Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online (2024)

1. Introduction⇫¶

Quite a few languagesthroughout the world have a distinction between inclusive andexclusive person forms, rather than a single nonsingular personform ‘we’. The inclusive form means ‘you (singular or plural) andI’, i.e. it includes the hearer, while the exclusive form means‘he/she/they and I’, excluding the hearer. Sometimes both inclusiveand exclusive forms are called first person forms, but theinclusive is perhaps better described as “1+2 person”, while theexclusive form is “1+3 person”.

As the correspondingWALS chapter (Cysouw 2005) shows, inclusive/exclusivedistinctions occur only sporadically in Africa and Eurasia, but arecommon in Austronesian languages and northern Australian languages,as well as in the Americas. Some examples of the distinction inthese languages are given in Table 1.

For the world-widetypology of inclusive/exclusive distinction (also called clusivity), see also Filimonova (ed.) (2005).

2.The two values⇫¶

We distinguish justtwo values, absence and presence of the distinction.

	No inclusive/exclusive distinction	67
	Inclusive and exclusive differentiated	9
Representation:		76

The great majority ofAPiCSlanguages make nodistinction between inclusive and exclusive forms, which is notsurprising in view of the fact that this distinction is not foundat all in European languages, and is hardly found in West African,Bantu and Semitic languages. Thus, in APiCS we primarily find it in the Pacificregion, where the Austronesian and Australian languages are spoken.We might have expected the distinction also in Sri Lankan Malay orSri Lanka Portuguese, because Tamil has the distinction, butneither language adopted it from Tamil.

3. Inclusive/exclusive differentiation due to substrate⇫¶

In four of our languages, thepresence of the distinction is evidently due to Austronesianinfluence (see Table 2).

The case of English-based Melanesianpidgins and creoles is quite well-known (see, e.g., Keesing 1988,Siegel 2008), perhaps because it is so transparent to speakers ofEnglish: The exclusive form is yumi, which evidently comes from Englishyou (and)me. Theexclusive form mipela (and similar forms in Bislama and Kriol), by contrast,comes from the singular form mi ‘I’ plus the plural-indicating element pela (from fellow). Since Melanesian pidgins/creoles alsohave dual and trial forms like (yu)mitupela and (yu)mitripela, like the Oceanic (Austronesian)languages that were their main substrates, it has long been clearthat the pattern must have been created on the basis of thesubstrates.

In Zamboanga Chabacano, theforms kita and kame were apparently borrowed from the Philippinic languageHiligaynon. The two other Chabacano varieties do not make thedistinction.

Interestingly, theinclusive/exclusive distinction was lost in the three Malay-basedvarieties in APiCS. While standard Malay has kita vs. kami, Ambon Malay only has katong ‘we’, Singapore Bazaar Malay onlyhas kita(-orang) ‘we’ (with the plural-indicating-orang), and Sri Lankan Malay has kitang or kitam-pəðə ‘we’ (with the plural-indicating-pəðə). The distinction was also given up in Pidgin Hawaiian,where kakou and makou (Table 1) still exist, but are not distinguished, and inPidgin Fijian (Siegel 2008: 14).

In the two mixed languages Michif andGurindji Kriol, the distinction is retained from the non-Europeancontributing languages Cree and Gurindji, respectively:

In Michif, thedistinction is even sometimes made with affixal person forms,following Cree.

4.Newly introduced distinctions⇫¶

Inthree APiCS languages, there is an inclusive/exclusive distinction thatis not (or not clearly) derived from a substrate language, and isnot due to the lexifier either.

Thefirst case is the curious case of Sranan, which has the generalform wi (whichcan mean ‘we including you’ or ‘we excluding you’), but also theform unu, whichcan mean ‘we excluding you’, but also ‘you (plural)’ (see alsoChapter 16 on person syncretism in personal pronouns). Thesyncretism between first and second person might be attributable toWest African substrate influence, but the fact thatunu in its first personuse is restricted to exclusive use is quite unexpected.

For Norf’k, Mühlhäusler (2013) reports a distinction betweenhimii/hamii (dualinclusive, corresponding to the Melanesian form yumi) and the formsmiienhem, miienher (dualexclusive, evidently from me andhim, me andher). This distinction is said to existonly in the dual, not in the plural. But here it seems somewhatquestionable whether miienhemand miienhershould be regarded as fully grammaticalizedpronoun forms. Likewise, in Tayo it is not quite clearwhether nuⁿdeave twa [we.two withyou] ‘we (dual) inclusive’ and nuⁿde sa twa [we.two without you] ‘we (dual) exclusive’ are sufficientlygrammaticalized to be regarded as exhibiting this distinction . But since the substrates of Tayo areAustronesian and do show the distinction, this could be a case ofsubstrate influence.