Petit nègre
| Français tirailleur | |
|---|---|
| Petit nègre | |
| Region | West Africa |
| Extinct | ca. 1850–1950 |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
None (mis) |
| Glottolog | fran1267 |
Français tirailleur, also known as Petit nègre or Petinègue or Forofifon naspa, is a pidgin language that was spoken by West African soldiers and their white officers in the French colonial army approximately 1857–1954. It never creolized.
The first West African soldiers were enrolled in the French colonial army in 1820 and the company of the Tirailleur Sénégalais was formed in 1857. They fought for France in both World Wars. The last company of West African soldiers in the French army was disbanded in 1964 and the last Tirailleur who served in WW1 died in 1998. It is important to keep in mind that while slavery was abolished in France and her colonies in 1848, this does not mean the situation changed totally over night. There is an inter-departmental report from 1950 suggesting that the recruitment was not necessary voluntary from that point forward. The French military was to go “up-country to enroll captives, to whom the sum needed to purchase their freedom is given as enrollment bounty (Hargreaves, 1969: 100 as cited in Wilson )). In other words, they more or less bought captives and turned them into soldiers.
The language of the West African soldiers in the French colonial army has been mentioned in descriptive works from the 19th century and forward. The earliest documented utterances in Français Tirailleur are found in Dupratz (1864). Maurice Delafosse wrote about Français Tirailleur in 1904, describing it as a French equivalent to the more well-known English pidgins of the area.
The most cited source on the language variety is an anonymous manual, Le français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs Sénégalais. The manual was printed in 1916 and was intended to facilitate the communication between French officers and the African soldiers in the French army.
The manual is prescriptive, informing white officers how they should best formulate orders for optimal effect. The author(s) does make comments that suggest that the material is based on at least some actual experience with West African soldiers. There is also references to the structure of Bambara. This, together with the prescriptive nature of the work, suggests that the anonymous manual is the product of a conscious effort rather than natural utterances.
Chris Corne also wrote about this pidgin in his 1999 book on French contact languages
There are many languages that have been mentioned in connection with Français Tirailleur. First of all there is great consensus on the matter of the lexifier (the language that has contributed with most lexical items), it is French (as spoken in 1800’s) . The primary contact with the French language must have been through spoken discourse, which means that it is unlikely that structures and words that were uncommon in the spoken language at that time could have made it into the pidgin. There was a French officer by the name of Charles Mangin in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century who, in 1910, published a book called La Force Noire in which he propagates for the use of African troops in the event of a European war. This book also contains valuable information about the African troops and their composition. The following is a summary of the information available in the book of Mangin.
...
Wikipedia