Pidgins and Creoles

‘Pidgin’ from Chinese pronunciation of business - or from Portuguese ocupacao business, and pequeno small (baby talk), or Hebrew pidjom barter a contact language that draws on elements from 2 or more languages; a hybrid makeshift language used by and among traders, on plantations (with slaves) and between Europeans and indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa, Americas (17 th -20 th cc.) often used pejoratively ( ‘ pidgin English ’ : childish, corrupt, lazy, inferior, oversimplified, simple-minded) - extended (pidgin Latin, pidgin Marxism) basic difference with a Creole: it's a learned language, not a native one features: small vocabulary (a few hundred or thousand words; English has maybe a million) - mostly drawn from the superstrate language

reduction of grammatical features, such as inflectional morphology: Tok Pisin (pidgin of Papua New Guinea): mi kam (I come, I am coming, I came) wanpela haus (house) tupela haus (two houses) grammar influenced by substrate language(s) - lack of grammatical complexity - no redundancy - e.g., English one man comes, six men come - singular and plural are marked in both noun and modifier, and concord is shown in both noun and verb TP wanpela man I kam, sikspela man I kam thus, depends heavily on context - little or no inflectional morphology

English marks possession: John’s house TP haus bilong John (from English ‘belong’ - shifts from a verb to a preposition) multifunctionality: same word functions in many ways English ill (adjective), illness (noun) TP mi sik (I am sick), Em I gat sik malaria (I have malaria) circumlocution: English branch, TP han bilong diwai (‘hand belonging to tree’)

Creoles from Latin creare (to create), Portuguese criar (to nurse, breed) Portuguese, Spanish and French colonies in the New World: a noun from this word meant ‘a person or animal born in the home’ (Fr. creole) Caribbean usage in 17th-18th centuries, creole meant: (i)A local descendant of European settlers (white creole, creole white) (ii)Descendant of African slaves (Negro creole, creole Negro) (iii)A mixture of both, usually capitalized (the local Creoles, the local Creole population) extended to Louisiana

late 19th century, creole extended to languages throughout colonial and postcolonial tropics, all over the world (Americas, Australasia, Indian Ocean, elsewhere) French Creole, Creole French (Martinique, Mauritius) English Creole, Creole English (Belize, Jamaica) Roper River Creole (Australia) Hawaii Creole English (Pacific) people of any background in a place where a creole is used are likely to speak, whether or not it is their mother tongue creoles are acquired as a first language by children speech becomes faster, vocabulary increaes, development of tenses increases, development of relative clauses increases for more on pidgins and creoles, see