Pidgins

Pidgins and creoles are today to be found in every continent. There are believed to be between six and twelve million people still using pidgin languages and between ten and seventeen million using descendants from pidgins called “creoles.” References to their existence go back to the Middle Ages and it is likely that they have always arisen when people speaking mutually unintelligible languages have come into contact. Pidgins and creoles have been given both popular and scholarly attention. Popularly, they are thought to be inferior, haphazard, broken, bastardized versions of older, longer established languages.

A pidgin is a language with no native speakers: it is no one’s first language but is a contact language. That is, it is the product of a multilingual situation in which those who wish to communicate must find or improvise a simple language system that will enable them to do so. Very often too, that situation is one in which there is an imbalance of power among the languages as the speakers of one language dominate the speakers of the other languages economically and socially. A highly codified language often accompanies that dominant position. A pidgin is a variety of a language that developed for some practical purpose, such as trading, among groups of people who had a lot of contact, but who did not know each other’s languages. As such, it would have no native speakers. So,the term is applied to a lingua franca which develops as a simple means of communication between people speaking different languages.

A pidgin is therefore sometimes regarded as a ‘reduced’ variety of a ‘normal’ language, i.e., one of the aforementioned dominant languages, with simplification of the grammar and vocabulary of that language, considerable phonological variation, and an admixture of local vocabulary to meet the special needs of the contact group.

The process of pidginization probably requires a situation that involves at least three languages, one of which is clearly dominant over the others. If only two languages are involved, there is likely to be a direct struggle for dominance, as between English and French in England after 1066, a struggle won in that case by the socially inferior language but only after more than two centuries of co-existence. When three or more languages are involved and one is dominant, the speakers of the two or more that are inferior appear to play a critical role in the development of a pidgin. They must not only speak to those who are in the dominant position, but they must also speak to each other. To do this, they must simplify the dominant language in certain ways, and this process of simplification may or may not have certain universal characteristics. We may argue, therefore, that a pidgin arises from the simplification of a language when that language comes to dominate groups of speakers separated from each other by language differences. This hypothesis partially explains not only the origin of pidgins in slave societies, in which the slaves were deliberately drawn from a variety of language backgrounds, but also their origin on sea coasts, where a variety of languages might be spoken but the language of trade is a pidgin. It also helps to explain why pidginized varieties of languages are used much more as lingua francas by people who cannot speak the corresponding standard languages than they are used between such people and speakers of the standard varieties. For example, Pidgin Chinese English was used mainly by speakers of different Chinese languages, and Tok Pisin is today used as a unifying language among speakers of many different languages in Papua New Guinea.

Pidgins are auxiliary languages which can be characterized as either ‘restricted’ or ‘extended’.

A restricted pidgin is one which arises as a result of marginal contact such as for minimal trading, which serves only this limited purpose and which tends to die out as soon as the contact which gave rise to it is withdrawn. A good example of this type of pidgin is what has been called Korean Bamboo English. This was a very restricted form of English which gained a limited currency between Koreans and Americans during the Korean war. It has by now almost disappeared, as has a similar variety which developed in Saigon during the Vietnam war [todd 3].

An extended pidgin is one which, although it may not become a mother tongue, proves vitally important in a multilingual area, and which, because of its usefulness, is extended and used beyond the original limited function which caused it to come into being. There is reason to believe that the many West African pidgins and creoles attained their present extended range of use because, having come into being as a result of contact between white and black, they were soon used and further developed in multilingual areas between black and black.

A pidgin is described as an “English pidgin” if English is the lexifier language, that is, the main source of words in the pidgin. It doesn’t mean that those words will have the same pronunciation or meaning as in the source. For example, the word gras has its origins in the English word “grass,” but in Tok Pisin it also came to be used for “hair.” It is part of mausgras (“moustache”) and gras bilong fes (“beard”). Thus there are two sources of linguistic features:

n Superstrate: the socially dominant language

Most vocabulary from superstrate language (lexifier language)

n Substrate: socially subordinate language(s)