A creole is often defined as a pidgin that has become the first language of a new generation of speakers. As Aitchison says, ‘creoles arise when pidgins become mother tongues.’ A creole, therefore, is a ‘normal’ language in almost every sense. Holmes says that ‘A creole is a pidgin which has expanded in structure and vocabulary to express the range of meanings and serve the range of functions required of a first language.’ In practice it is not always easy to say whether we have a pidgin rather than a creole. Tok Pisin and some of the West African pidgins such as Nigerian Pidgin English probably exist as both pidgins and creoles. They have speakers who use them only as second languages in an expanded form and also speakers for whom they are first languages. Such expanded varieties are often characteristic of urban environments in which there is likely to be considerable contact among speakers of different languages and are sometimes referred to as extended pidgins.
Just like a pidgin, a creole has no simple relationship to the usually standardized language with which it is associated. If a variety of pidgin English has a complex relationship to Standard English, so Haitian Creole, which is French-based, has a complex relationship to Standard French. As we will see, the latter relationship is quite different in still another way from the relationship between Jamaican Creole, which is English-based, and Standard English. However, speakers of creoles, like speakers of pidgins, may well feel that they speak something less than normal languages because of the way they and others view those languages when they compare them with languages such as French and English. The result is that the many millions of people who speak almost nothing but creole languages – the estimates range from a low of 6–7 million to as many as 10–17 million – are likely to feel a great sense of inferiority about their languages.
