example, applies much the same educational programmes in both regions, but educational failure, including school drop-out rates, are much higher in French Guiana than in metropolitan France; in fact, French Guiana consistently scores lowest on all educational achievement indicators among all French regions. Members of the national education system commonly blame the linguistic and cultural diversity of French Guiana for the region’s catastrophic educational track record.

In contrast to the powers that be, over the last forty years anthropologists and linguists working in the region (see Hurault Reference Hurault1972; Grenand Reference Grenand1982; Grenand and Lescure Reference Grenand and Lescure1990; Goury et al. Reference Goury, Launey, Queixalós and Renault-Lescure2000, Reference Goury, Launey, Lescure, Puren and Tupin2005) have repeatedly argued that the educational problems of French Guiana are largely produced by existing educational syllabuses, approaches and practices. In their view, it is their ignorance of the social, cultural and linguistic context of the region combined with their close adherence to the social, cultural and linguistic norms of (middle-class) metropolitan France that are putting French Guianese children at a disadvantage, as children in Guiana often have little sustained access to metropolitan norms. In recent decades, several initiatives have tried to overhaul this situation (Puren Reference Puren, Léglise and Migge2007). One of the most recent initiatives was led by linguists who had previously participated in grassroots bilingual education projects in other South American countries (see Chapter 2). Its aim was to address the issues raised by the local Amerindian movement of cultural and linguistic self-determination which argued that the French Guianese education system was not only ineffective but also destructive per se (see Charles Reference Charles1997).¹

In the 1990s, in an attempt to address language-related issues in schools, the linguists of the CNRS-IRD research unit CELIA initiated a program called Languages of French Guiana: Research, Education and Training (Langues de Guyane: recherche, éducation, formation).² Its goal was to document the lesser-known languages spoken in French Guiana and to train members of these linguistic communities to teach their home language and culture to the children of these communities. Their motto was ‘producing knowledge to empower local social actors’. Using traditional fieldwork methodologies (see Munro Reference Munro, Aronoff and Rees-Miller2002; Crowley Reference Crowley2007; Payne Reference Payne2006), they produced valuable linguistic knowledge about various local languages. This research yielded publications in scientific journals, presentations at scientific conferences, PhD theses, and the publication of grammars and dictionaries aimed at diverse audiences. An important element of this work involved political activism. Researchers set out to raise decision-makers’, teachers’ and lay people’s awareness about local languages and about the need to implement languages other than French in local schools. Because they were descriptive linguists whose primary focus was on structural issues related to one or the other language, their efforts were hampered by their lack of knowledge about the sociolinguistic context of French Guiana. For instance, they did not know which languages and how many languages children spoke, when they used this or that language, nor children’s attitudes and proficiency in various languages. In their professional work as descriptive linguists, this type of sociolinguistic information was epiphenomenal, yet it proved vital when making a solid case for integrating trained community members into the local school context. Despite the various team members’ endeavours, by 1999 they had found neither a suitable researcher nor the necessary funds to carry out a detailed sociolinguistic survey of French Guiana.

Isabelle came to French Guiana for the first time in 1999 to visit a friend who was then part of the initial team of researchers of the program Languages of French Guiana: Research, Education and Training. At the time, Isabelle was teaching linguistics at the University of Paris III and had just finished her PhD thesis on discourse analysis. Although she had only dealt with ‘non-exotic’ field sites, namely language variation and change in urban settings and language at work, her previous training in linguistics, anthropology and French as a Foreign Language predestined her for research in French Guiana. She was immediately taken with the place and the people she met there. An older Creole woman, who was her friend’s neighbour, made her try her delicious bouillon d’awara – and the prophecy was readily fulfilled³ . . . for the CELIA linguists were still looking for someone to carry out a sociolinguistic survey of French Guiana’s multilingual context.

The goal of the sociolinguistic survey was to document and answer the following:

1. a. What are the linguistic practices of the school population? That is, what is the distribution, function and status of the different languages in French Guianese society in general and in specific contexts such as the home environment, the school context, at work, at the marketplace etc.?

2. b. Which of the languages used in French Guiana function as a lingua franca? (See also Chapter 2.)

Isabelle was immediately enticed. A few months later, the French Ministry for Culture was inviting proposals for research on linguistic practices as part of the project Observatory of Linguistic Practices in France (Observatoire des pratiques linguistiques). These funds allowed her fieldwork to go ahead. Even during the very initial stages of the sociolinguistic survey, when she mostly collected data from primary-school children (see Chapter 2), an unexpectedly high degree of multilingualism became quickly apparent.

The survey challenged existing scientific views about French Guiana. First, contrary to the widespread assumption that urban areas are multilingual while rural areas remain mono-ethnic and monolingual, the survey revealed that both kinds of geographical settings are linguistically heterogeneous. Her work also showed that mono-ethnic communities are not automatically monolingual (in the community’s ancestral language) but are in fact also multilingual and, just like urban areas, also constitute heterogeneous linguistic spaces. Second, the survey also demonstrated that besides the traditional language names commonly used by linguists, children in western French Guiana were also spontaneously using other terms, especially to refer to the various locally used English-based Creoles spoken in French Guiana. These terms challenged linguists’ perceptions of the English-based Creole linguistic space. The most striking case was the term Takitaki.

Even before Isabelle started her survey, fellow linguists working in French Guiana had told her about the term Takitaki which, according to them, was used by ignorant people to refer to the English-based Creoles associated with local Maroon populations.⁴ When interviewing children about the languages they spoke at home, with their parents, before they went to school etc., Isabelle was, of course, trying to avoid using the term. In order to signal to the children that she was not ignorant about the makeup of the English-based Creoles, she generally tried to respond with further questions such as ‘which one?’ when children told her that they spoke Takitaki to their parents, for instance. This strategy generally worked well. In most cases, children supplied known ethnically based names in response to her second question (such as Aluku, Ndyuka, Pamaka or Saamaka),⁵ and in some instances children even expressed their surprise about her knowledge – they would ask her ‘but, Madam, you are white how come you know this?’ In other cases, however, children never used the terms commonly employed by linguists, suggesting to her that they were using the term Takitaki in order to signal something. As the school survey progressed, Isabelle became literally overwhelmed by the high frequency and ease with which children were using the term Takitaki to respond to her questions. She was convinced that something was going on that merited closer attention. It seemed to her that children’s use of the term Takitaki was clearly linked to categorization processes, naming practices and attitudes towards languages and peoples. Isabelle was also wondering if its usage was somehow linked to newly emerging linguistic practices. She therefore went in search of someone who would have a good knowledge of the English-based Creoles in order to join forces to solve this puzzle.

Descriptive linguists were not very receptive to the idea, but things were about to change in October 2001 when Isabelle met Bettina for the first time at a common friend’s house in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni while doing fieldwork in western French Guiana. At the time, Isabelle was recording spontaneous interactions (commercial encounters at the market, within families, etc.) and was doing interviews with adults – of the ‘your life with languages stories’ type (Linde Reference Linde1993; Schüpbach Reference Schüpbach2008) in order to complement her school survey data. Bettina initially helped her to carry out some recordings at the market and gave her ideas about where to meet Maroons. Eventually, Isabelle spoke to Bettina about Takitaki and in 2003 a long collaboration began.

Bettina first came to the region in 1994. Set to write a PhD thesis on the role of African languages in creole formation, she was exploring the possibility of carrying out fieldwork on one of the lesser-known varieties of English-based Creoles called Pamaka, which is associated with a Maroon community by the same name. Needing relatively conservative language data for her historically oriented project, she decided to collect the necessary language data in the traditional rural, largely mono-ethnic village communities. With the kind assistance of SIL Suriname, she went on a bumpy but thoroughly intriguing week-long trip up the Maroni River to the village of Langa Tabiki, which at the time was still recovering from the effects of the Surinamese civil war (see Chapter 3). A Ndyuka contact introduced her to the paramount chief of the Pamaka and the officers of his government and obtained their permission for her return the following year to do fieldwork for her PhD thesis in the village.

When Bettina returned to Langa Tabiki in September 1995, she assumed, based on her readings on creole communities and the Maroons, that the village and the Pamaka community would be linguistically relatively homogeneous. To her surprise, however, even during her first days in the village when her competence in Pamaka was still very low, she noticed different speech forms that seemed at least in part to correlate with distinct social behaviours, different groups of people and different spaces within the village. What was initially most salient to her was the variation between Pamaka, Sranan Tongo and Dutch. Her cultural and linguistic mentor Gaanman Levi and the other elders, who were never short of advice, repeatedly warned her about Sranan Tongo and its users as well as about the Pamaka who frequently employed it – mostly young men who worked in small-scale gold exploitation or who came to visit from the coastal urban centres for longer or shorter periods of time. They described these men as unpredictable, and their language use as rude and ignorant. Having her hands full with coming to grips with life in a remote Amazonian village, with language learning – a basic prerequisite for survival – and identifying language consultants for her PhD project, she initially did not pursue this issue further and focused on what was presented to her as ‘true’ Pamaka language and culture. But even what was presented to her as ‘true’ Pamaka culture did not seem all that homogeneous. For months she kept putting off making recordings because it was unclear to her which type of speech would be most appropriate for her project. Moreover, Labovian sociolinguistic fieldwork methods – her main training at the time – which rely heavily on single or group interviews appeared entirely inappropriate for this community, as people do not appreciate direct questions and even semi-formal elicitation of information. Their standard response was: look around, come along and find out. Finally, more out of frustration than anything else, she decided to make the best use of this approach. She tagged along with community members and recorded different kinds of social interactions that she participated in as a bystander or as an active participant if people allowed her to turn on the recorder. People thought that she was in the village to learn the language, and she spent part of her energy on mastering various socio-cultural and language practices.

Still intrigued by the linguistic diversity in a mono-ethnic community and by the stark difference between her experiences in Suriname and common sociolinguistic accounts of creole communities, following the completion of her PhD, Bettina decided to take a closer look at the sociolinguistics of the Maroon community. Initially, she returned to the village setting and tried to get a handle on traditional village-type speech forms. But she quickly shifted her focus to the urban context because the village community she had known in 1995 was rapidly urbanizing due to migration to the French Guianese town of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and the French Guianese village of Apatou (see Map 2.1 in Chapter 2).⁶ Both were undergoing rapid change due to efforts by the French government to ‘develop’ the region. The population had been rapidly increasing since the late 1980s (due to migration from the interior and from Suriname in the context of the Surinamese civil war). This forced French authorities to build a significant number of houses and schools and to increase local infrastructure significantly. Spending increasingly more time in the urban context among both Pamakas that she had known since 1995 and meeting new people of different backgrounds, Bettina noticed that what the elders of the Pamaka and Ndyuka villages she had visited in 1995, 1996 and 1997 had termed ‘bad speech’ was rapidly gaining in importance in the urban context. It was also losing its negative connotations in the early twenty-first century. Equally surprising was the fact that the language that she had learned in 1995 was increasingly rated as non-contemporary; especially in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, members of its large Maroon community were now starting to describe her language use as very polite and youngsters at times made jokes about its village character, something which had not happened in 1995 and 1996. Moreover, starting around 2000, Maroons in French Guiana who did not know her were suddenly using the term Takitaki rather than the traditional terms Ndyuka or Nengee when asking where she had learned to speak it.

Having compared notes, we decided that the issue of Takitaki merited much more serious attention because it squarely challenged traditional scientific views about the linguistic setting of French Guiana and received knowledge about the English-based Creoles. In order to explore Takitaki, we initially set out to look for answers to the following questions:

1. What linguistic facts and practices does the term Takitaki relate to?

2. What are the meanings and uses of the term Takitaki?

3. What are the factors that determine the use of this term and the practices associated with it?

4. Is the term Takitaki linked to a ‘real’ linguistic community or is it used to refer to different types of practices?

5. How does the term Takitaki relate to other terms used to refer to varieties pertaining to English-based Creoles?

6. How does Takitaki relate to the currently observable linguistic practices involving the English-based Creoles?

7. What are the linguistic, social and interactional properties of the linguistic practices identified by the term Takitaki?

Having identified some of the questions, we had to face yet another issue:

1. How could such a phenomenon be studied most effectively?

We first decided to explore ideologies, attitudes and naming conventions both to get acquainted with the cultural context and to establish how discourses on Takitaki shape the social and linguistic realities. Reviewing our existing data, we decided that additional data was needed and began new field research on the topic. Extensive observation showed that the term Takitaki was much more widely used among people living in French Guiana than we had initially thought. Whenever and wherever possible, we carried out interviews and discussions using different languages, such as French, Sranan Tongo, Eastern Maroon varieties, English, in order to access the linguistic ideology and attitudes about Takitaki. We generally never used the term ourselves, but tried to record everything that people were saying about it. Second, we decided to record the linguistic practices referred to as Takitaki in order to analyse them from a linguist’s perspective. Several hours of Isabelle’s recordings at the hospital documented brief usage of common languages between the medical staff, the patients and their families. Some of these were obviously in a kind of English-based Creole that the speakers themselves called Takitaki, but the extracts were too short to perform a proper linguistic analysis (see Chapter 6). We therefore decided to obtain new recordings in different kinds of settings. Our enthusiasm was quickly dampened, however, because this led to yet another set of difficult questions: What, in fact, were we looking for? What kind of speakers should we record? What kind of interactions should we record? Who is a ‘good’ speaker of Takitaki? Native speakers (if the term still retains any meaning in this type of context . . .)? Older people? Younger people? Outsiders? In short, how can we identify the speaker community? What are its outlines and what is its structure? Should we focus on contexts in which ‘native’ speakers interact with ‘non-native’ speakers or on encounters between non-native speakers? Or should we maybe look at both types of interactions? Are there certain kinds of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speaker groups that we should concentrate on? Are there certain social contexts that are more closely associated with Takitaki than others? How can we find out about these issues?

Since these issues raise important questions about the relationship between language and community that are in many ways relevant to all forms of language research, we searched among existing frameworks that deal with linguistic description and documentation (e.g. Abbi Reference Abbi2001; Austin Reference Austin2004; Mithun Reference Mithun, Newman and Ratliff2001, Reference Mithun2007; Payne Reference Payne2006; Crowley Reference Crowley2007). However, they did not prove entirely useful for several reasons. First, language documentation generally relies on elicitation of context-independent language data and on mostly staged monological narratives of traditional stories and descriptions of traditional cultural events. Little use is made of spontaneous interactional data recorded in natural settings. This kind of behaviourist data did not seem suitable for investigating and capturing what people in French Guiana call Takitaki because our preliminary investigation suggested that Takitaki is a much more multifaceted, dynamic and interactionally based phenomenon. Second, descriptive linguists tend to obtain the bulk of their language data from one or a small number of language consultants who have a good knowledge of traditional community practices and who generally receive training in linguistic data production from the researcher. This approach implies that the researcher is able to define the speaker community and distinguish good or knowledgeable speakers from others. This aspect of language documentation methodology appeared to be equally unsuitable for our case, because one of the aims of our investigation was to define the makeup of the Takitaki speaker community. Third, existing approaches to language documentation pay little attention to the social contexts in which a language is used and the social ideologies and attitudes that condition and shape its use, its social structuring and its interaction with other languages including patterns of contact and variation and change. Languages are described as near-static structural systems and little attention is given to the social, ideological and linguistic dynamics that underlie people’s linguistic practices and (re)presentations of these practices in spontaneous discourse and in print.⁷ This also proved to be problematic for our purpose because our preliminary investigation had already demonstrated that Takitaki was a socially complex phenomenon that is closely tied up with local language ideologies and with the social dynamics of the context. Thus, in order to understand it properly, we felt it was necessary to focus on social context and issues. Finally, language documentation’s focus on description of language systems rather than on linguistic practices appeared to be problematic too because we began working with a mere word, Takitaki, with some idea of its referent(s) and a few practices, but we had very few certainties as to their status and relationships to other entities or practices, social actors and contexts in the social and linguistic landscape of French Guiana. In short, since our investigation of Takitaki resembled a discovery mission – a search for an unknown object, its users and contexts of activity – our approach had to be bottom-up rather than top-down.

The strongly researcher-oriented approach to data collection – with the linguist fully in control of the linguistic data and deciding ‘whose language should be recorded and which genres are appropriate for extracting grammatical forms and inferring grammatical rules’ (Duranti Reference Duranti1994: 16–17) – inherent in descriptive linguistic approaches to language may be useful for describing context-free linguistic systems, but it is unsuitable for understanding how linguistic forms constitute cultural practices. Researching the interface between language, culture and society is the domain of ethnographic linguistics or linguistic anthropology. In these disciplines, data is mainly collected through participant observation (see Spradley Reference Spradley1980) where the researcher participates, as far as possible, in the social life of the community they investigate for a certain amount of time, record and analyse spontaneously occurring and locally meaningful interactions ‘in which language is used for ends other than the linguist’s need to collect examples’ (Duranti Reference Duranti1994: 17). While linguistic anthropology’s focus on interaction appeared to us to be well suited for our research on Takitaki, its emphasis on the notion of community proved problematic for our investigation. In the same way that descriptive linguistics’ focus on language systems went counter to our purpose, so did linguistic anthropology’s emphasis on community. This implies that the researcher is able, from the outset, to define the speaker community or one or more smaller well-defined social entities. However, in the case of our research on Takitaki, the speaker community was one of the entities that had to be discovered. Moreover, it is not entirely clear how a community can be identified in a heterogeneous multilingual and multiethnic context. If the community is defined around culturally and socially constituted interaction, ‘reflects what people know when they interact with one another’ and assumes ‘that when people come together through discursive practices, they behave as though they operate within a shared set of norms, local knowledge, beliefs, and values’ (Morgan Reference Morgan1999), then the question arises as to how much must be shared among people in order for a group of people to constitute a community. How similar do people’s linguistic practices, interactional patterns, usage patterns and interpretations of these have to be in order to constitute a community? Does the overlap have to be real or can it be imagined? Although linguistic anthropology had until then always provided us with useful avenues for investigating language phenomena, it did not seem to provide a ready-made methodology for studying a case like Takitaki.

This book has two interrelated goals. First, we investigate the phenomenon of Takitaki in French Guiana. Second, we explore and set out a holistic methodology for documenting language in a multilingual setting and demonstrate how it can be effectively applied to document cases like Takitaki in French Guiana. In relation to Takitaki, our investigation focusses on identifying its social and linguistic nature. In terms of its social nature, we seek to answer the following set of questions:

1. Who uses this term and in what contexts?

2. What types of meanings does it index and what social and linguistic images does it construct?

3. How does it relate to other local naming/categorization practices?

4. What forms of social processes does it mediate?

5. What types of linguistic facts or practices does it reference/construct?

6. What is the interaction/relationship between naming practices and linguistic practices for the English-based Creole in French Guiana?

In relation to Takitaki’s linguistic nature, we are looking to answer the following questions:

1. What are its distinctive linguistic characteristics?

2. What type and degree of variation characterizes Takitaki practices?

3. What social and linguistic factors ‘govern’ this variation?

4. What types of social and linguistic processes are Takitaki practices involved in?

5. How do the various practices referred to as Takitaki relate to one another and how is this relationship mediated?

6. How do Takitaki practices relate to the linguistic practices of the English-based Creoles described in the literature and currently practised by Maroons?

Our investigation reveals that the term Takitaki is used by a wide range of social actors in French Guiana to reference linguistic practices associated with the English-based Creoles. However when people use the term Takitaki, they assign to it widely differing social meanings and referents and they construct varied linguistic and social distinctions and entities. The term Takitaki is used to highlight a range of newly emerging social categories, identities, social distinctions and relationships prompted by on-going macro-social processes of change such as migration, urbanization and social reconstitution that have been affecting this region in the last two and a half decades. One way in which these new social distinctions and categories are discursively constituted or articulated is through categorization processes involving naming practices relating to what are also referred to as the English-based Creoles in French Guiana. There is no close match, at best some overlap, between different local social actors’ conceptualizations, because each (group of) social actor(s) is bound up in (partially) different relationships and identity-based processes. Young Maroons, for instance, are concerned with distancing themselves from older members and negative images attached to their own social group and with asserting new or what they see as more favourable social categories, identities, relationships. This is done by invoking new linguistic entities, and they use the term Takitaki instead of or in addition to existing sets of terms associated with traditional, rural linguistic practices. By contrast, Arawak children are concerned with carving out their own space distinct from that of Maroons and Surinamese children, because they feel that they are linguistically, but not socially, uncomfortably close to them. Since they are mostly concerned with differentiating themselves, on some levels, from Maroon children, their conceptualization of the English-based Creoles mediated through the term Takitaki constructs only two categories, ‘ours and theirs’, or possibly three categories ‘ours, theirs and that of the people from the other country, i.e. Suriname’. Others, such as metropolitan and Antillean French people or middle-class people are concerned with asserting their superiority vis-à-vis the other inhabitants of western French Guiana. They construct only one variety, associated with an undifferentiated set of black people indexed with mostly unfavourable connotations, which they implicitly oppose to their own language identified with positive meanings. People with greater experience in the local context are eager to show that they are in tune with the local context. This is done by constructing and differentiating between several practices and speaker groups. They use the term Takitaki to delineate local low-status linguistic practices of the English-based Creoles from others, such as those used by what they class as more educated people and those that they view as rural (and backward). The latter were usually identified using traditional language names such as Sranan Tongo and Saamaka, respectively. Essentially, the term Takitaki is bound up with different kinds of social processes. These processes in turn are associated with different linguistic practices and social actors, whose social issues or concerns impact on the negotiation of their social position, their relationships with others and identities: modern day’s western French Guiana’s social and linguistic landscape is in flux. We argue that people draw on a socially and linguistically underspecified and multifunctional term such as Takitaki because it can be invested with a wide range of interactionally useful meanings, and this, in turn, reveals newly emerging social distinctions. The English-based Creoles spoken in French Guiana are a good projection field because they are salient but at the same time dynamic, ‘new’ (to French Guiana), and this space’s structure has not been discursively fixed yet – everyone feels that they have a right to have an opinion about the English-based Creoles. In fact, from the point of view of most people in French Guiana and those who have a stake in it, they (and their speakers) are so closely tied up with the social changes that have been taking place in western French Guiana that it often appears impossible to talk about the local transformations without talking about Maroons and the language practices commonly linked to them.

The linguistic practices identified as Takitaki by local actors can be related to the English-based Creoles from a purely linguistic point of view. One striking aspect of Takitaki practices is that they appear mainly to combine features from the varieties spoken by some Maroon groups (Ndyuka, Pamaka, Aluku) with those typically associated with the related Surinamese lingua franca, Sranan Tongo, despite the fact that most people claim that they learned Takitaki from interacting with Maroons. Takitaki practices are not homogeneous. There are differences in the relative proportion of Maroon-, Sranan Tongo-associated and shared features as well as features from other languages such as Guyanese English, French, French Guianese Creole (Créole Guyanais). These differences are due to a variety of factors such as different language-learning trajectories, usage and interactional patterns, language attitudes and overall competence issues. For instance, while some people were (also) exposed to the English-based Creoles in the rural up-river villages or in more remote coastal areas while interacting with a variety of people, others picked it up in the urban context mostly from people of their own age group, such as young men interacting in public, multiethnic/multilingual spaces. Others had previously spent some time in Suriname, and been exposed to Sranan Tongo. Takitaki practices also serve different functions. Some people use them only as a means of bridging basic communication difficulties that typically occur in certain work contexts such as service encounters. These practices tend to be strongly simplified. Others carry out a wide range of interactions using Takitaki because they are involved in networks that consist of or include speakers of the English-based Creoles. In some cases, Takitaki is presented as a bare necessity: it is the only way to communicate with (some) non-French speakers. In others, it is cast as the unmarked way of communicating with people, or it is used to prove that a person is in tune with his or her environment, i.e. does not behave like a French imperialist. Some of these practices diverge in a number of ways from descriptions of the English-based Creoles in the literature, and bear the mark of second language (L2) learning processes. Other practices mirror Maroon practices socio-pragmatically but also structurally. This suggests that Takitaki represents a continuum of practices that have arisen in different interactional contexts (involving different actors, interactional goals and practices, etc.).

But what is the origin of this phenomenon and is there a link between these different practices? Most importantly, how does the term Takitaki align with the linguistic practices we observe? Our investigation suggests that what is referred to as Takitaki has its origin in young(er), urban(izing) Maroons’ practices. Essentially, migration and urbanization and the resulting social changes have led to the emergence of new social categories, identities and lifestyles among Maroons associated with modernity and urban life that supplement those already in existence and have come to be viewed as traditional and associated mainly with monolingual Maroon practices; the former are actively distinguished from the latter by greater use of linguistic practices that embody important meanings such as modernity, worldliness and sophistication (e.g. from Sranan Tongo and European languages) or, as we argue, by mixing of different linguistic practices. Typically, most non-Maroons get in contact with these mixed practices, which are in some contexts also combined with ‘foreigner talk’ strategies. Lacking detailed knowledge about the sociolinguistic structure of the English-based Creoles and Maroons’ conceptualizations thereof, these mixed practices are then conceptualized as the language of Maroons, i.e. as the English-based Creole referred to by the name of Takitaki – or as the main French Guianese form within a dialect cluster that spans the French Guianese-Surinamese political border. These mixed practices then become a target of learning for non-Maroons who are not always aware of the fact that these practices are a mixed, newly emerging style that combines elements from Sranan Tongo, Maroon varieties and possibly other languages. Non-Maroons resort to these practices – or rather what they have been able to learn of them and what they see as useful – in all kinds of interactions with Maroons (where French does not play a role), and in part they are then extended to other contexts that have similar characteristics (e.g. involving black/non-European people who do not speak French). Over time, this may give rise to a fully fledged lingua franca, the beginnings of which we are already witnessing. What our linguistic and social analysis, however, crucially demonstrates is that there is no neat fit or one-to-one mapping relationship between the name, Takitaki, and a specific type of linguistic practice. Takitaki is used to designate a variety of more or less linguistically and functionally similar sorts of practices that are in turn linked to or function as indices of different forms of identity-based social processes. Different social actors are engaged in various identity-based social processes, so they hold diverging views as to how the term Takitaki maps onto the linguistic practices referred to as English-based Creoles in the literature, i.e. what is part of them and their internal structure.

The following issues are at the centre of all language documentation work, but more urgently so in multilingual contexts:

1. How can language practices be effectively documented in a multilingual area?

2. What constitutes a representative speaker in a multilingual context?

3. How can such representative speakers be systematically identified in multilingual contexts?

4. What constitutes so-called representative linguistic practices, i.e. practices that are ‘worthy’ of linguistic description?

5. How can they be most effectively identified, ‘collected’ and described?

Intimately related and, as we argue, the key to resolving the above issues are two other questions:

1. What is the role of sociolinguistic context and analysis in language documentation?

2. What is the role of language categorization, including analysis of local language attitudes and language-naming processes, in determining the outline and the makeup of a set of practices in a multilingual context?

Our exploration of Takitaki as a case in point strongly suggests that linguistic practices cannot be effectively documented outside of their natural, social and historical habitat. Linguistic practices are means of communication that inscribe people in a context, including other people, conceptualizations of self, social groupings, activities, spaces and histories. Studying linguistic practices must thus involve both studying who uses and/or invents them (and who doesn’t use them), what they do with them (and what they do not), but also people’s conceptualization of them and their reasons for using (or not using) them (see Makoni and Pennycook Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2006a: 22). Language ideologies are a crucial aspect of the interactional context and, like other aspects of context, they shape language practices and are shaped by them. The relationships between language ideologies, context and linguistic practices can be effectively determined only in a bottom-up approach taking into account all the social actors, their issues, interests, views and ideologies, means of interaction and interactional contexts. A truly representative picture of the linguistic nature of a set of linguistic practices conceptualized as a language by the social actors involved can only emerge when all different types of practices are considered independently and are exhaustively compared on a number of grounds, i.e. structurally, functionally, socially, ideologically. A holistic approach to language shines a light on the situated nature of language production and its complex relationships to broader abstract categories such as language. In these approaches, language elicitation must take a backseat, and recordings of spontaneous interactions that are not staged for the researcher and observation of people’s activities must constitute the bulk of the linguistic data. Such data are most effectively collected through the interactional networks of different social actors. Language ideologies and categorization principles play a crucial role in identifying types of linguistic practices that are perceived to belong together, types of linguistic practices that are perceived to be different, the various relationships that exist between linguistic practices and aspects of interactional, social and political context and the social and linguistic processes that operate within particular contexts. Language ideologies and categorization principles help us explore people’s perceptions of the connections that exist between people, their social and linguistic activities, the social processes that drive them and people’s various ways of exploiting communicative resources to create meaning. Such information is crucial for understanding change.

In a way, the present study resembles a police investigation, or detective work. We describe how we went about searching for Takitaki, looking for its traces and chasing it up from all different angles. The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the wider social, historical and linguistic context of our study. In Chapter 2 we provide an overview of the current social, historical and linguistic situation of French Guiana by critically assessing official and linguists’ views of the situation in the light of findings from a sociolinguistic survey recently carried out by one of the authors and from anthropological research on the region. Focusing on the western part of the country, we show that contrary to received views, French Guiana is not a mosaic of isolated, monolingual and mono-ethnic communities. Coexistence and interaction between people who see themselves and are conceptualized as belonging to different ethnically identified social units is the norm rather than the exception, in both rural and urban settings. Multilingualism is equally common in both so-called mono-ethnic and multiethnic rural and urban settings. Western French Guiana’s population is quite diverse in a variety of ways. Currently, about 60 per cent of the population are of Maroon origin while the remainder come from metropolitan France, the French Antilles, Haiti, the Republic of Guyana, Suriname, Brazil or are members of Amerindian communities from within the wider region or are of French Guianese Creole origin. Most of the people from Haiti, Guyana, Suriname and Brazil arrived in western French Guiana within the last thirty years. While some of them have made it their home, seeing their life there as permanent, others are hoping to move on as opportunities arise (but may in fact never do so). Metropolitan French and French Antilleans typically see their life in western French Guiana as temporary, usually working in local administration (e.g. tax collection office, fire service, hospital, town hall, police service, coastguard, army, post office, etc.) or in the numerous schools for children aged 2–11 years. Coastal western French Guiana used to be populated mostly by French Guianese Creoles. However social change, especially increased migration, has prompted many of them to move to urban areas in eastern French Guiana. The town of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was originally founded on the site of an ancient Kali’na Amerindian settlement called Kamalakuli. In the recent past, members of other Amerindian communities, both Kali’na and Arawak, who had lived a nomadic life residing for many centuries in various locations throughout French Guiana and Suriname and had eventually come to settle in what is now part of Suriname, also came to reside permanently in and around Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. Each of these ‘groups’ is ideologically associated with different linguistic practices, but by no means socially and linguistically homogeneous. While French has, in recent years, come to play a more important role as a lingua franca among school-age children, the English-based Creoles nowadays clearly dominate in the western part of the country, having displaced French Guianese Creole as the main lingua franca in the region. The English-based Creoles are important languages of primary socialization and function as principal community languages among local Maroon populations. Besides Maroons, there are also a number of other people who lay claim to them, or rather some of their varieties, such as some Amerindian populations. Others living in French Guiana make use of them to interact with Maroons and Amerindians and sometimes with others such as people from Suriname but also people from the Republic of Guyana. Both Maroons and members of other local ethnic groups in particular currently use generalizing terms such as Takitaki widely instead of traditional ethnic terms to refer to them.

Chapter 3 focusses on the Maroons of French Guiana, the largest population group in the western part of the country, who are also traditionally most intimately associated with English-based Creoles. We show that although they are often conceptualized as one (homogeneous) entity, they consist of several politically semi-autonomous communities that emerged roughly between the 1690s and 1800 as a form of resistance to slavery in Suriname. Each community is headed by a paramount chief and consists of several lineages and matriclans or lo headed by a kabiten and a council of community elders. For most of their history, Maroons resided in smallish mostly mono-ethnic villages, situated in the interior of the rainforest along major rivers of the wider region, and made their living through subsistence farming. Although contact with other local communities tended not to be very close and involved only some of their (male) members, four of the six surviving communities have had a fairly long history with French Guiana. Until the late 1980s most Maroons saw their allegiance with French Guiana as temporary or secondary and tended to favour Suriname over French Guiana. In the 1980s, the civil war in Suriname thoroughly changed this situation. Many Maroons fled their traditional villages and came to reside in the urban and semi-urban areas of French Guiana, prompting a sharp rise in population numbers, important changes in the ethnic and social makeup of coastal western French Guiana, and large-scale expansion in local services. Maroons currently make up about 60 per cent of the western French Guianese population and their numbers continue to grow due to new arrivals from eastern and central Suriname, but mostly as the result of a high birthrate. Growth was quite significant in the 1980s and 1990s but is currently proceeding at a somewhat slower pace. Nowadays, Maroons overwhelmingly view their residence in French Guiana as permanent and are actively participating in the social, political and economic life of this French region. Displacement and relocation coupled with processes of urbanization have had a profound effect on Maroon communities. The social and political structure of their communities has been weakened, and younger Maroons especially are forging new relationships with people outside of their clan and their family-based networks and are engaging in new lifestyles. People are negotiating new social groupings, distinctions and identities to suit these new lifestyles, thus blending traditional and new social practices.

Chapter 4 examines the social and linguistic ideology of the term Takitaki. Analysing its use in various discourses, we explore local conceptualizations, attitudes and ideologies about what is referred to as Takitaki in French Guiana. Contrary to common practice, we do not restrict analysis to emic and researcher-based views but take into account the perspectives of all local social actors who make use of the term in order to survey the uses, meanings and functions of Takitaki. Our analysis demonstrates that people’s uses of this term, the meanings they assign it and the functions to which it is put are far from homogeneous, thus suggesting that Takitaki is a complex sociolinguistic phenomenon. People use the term to construct quite different linguistic entities, which both mediates and reveals various types of social processes that emerged due to the macro-social changes in the region. While most people employ Takitaki to refer to English-based Creoles as a singular entity, others use it to delineate some of its (but not necessarily the same) practices from others, identified using traditional language names, for a variety of reasons. The investigation also demonstrates that there are essentially two broad groups of Takitaki users, namely those who claim it as a language of primary socialization and those who state that they speak it as a second, third, etc. language.

In Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8, we focus on the western French Guianese language practices relating to the English-based Creoles. Chapter 5 discusses the types of people who are associated with and/or use Takitaki and presents the people from whom we obtained data for the linguistic study. Based on the analysis of language ideologies, we identify different groups of people. While we do not in any way claim that they are homogeneous, we argue that overall their members tend to have specific social positions within the socio-political and economic landscape of French Guiana, different legal statuses and economic opportunities, different histories with French Guiana and are involved in different processes of identity negotiation. As a result, they position themselves differently in relation to the English-based Creoles, Maroons and western French Guiana. When it comes to English-based Creoles, they also have various levels of knowledge and proficiency and they make use of Takitaki in different ways. While members of local Amerindian communities usually learned it as their main language of primary socialization (Arawak) or as one of the languages of primary socialization (Kali’na and Wayana) and use it in in-group and out-group contexts, others state that they learned it and use it mostly in exolingual interactions typically involving Maroons and to a lesser extent Amerindians. Many of the Europeans say that they draw on Takitaki in professional interactions with non-French speakers, but it is also widely used in peer-group contexts. Surprisingly, both groups’ understandings of the makeup of Takitaki are rather similar and differ from Maroons’ and non-speakers’ views. All people agree that it is a useful means of interethnic communication, and people who came to French Guiana later in their lives generally say that they learned the language in order to negotiate integration into the local context. However, it is clear that none of them considers this as a typical language-learning enterprise; they do not target the language of the ‘native’-speaker group but use it as a mere tool of communication. Integration with/in western French Guiana rather than with Maroons appears to be at stake here.

Chapter 6 explores the linguistic aspects of Takitaki as spoken by non-Maroons, based on recordings of interactions between non-Maroons and Maroons. The analysis shows that their practices are consistent and closely resemble the structural patterns described for the English-based Creoles in the academic literature. Lexically, Takitaki as used by this group of people is characterized by variation between different languages. The bulk of the vocabulary comes from the English-based Creoles, specifically Sranan Tongo and to a lesser degree from Eastern Maroon varieties, but there are also a good number of shared elements. Speakers also draw on other languages in their multilingual repertoires, making use of linguistic material from other languages they know or that are locally salient. Structurally, Takitaki is clearly related to the English-based Creoles but also involves additional variants, and ‘existing’ variants assume partially different distributions. These patterns are most likely due to processes of acquisition-based and contact-related patterns of simplification and regularization, contact-induced change and the acquisition of patterns of variation.

The nature of interactions involving Takitaki is the focus of Chapter 7 where we explore patterns of accommodation and adaptation in these interactions. Our investigation reveals different patterns for different groups of speakers. In the case of some interactions, mostly institutional encounters between Maroons as clients and Europeans as service providers, we found that Takitaki practices are used as a communicational stopgap measure. Europeans draw on it when communication in French has broken down. However, they are only able to use a few set phrases and cannot really manage to understand spontaneous utterances despite accommodation on the part of Maroons. Such interactions tend to deal with rather basic issues and are fraught with difficulty. Our recordings also include a good number of instances of successful communication, dealing with a wide range of topics recorded in a diverse range of settings. In some settings, Maroon interlocutors engage in various kinds of strategies of accommodation associated with foreigner talk, including greater use of Sranan Tongo-associated vocabulary, repetition, structural simplification and reformulation. In other settings, typically in encounters involving relatively fluent speakers, we did not find any particular patterns of adaptation on the part of the Maroon interlocutor. Patterns of variation between Sranan Tongo and Eastern Maroon-associated vocabulary represented cases of discourse-based and identity-based code-switching. While non-Eastern Maroons also varied between Sranan Tongo and Eastern Maroon choices, we found very little evidence of discourse-based switching. Finally, we examined the use of greeting sequences as an instance of a discourse-based feature in these interactions. We found that some people had a good knowledge of local greeting sequences and their structure, while others seem to rely on the interactional rules and structures from other languages. Maroon interlocutors appear to play an active part in privileging informal urban greetings by discouraging the use of traditional greeting sequences. This suggests that Maroons do not simply ‘make available’ to non-Maroons linguistic practices that are then partially ‘distorted’ by non-Maroons due to acquisition-based issues. Quite to the contrary, Maroons and non-Maroons play an active role in fashioning these practices.

Chapter 8 investigates language practices among urban Maroons in order to address two questions:

1. a. How do Maroons’ exolingual practices differ from their in-group practices? That is, are their practices with non-Maroons part of a special out-group register (that is called basaa nengee in the language) or are they in fact similar to their in-group practices?

2. b. Given that young(er) urban Maroons employ pan-ethnic terms to differentiate their practices from those of rural and older Maroons (see Chapter 4), how do urban Maroons’ practices compare with those of rural Maroons? That is, are they in fact linguistically distinct from the practices described for rural Maroons?

We show that just as in some exolingual contexts, urban Maroons habitually draw on Sranan Tongo-based practices, neutral ones and to a lesser extent practices from other languages in order to negotiate interactional meanings and identities, to align with modern urban life and to project an image of urban sophistication. However, changes are not restricted to patterns of code alternation alone. We show that traditional discourse practices are being adapted to suit and to create new social relationships and interactional spaces among community members. Investigating the use of courtesy titles, greeting sequences and the use of formal respect speech on the airwaves, we argue that young Maroons continue to attach positive associations to Maroon language patterns, but are increasingly levelling features that carry a very strong village character and/or invoke types of relationships that seem unsuitable in their new urban context. Existing traditional options are reassigned to specific contexts while the new practices are becoming people’s everyday interactional mode. Urban Maroons’ in-group practices share features in common with those in exolingual contexts, but also go far beyond them and differ in various respects from prototypical village practices. This suggests that there is a definite link between what is called Takitaki by non-Maroons and newly emerging urban practices among Maroons.

The final chapter summarizes the findings and discusses their implications for research on creoles, language variation and change, language contact and language documentation and also considers the place of language ideology. Our study revealed that the Takitaki phenomenon has four aspects: (i) terms to designate linguistic facts, (ii) linguistic practices, (iii) different social processes (and emergent results) taking place in the same social space and set in motion by macro-social changes in the region and (iv) different social actors with their own histories, goals and ‘issues’ interacting in a common space. These four aspects are intricately linked. Social actors in western French Guiana have been affected by macro-social changes (migration and urbanization). In order to negotiate their place in this new context, each group of social actors had to (re)imagine itself by (re)negotiating and (re)conceptualizing their social relationships with the other salient social actors in western French Guiana, including their different social sub-entities. This negotiation is articulated on a complex battlefield: that of the linguistic practices pertaining to the English-based Creoles, because of their local prominence. By deploying in various ways the different names associated with it, and the term Takitaki in particular, social actors are simultaneously constructing a linguistic entity and are making visible their ideologies about these linguistic practices (and about how they conceptualize the contexts of their use) and the social processes and resulting social categories, identities and relationships that they are currently involved in and that are salient for them. This suggests – if it needed demonstrating – that there is no neat fit between the names used and the linguistic practices they are purported to identify. Each act of categorization using any of the available terms is interested and positioned. In terms of the linguistic side of the issue, we are dealing with multiple sets of linguistic practices taking place in different and partially overlapping interactional contexts – a classic sociolinguistic continuum. The linguistic practices of the Maroons, specifically those used in urban, interethnic encounters, are at the centre while the others are either directly and indirectly or secondarily linked to them – other local actors pick some of these practices up and shape them to meet their own communicative goals. The links between these practices are at times not entirely tangible or obvious, but are mediated through complex processes of association. What binds them together is the fact that people see them as belonging to one another or as being associated with each other. Speakers express and assert this relationship by using similar terms to identify them. Consequently, language documentation proves a complex enterprise that must embrace current approaches to data, data collection and data analysis in social, cultural and structural linguistics in order to capture the dynamic and multifaceted nature of linguistic practices in multilingual contexts. Most crucially, language documentation should pay much greater attention to ideology at all levels – the individual, the community, the broader context, the language documentation enterprise, etc. – because it has a fundamental impact. Our study also argues that current, largely structurally based notions of language, are not sufficiently fine-grained to capture the interactional, context-based and ideologically mediated nature of linguistic practices. Holistic documentation must adopt a bottom-up approach that pays attention to all social actors as well as the various scales and aspects that together constitute context (i.e. the interactional or micro-social level, the macro-social level such as social domains and the social and regional groupings and distinctions, and language and social ideologies and imaginations). Our approach questions the notion of speech community and argues that research on creole communities must pay greater attention to the social, ideological and linguistic dynamics of settings and start with people’s perceptions and conceptualizations because they reveal the types of existing linguistic practices, their meanings and interconnections. These perceptions and conceptualizations drive people’s actions and determine their linguistic practices. The investigation promotes a different approach to researching creole communities. Research should also deal with a wider set of settings and practices, it must explore more carefully the connections between social context, language ideologies and language practices and venture beyond the investigation of a few familiar morphosyntactic and phonological variables. By paying attention to a wider range of social dimensions, it will become possible to gain full understanding of language use in these communities. While quantitative sociolinguistic and linguistic descriptive methods have proved useful for analysing certain kinds of linguistic phenomena, it is also clear that they cannot be easily applied to all types of language phenomena, including variation phenomena. We argue that comprehensive understanding of such phenomena is only possible through various methods of data collection and analysis, using different types of data, as each approach will yield only a certain category of results. Finally, we suggest that research on language contact must pay greater attention to contemporary contact settings and the social and linguistic processes that they entail. Multilingual settings challenge current typologies in that they show that many of the contact settings, mechanisms and processes, and outcomes that are typically discussed as separate entities do in fact take place at the same time in the same context and mutually influence each other.