You write a chat message to a friend differently than a quarterly report for your boss or a letter to your grandma. It’s gotten better, but it has quite a ways to go. In a creole, ‘is’ and ‘am’ would often be omitted: the sky blue. This will first require a discussion of what creole languages are, as well as their key characteristics. For the language from the TV show, see Belter Creole. Verbal inflection is minimized. Any sentence can be turned into a yes–no question by ending it with the interrogative particle ke: The related tag question keyá also makes a sentence into a yes–no question, but one which expects agreement: Sentences containing the ke-based interrogative words kemang, kepelésh, ketim, keting, or kewe do not need the trailing ke. In creoles, this often takes the form of generalizing the infinitive. The background pits three main factions against each other: Earth, Mars, and “the Belt,” which is everything past the asteroid belt. In everyday chit-chat, they’ll probably switch back and forth without thinking about it. that of the people in power). This is the linking verb ‘to be.’ If the lexifier uses a copula, the creole often lacks it, or only uses it in certain instances. Any time plot-critical information is given, it’s in English. In relation to plantation creoles, for example, the Feature Pool Hypothesis suggests that, as multiple waves of slaves were brought to the Americas, they learned a non-native version of the languages, which approaches equilibrium over time. The lexifier is often, but not required to be, the superstrate, the dominant language or language of power. (So there aren’t spoilers for anything past the opening of book 3, Abaddon’s Gate.). The Feature Pool isn’t the first hypothesis to make use of generativist ideas. Given that Belter is essentially a daughter language of English (via the route of creolization), it’s easy to do. 4. European languages are the most frequent lexifiers (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), and all of these languages use a form of ‘to be’ to link the subject with the predicate: The sky is blue. Typologically, Belter is an analytic language. I took a class in contact linguistics, where we covered the basics of pidgins and creoles, among other things, and in preparation for this essay, I read John McWhorter’s The Creole Debate (2018). McWhorter gives an example from Sranan Creole English, spoken in Suriname (5), which includes multiple creole features: the hunter NEG PAST PROG buy a house give me, “The hunter was not buying a house for me.”. Active 2 years, 4 months ago. The narrators explicitly mention social aspects of belta multiple times. Is there any consistency to when certain languages' loan words are used in the Belter language, or even just a list somewhere … Believe it or not, Belter slang — or, more officially, Belter Creole — isn't a completely made-up way of communicating. Thanks for A2A! Creoles frequently omit the copula. For a real-world, US-based example, we have Standard American English (what you learn in school) and African-American Vernacular English (which has its own separate rules). The language in the books series is apparently little … So, how does a creole evolve and develop from this? Ars Talks with the Creator of 'The Expanse' Belter Creole Language. https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/708049355173834753, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/842449556117757952, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/840229898308399106, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/711739147791241216, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/707289345049231360, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/841759024869605377, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/841785504320315392, https://twitter.com/Nfarmerlinguist/status/842582221340925952, List of Belter Creole individual articles, https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_grammar?oldid=62772. Adjectives are placed after the nouns they modify: ere: at, on, about (locative preposition), Below are the words for basic numbers.[6]. Encountering the Alien in, Disruptions in Communication Disrupt Atevi Society in CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner Series, Five Books That Get Kinetic Weapons Very Wrong, Fairy Tale Sisters Who Don’t Hate Each Other, The Real Ghosts Were the Friends We Made Along the Way: Téa Obreht’s, Being a Superhero Is Super Hard in the Trailer for, Leia’s Bounty Hunter Disguise Brings My Favorite Fantasy Trope to a Galaxy Far, Far Away, Advertising for Burglars: Lord Dunsany’s “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles”, Calling Evil Good, and Good Evil: Spiritual Abuse in C.S. The Expanse is an ongoing novel series by James S.A. Corey (the collaborative pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck); currently at eight doorstop-sized volumes, it was adapted for TV by SyFy, cancelled, and rescued by Amazon Prime. The two most easily identifiable (to me) non-English languages involved in lang belta appear to be German and Spanish, with que/ke, pendejo, agua, nichts, dir, and bist. Do you want to learn it? A break in transmission of the parent languages is a key aspect in the formation of a creole, because when adults learn a second language (in a non-classroom setting, as would be seen in this type of situation), some of the more complex features are lost, and when these adults transmit the languages to their children, those features aren’t there. The you-form of verbs would be pretty frequently used in this kind of situation, and it’s plausible that this would be the most salient, noticeable form for learners, which they then would pick up and use as the only verb form. Verbal inflection … Within a creole, there is an acrolect, which is most similar to the lexifier, a basilect, which is most different from the lexifier, and a mesolect, which is in-between. This is a (possibly incomplete) chart of pronouns, pro-adverbs and determiners, arranged in a convenient table-of-correlatives format. English isn't my first language and with the added slang of Belter it makes it frustrating to follow what they are talking about. (They don’t consider Belters fully human.) Since I don’t speak any Romance languages, I’ll turn to English and German to invent examples. There are plenty of other linguistic worldbuilding features I didn’t cover in depth, like Inners’ slang and Belter body language, so please feel free to discuss those below as well! Belter displays definiteness agreement, similar to that found in Greek or Hebrew. The world of The Expanse is divided into three main factions: Earth, Mars, and the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance). Inflection is the changing of a word form to mark person, number, gender, case, etc. Generally, nouns are not inflected for number; a singular noun has the same form as a plural one. Together on the Roci, the crew and Miller are discussing the reasons that Protogen, the Earth-based company, believed that they could use Eros as a testing facility for their protomolecule. Language forms a solid plinth for Belter identity, both uniting and alienating them at the same time. Over time this developed into a full-fledged creole language, lang Belta, which became the lingua franca, a common ton… Ars Technica. It was a pretty cool idea at the time and would have done a lot to support the UG hypothesis, but, unfortunately, evidence contradicted this premise, as studies were published that showed that children who created creoles (in this case, Hawaiian Creole English) did not have insufficient input, because they spoke English at school and their parents’ languages at home (McWhorter 2). (Sociolinguistics is the fun part: it’s the “why do people do the thing?” and “what does it mean when they do the thing?” Many of my friends and colleagues prefer formal linguistics, which is cool I guess, and someone has to study phonetics and morphology and syntax, and I’m glad it’s not me.). During humanity's expansion into the solar system, people from many different parts of Earth or Mars would often have to live and work together, and they developed a pidgin language so that they could communicate with one another. Ars talks with the creator of "The Expanse" Belter Creole language. So, beratna: What are your thoughts on belta? [1] The exception is pronouns, which do have distinct plural forms (see Pronouns below). Seth Macfarlane's From the guys who made family guy +18 only. Pidginization was not involved. If they’re holding a separatist rally to protest Earther rule, Belter is the order of the day. See list of Belter Creole individual articles for a multi-column list of all words in this category. Creoles emerge from language contact situations where people need to communicate with speakers of other languages. The Expanse Wiki is a FANDOM TV Community. There are also various sociolinguistic factors in evidence in belta. It was just my luck that Ars Technica published an interview with Nick Farmer about his work on the TV version of Belter while I was putting the edits on this post. For example, maliwala can mean either "child" or "children", depending on context. It’s easy to notice examples of verbal simplification. Earth and Mars have a financial interest in the colonies in the Belt, and Belters typically work for companies owned by Inners. There’s also a whole lot of English/ lang belta codeshifting on the fly. Belters like Naomi can make use of their bilingualism and code switch to show solidarity, which Naomi is also shown to do in the TV adaptation (season 2, episode 6, around 35 minutes in). I don’t know how many real-world creoles are composed of a lexifier plus five or more substrate languages (I think the one McWhorter mentions with the most substrate languages is Mauritian Creole French, at six substrates), but it is certainly possible, especially in a space-future where people from dozens of countries are thrown together and have to communicate. Where can I learn some Belter language. A pidgin is an ad hoc language that typically arises in situations where people who don’t speak the same native language have to communicate with each other, such as trade with a new partner or (all too frequently) as a result of colonization or enslavement. You they dog.” This demonstrates both copula deletion and loss of case distinctions (no possessive marking), as well as the verbing of the noun “kibble.”. Out in the Belt, though, people from a lot of different countries who spoke a lot of different languages came together to build colonies or mine asteroids or fly cargo ships. Both of the inner planets use the Belt as a source of resources, in an extractive economy. European languages are the most frequent lexifiers (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese), and all of these languages use a form of ‘to be’ to link the subject with the predicate: The sky is blue. Belters use the standard language when they have to talk to people not from the Belt, and belta to communicate with the in-group. 0:07 It's actually a mix of several Earth languages spoken by the original settlers in the Asteroid Belt colonies — very appropriate, as the Belt is a melting pot of several different races, customs and backgrounds. Diglossia occurs when two dialects or languages exist in the same space and are spoken within a language community. (1988). Earth and Mars have their own insults for each other and the Belters, but they speak similar standard languages, with some lexical variation akin to U.S. vs. British English. It’s quite a percussive and catchy language, and on set many of us began tossing around Belter words and phrases in our daily speak. The Expanse: The Belters' Language Is Excellent - Here's Why Multiples of 10 or 100 are formed by appending teng or xanya to the combining form of the multiplier, with the stress remaining on the multiplier: Numbers with values in both the ones and tens place are composed in little-endian order, joined by un: If there is a hundreds place, it comes before the ones-and-tens place terms:[7], When used attributively, numbers come before the noun they count, as in English.[8]. TomoNews US. I also noted some examples from the first two seasons of the TV adaptation. This page deals with the grammar of Belter Creole, also known as lang Belta. According to this hypothesis, “creoles instantiate Universal Grammar with parameters unset, the ‘default’ of language, produced by children under the unusual circumstance of acquiring language with insufficient input” (McWhorter 1). Here are just a few of the Belter words and phrases that we've heard on … Linguistic worldbuilding can be fairly simple—like making up and incorporating a few slang words or insults based on whatever your fictional culture finds profane—or it can be elaborate, like inventing an entire new language and writing poetry in it (hi, J.R.R. And so, when adapting the books into a TV show, linguist Nick Farmer and accent-coach Eric Armstrong worked together to develop the Belter language based on existing cultures. I think you could call lang belta a (constructed) creole, because it hits many of the common features of a creole, and if similar conditions were mapped onto a real-world situation, the social aspects would be highly amenable to creole formation. So the children take features from the languages and construct a new grammar, which becomes a creole. We’ve already discussed an example of a technique around the midpoint of the spectrum in Cherryh’s Hunter of Worlds, so now I’d like to explore something on the more elaborate end: Belter creole in The Expanse. Lewis’, A Small and Eclectic Herd of Recent Equine Delights, Thomason, Sarah and Terrence Kaufman. In Leviathan Wakes, chapter six, Detective Miller, a Belter who works for an Earth-based security company, is talking to a man who’s inciting a riot on Ceres. The two most well-known of these are Media Lengua, which combines a Spanish lexicon with Quechua phonology, morphology, and syntax, and Michif, which combines French nouns and nominal morphology with Cree verbs and verbal morphology. This is the linking verb ‘to be.’ If the lexifier uses a copula, the creole often lacks it, or only uses it in certain instances. I know there is a site that teaches Belter but I don't need to know the entire language I just sort of need their top 10 most used words to get me through the Free Navy chapters. I think it's ordinary human behavior to switch between languages in order to be better understood by the people you're talking to. A really cool but rare result of language contact is a mixed language. What I learned about creoles in Contact Ling was that they are the result of a pidgin developing a full grammar and being acquired and spoken as a native language. In a creole, ‘is’ and ‘am’ would often be omitted: the sky blue . Nouns may be used attributively to modify other nouns, forming a compound noun. Think of how a Belter would say “Jo-burg” as in Johannesburg. A pidgin doesn’t have grammar per se, but it has very basic syntax. Drummer doesn’t believe that Naomi is on her side, so Naomi answers her in the belta basilect. However, it does use compounding and some suffixes for deriving new words. Other source languages include French (bien, dieu), Japanese (shikata ga nai), and Mandarin (dui ), along with other languages that I didn’t recognize because I don’t know them. Earth and Mars have a very tentative alliance that could come crashing down at the least provocation. For standard English, we have ‘I go’ but ‘she goes.’ Generalizing the infinitive would be ‘she go.’ German has different inflectional forms, ‘ich gehe,’ ‘du gehst,’ ‘er geht,’ ‘wir gehen,’ ‘ihr geht,’ ‘sie gehen.’ Generalizing the infinitive would give ‘ich/du/er/wir/ihr/sie gehen.’, Case distinction is lost in lexifier pronouns.