9 - Implications, conclusions, and new horizons

Summary

Certainty – that is, twisting the objective nature of our perceptions and fitting our ideas to ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ – is a symptom of ignorance or madness…

Fernando Pessoa

The reader may have realized throughout this book that I maintain some scepticism towards strong theoretical formulations as well as theory-driven data analysis. Arends (2001b : 182) warns us against approaches that overly rely on theoretical considerations, as they are more notable for their capacity to generate discussion “than [for] their contribution to deepening our understanding of [creole] languages as complex empirical phenomena”. In trying to strike a balance between theoretical and empirical discussions, I have attempted to contribute to a growing evolutionary framework for the study of language change. This framework, developed extensively in Croft (2000, 2001) and Mufwene (2001, 2008), requires, in my view, few and simple ideological commitments. In essence, it asks us to view language as a variable, dynamic, and interactive phenomenon, and rests on two basic assumptions of evolutionary biology: a population view of categories (such as languages), and a theory of selection of evolving systems. I hope that the discussion of evolution of contact languages in Asian contexts, in particular in Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and Southern China, offers contrasting case studies to the better-known ones that may not only allow us to discover our own implicit theoretical prejudices, but also present new ideas and alternative explanations to established views through evidence of contact language formation (CLF) in non-exceptionalist scenarios.