John Holm, a linguist who helped bring the study of creole and pidgin languages into the scholarly mainstream, died on Dec. 28 in Azeitão, Portugal. He was 72.
The cause was prostate cancer, his husband, Michael Pye, said.
While hitchhiking through Mexico and Central America as a teenager, Mr. Holm heard black Nicaraguans along the Caribbean coast speaking a non-Spanish language that seemed oddly familiar. They called it “pirate English,” a reference to its probable origin as a pidgin spoken on pirate and British Navy ships.
Although Mr. Holm could barely understand what he was hearing, it planted the seed for what would become his life’s work: the study of creole and pidgin languages spoken by millions of people around the world, especially the English-derived creoles of the Caribbean.
A pidgin is a reduced language used by groups with no language in common who need to communicate for trade or other purposes. A creole, by contrast, is a natural language developed from a mixture of different languages, like Haitian Creole, which is based on 18th-century French but absorbed elements of Portuguese, Spanish and West African languages. Semi-creole languages, which Mr. Holm also studied — Afrikaans is an example — share even more traits with their vocabulary-source languages.
After compiling the first dictionary of Bahamian English, Mr. Holm produced a landmark study, the two-volume “Pidgins and Creoles,” which traced the socio-historical evolution of pidgins and creoles, explained their structures and described more than 100 varieties.
“Pidgin and creole studies had generally been dismissed, largely because creole languages in particular were thought to be spoken almost exclusively by poor people of color and were considered to be bastardized versions of the European languages that contributed their vocabularies,” said Sarah Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan and an associate editor of The Journal of Historical Linguistics.
“By publishing careful empirical studies of creole and semi-creole language structures, and by publicizing these languages in ‘Pidgins and Creoles,’ John helped create one of the most exciting subfields of linguistics,” she added.
John Alexander Holm was born on May 16, 1943, in Jackson, Mich. He studied German, Spanish and Russian in high school. As a student at the University of Michigan, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in English in 1965, he studied French at the Sorbonne during his junior year and picked up Italian at the same time. After graduation, he taught English at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where he became fluent in Spanish.
At Columbia University’s Teachers College, he earned a master’s degree in teaching English as a foreign language. He taught English in Zurich and at the Detroit Institute of Technology, where his students included Indians from Gujarat and black Americans from poor neighborhoods in Detroit. His interest in black speech led him to study African-American English at the State University of New York at Cortland.
In 1978, he was awarded a doctorate in linguistics from University College, London. His dissertation was a history, descriptive grammar and dictionary of the “pirate English” he had encountered along the Miskito Coast.
His early work as a scholar focused on the creole languages of the Caribbean and their structural links to the Niger-Congo languages spoken by the region’s slaves. While still in graduate school, he presented an influential paper proposing a historical relationship between Gullah and Jamaican creoles and informal African-American speech, known to linguists as black vernacular. Among other things, he noted that all three drop verbs in certain contexts, turning a statement like “He is angry,” for example, into “He angry.”
In linguistic terms, Mr. Holm was a substratist — someone who emphasizes the contributions of non-European languages to creoles — as opposed to a superstratist, who considers creoles to be reduced forms of European languages, with minimal contributions from non-European sources.
He also insisted that pidgins and creoles be regarded as languages in their own right, not debased versions of source languages. “They are new languages, shaped by many of the same linguistic forces that shaped English and other ‘proper’ languages,” he later wrote in “An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles” (2000).
While lecturing at the College of the Bahamas, he began writing down examples of creole usage that blossomed into the first dictionary of Bahamian English, written with Alison Watt Shilling and published in 1982.
In 1980, he began teaching English and linguistics at Hunter College in New York, continuing to work on Caribbean and Central American English. He edited “Central American English” (1982) and, with Manfred Görlach, “Focus on the Caribbean” (1986) before completing “Pidgins and Creoles,” which was published in 1988 and 1989.
After teaching in the doctoral linguistics program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he accepted a post in 1998 as chairman of English linguistics at the University of Coimbra in Lisbon, where he created a department of creole linguistics.
His other works include “Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole Grammars” (2007), which he edited with Peter Patrick, and “Contact Languages: Critical Concepts in Language Studies,” a five-volume series he edited with Susanne Michaelis.
In addition to his husband, Mr. Holm, who lived near Miranda do Corvo, Portugal, is survived by a brother, James.
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