Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Dual number ⇫ ¶

In the great majority of languages, personal pronouns make a number distinction, at least in some of the persons: e.g. a contrast between singular I and plural we in English, between singular toi and plural vous in French, and between singular siya ‘she, he’ and plural sila ‘they’ in Tagalog. This also applies to the great majority of pidgin and creole languages. But far fewer languages make a further distinction between dual number (‘two’) and plural number (‘more than two’). An example is Classical Arabic, which has singular huwa ‘he’, dual humaa ‘they (two)’, and plural hum ‘they (more than two)’. Such a distinction is also made in some pidgin and creole languages. In this chapter, we only look at independent personal pronouns, i.e. personal pronouns that can occur independently, in an utterance of their own, e.g. in an elliptical answer (see also Chapter 13, 17). For dual marking in general, see Corbett (2000), and for duals of person forms, see Cysouw (2003: ch. 7).

2. The values ⇫ ¶

We distinguish three different values for this feature. The great majority of our languages lack a dual, so they have value 1.

	No special dual form	66
	Dual form in all three persons	8
	Dual form only in first person	1
Representation:		75

In languages with dual forms of personal pronouns, we distinguish further between languages with a dual form in all three persons (value 2), and languages with a dual form only in the first person (value 3). A well-known example of a language with dual forms in all three persons is Tok Pisin (Smith & Siegel 2013a):

The one example of a language with a more restricted range of dual forms is Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin, which has kapa ‘we two’, but no dual-plural distinction in the second and third person.

A few examples of the use of duals are given in (2).

3. Lexifier effects ⇫ ¶

None of the European lexifier languages have dual personal pronouns, so these cannot be the source of duals in pidgins and creoles with European lexifiers. In Old English, there was a distinction in the first person (wit ‘we two’ vs. we ‘we (more than two)’) and in the second person (git ‘you two’ vs. ge ‘you (more than two)’), but this distinction disappeared by the end of the Old English period, and the dual forms were lost. In Classical Arabic (and Modern Standard Arabic), there is a special dual form (as we saw in the first section above), but this form has been lost in most of the modern vernacular varieties of Arabic. Thus, it is not surprising that no dual is found in the Arabic-based languages.

Thus, the duals in our languages generally do not go back to the lexifiers, but there are three exceptions in the Pacific region. Dual forms are widely found in the Oceanic languages of the Austronesian family and in other languages of the region, particularly in New Guinea and in Australia. The dual form in Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin goes back to Yimas (Foley 1991: 111); one of the dual forms in the mixed language Gurindji Kriol, ngali ‘we two’, goes back to the Australian language Gurindji (Meakins 2013); and the dual forms in Pidgin Hawaiian go back to the duals in the Oceanic language Hawaiian (Polynesian subfamily):

4. Substrate effects ⇫ ¶

It has long been known that in the English-based languages of Oceania and Australia, the existence of dual forms is due to the substrate influence from the Oceanic and Australian languages. In (4), we see the dual forms of Bislama and Kriol; the very similar dual forms of Tok Pisin were given above in (1). (In Gurindji Kriol, ngali is used for the first person, but in the second and third persons, forms derived from Kriol are used.)

Similarly, in the French-based creole Tayo, the dual forms in (5) are used:

These patterns are clearly due to the existence of a prominent dual-plural distinction in the Oceanic and Australian languages of the region.

In many of the Oceanic languages, the dual forms of personal pronouns are based on the numeral ‘two’ combined with the plural pronoun, and it is not surprising that the same method was chosen for creating personal pronoun duals in the pidgins and creoles. In the English-based languages, the dual marker is tu (from two), while in Tayo, it is de (from French deux).

This interpretation is corroborated by the fact that some languages are even reported to have trial forms, especially Tok Pisin (mitripela, yutripela, etc.). These forms also have corresponding trial forms in the Oceanic languages.

5. New duals elsewhere ⇫ ¶

Dual forms of personal pronouns have also been posited for Norf’k (Mühlhäusler 2013):

And Yakpo (2009: 184) identifies duals in the West African language Pichi:

Yakpo notes that the use of these dual forms is not obligatory, but very frequent. This raises the question of how to delimit dual forms from phrases consisting of plural pronoun plus numeral.

One sufficient criterion would certainly be obligatoriness. If a form must be used when two referents are intended, then one would regard it as a grammaticalized dual number form, because numerals are never obligatory. But obligatoriness is not a necessary criterion. There are many languages with grammatical plural and dual forms that are not obligatory in semantically plural and dual contexts (see, e.g., Chapter 22 for plurals).

Thus, we will say that a pronoun + numeral combination counts as a dual form if the numeral is used much more often than would be expected if the ‘two’ form were a numeral rather than a dual marker. For example, in Pichi, the use of the dual forms is very frequent, more frequent than the use of the numeral ‘two’ in other languages, so this was taken as a sufficient criterion for a dual number analysis. In Palenquero, the combinations suto ndo ‘we two’ and utere ndo ‘you two’ are also "fairly common in daily speech", but the author does not regard these combinations as dual forms (Schwegler 2013). They do not differ in their structure and use from combinations like utere tre ‘the three of you’. For Ternate Chabacano, Steinkrüger (2007: 368) claims that the combination mordós (< motro dós ‘we two’) is a dual form, but the APiCS contributor on Ternate Chabacano, Eeva Sippola, does not regard this as a fully grammaticalized form. Thus, the distinction between phrases with numerals and dual forms is subtle and not easy to make in a cross-linguistically comparable way. This should be kept in mind when interpreting the data of this chapter.