Basilectal

My neighbours, the Wongs, who are multiracial from Fiji, seem intimidated by, and simultaneously jealous of, Latinate culture. Once a British colony, Fiji was never a "donkey" as was my homeland, the Philippines. I suspect that many Anglophones with less than a university education still squirm at long acrolectal Greco-Latin words in English, and they try to settle in their basilectal Anglo-Saxon speech. Tangentially, I much admire French-influenced paradises like Tahiti and Mayotte. Maybe, the Wongs should learn Dutch.

The nature of the Germanic-Mediterranean dichotomy of English vocabulary seems still a novelty for many people, including my neighbours, the Wongs, who are multiracial from Fiji, once a British colony. The more educated an Anglophone is, the more acrolectal Mediterranean is the vocabulary. The less educated an Anglophone is, the more basilectal Germanic is the vocabulary. The late inventor, Buckminster Fuller, was very experimental in his English writing, as he concocted new-fangled words from Mediterranean and Germanic roots. He thought that using words only found in the dictionary was like living in a prison.

I prepared the three Matched Guise samples myself, controlling the forms carefully to represent basilectal, mesolectal, and acrolectal levels of usage.

It is tremendously important to study basilectal speech, but this valorization process has had some unfortunate byproducts.

While the use of basilectal French in colonial novels serves principally to depict the linguistic realities of interaction between colonial rulers and their subjects during the colonial era, the inclusion of basilectal French in novels set in the post-independence era generally functions to provide information on the social or educational status of a character.