Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Feature description ⇫ ¶

Two types of numeral classifiers may be distinguished. One type is referred to as mensural numeral classifiers, like pound in two pounds of gold. The second type – which is the topic of this chapter – is referred to as sortal numeral classifiers; they “divide the inventory of count nouns into semantic classes, each of which is associated with a different classifier” (Gil 2005b).

Ambon Malay, for example, possesses three main sortal classifiers: orang ‘person’ for human nouns, ekor ‘tail’ for nonhuman animate nouns, and bua ‘fruit’ for inanimates:

In Ambon Malay, these classifiers are optional, but optionality is not taken into account for the APiCS feature. This feature is based on WALS Feature 55 (Gil 2005b).

2. The values ⇫ ¶

We distinguish the following values:

	The language has no numeral classifiers	72
	The language has numeral classifiers	4
Representation:		76

In the APiCS languages, sortal numeral classifiers only occur in four languages, and they are optional in all four languages: Ambon Malay, Chinese Pidgin English, and Sri Lanka Portuguese in Asia, as well as Gullah in North America. Note that the confidence given by the APiCS authors for Ambon Malay and Chinese Pidgin English is ‘very certain’, but for Sri Lanka Portuguese and Gullah it is only ‘intermediate’.

Ambon Malay has at least three common numeral classifiers, as shown in example (1) above. In the other three languages, the numeral classifiers are very limited, mostly restricted to human nouns. Chinese Pidgin English uses piecee for human nouns and chop for others:

Sri Lanka Portuguese uses pesaan ‘person’ for human nouns:

Gullah uses head of for human nouns, especially for children:

3. Comparison with WALS ⇫ ¶

In the languages of the world, sortal numeral classifiers are very frequent in Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Amazonian basin, but in many parts of the world, they are almost absent (Gil 2005b).

The following table compares the WALS values with the APiCS values:

This table shows that in a substantial part of those WALS languages that allow for numeral classifiers, these classifiers are optional, like the four APiCS languages displaying this value.

The presence of sortal numeral classifiers in APiCS languages is certainly due to substrate influence – except for Gullah, which is an unclear case.

According to Smith (2013), the optional use of pesaan ‘person’ as a classifier for humans in Sri Lanka Portuguese is modelled on Tamil and Sinhala (but note that according to WALS, there are no numeral classifiers in Sinhala).

In Ambon Malay, the use of numeral classifiers is clearly of Indonesian origin. Interestingly, for the other APiCS languages based on Malay, or where Malay is an important sub- or adstrate language, no numeral classifiers are reported. This pertains to Sri Lankan Malay, Singapore Bazaar Malay, Papiá Kristang, and Batavia Creole.

Regarding Chinese Pidgin English, its contact language, Cantonese, has a rich variety of obligatory classifiers, which means that the two optional classifiers in Chinese Pidgin English represent a drastic reduction of the classifier system of the Sinitic contact language.