DistributionMany contemporary pidgins and Creoles can, however, be traced back to European 'discoveries' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of linguistic procreation, when new languages came into being, languages which are lexically related to Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and which are spoken in the late twentieth century, in some form, by perhaps 100 million people. Britain was more successful than any other nation in implanting its language around the globe, both in terms of sheer numbers of speakers and in the proliferation of overseas varieties. Britain’s 350 years of empire spread not only standard English and regional varieties overseas, but also more pidgins and creoles than any other language. Pidgin and creole languages are distributed mainly, though not exclusively, in the equatorial belt around the world, usually in places with direct or easy access to the oceans. Consequently, they are found mainly in the Caribbean and around the north and east coasts of South America, around the coasts of Africa, particularly the west coast, and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. They are fairly uncommon in the more extreme northern and southern areas of the world and in the interiors of continents. Their distribution appears to be fairly closely related to long-standing patterns of trade, including trade in slaves. A basic source on their distribution is Hancock (1977), a survey that was intended to list each language that had been treated as either a pidgin or a creole. More recently Holm (1989) provides a useful survey of pidgins and creoles, and Smith (1995) lists 351 pidgins and creoles along with 158 assorted mixed languages.
The Caribbean area is of particular interest to creolists because of the many varieties of language found there. There are countries or areas that are almost exclusively Spanish-speaking and have no surviving pidgins or creoles as a result of their settlement histories, e.g., the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Others have only English-based creoles, e.g., Antigua, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, and Guyana. Still others have only French-based ones, e.g., Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, and Haiti. Some have both, e.g., Dominica and Trinidad. Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao have Portuguese-based creoles, and one, the US Virgin Islands, has a virtually extinct Dutch-based creole. The official language in each case can be quite different: it is English in all of the above except Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, where it is French, and Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, where it is Dutch.
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Hancock lists 127 pidgins and creoles. Thirty-five of these are English-based, another fifteen are Frenchbased, fourteen others are Portuguese-based, seven are Spanish-based, five are Dutch-based, three are Italian-based, six are German-based and the rest are based on a variety of other languages.
