1 From Pre-pidgin to Post-creole Deny A. Kwary

2 Potential Chronological Development:

3 Pre-Pidgin When two or more groups who do not speak the same language come into contact, their needs to communicate to one another may lead to a pre-pidgin situation, in which one language, which is more dominant, becomes the source language.  Pre-pidgin occurs before focusing leads to the achievement of stability and the development of shared norms, and where the pidginized forms are still relatively diffuse.

4 Pidginization In a further development, pidginization may take place, especially when adults and post-adolescents learn a new language.  Pidginization consists of three related but distinct processes: reduction, admixture, and simplification.

5 Pidginization Processes 1.Reduction refers to the fact that there is a simply less of a language as compared to the form in which it is spoken by native speakers: the vocabulary is smaller, there are fewer syntactic structures, and so on. 2.Admixture refers to the interference – the transfer of features of pronunciation and grammatical and semantic structure from the native language to the new language. 3.Simplification refers to the regularization of irregularities, loss of redundancy, and an increase in analytic structures and transparent forms.

6 Pidgin In some cases, pidginization may lead to a pidgin, e.g. in the absence of native speakers of the original language, the pidginized forms become important as a lingua franca and acquire stability with widely shared norms of usage.  A pidgin is a stable language, without native speakers, which is the outcome of pidginization processes of a source language, and where intelligibility with the source language is no longer possible.

7 Depidginization Depidginization takes place if a pidgin comes into renewed or closer contact with its original source language. In this case, any expansion which occurs is contact-induced and leads in the direction of the source language. In some circumstances, a pidgin may become the most important language, and will therefore be subject to expansion, so that it can be used in an increasingly wide range of functions.

8 Creolization and Creole  A creole is a pidgin which has acquired native speakers and has undergone non-contact- induced expansion, where the expansion process repairs the results of the reduction process which occurred during pidginization. Creolization occurs when the expansion is non-contact-induced. The outcome is a creole.

9 Decreolization and Post-creole Decreolization occurs when a creole comes into renewed or intensified contact with its source language, that it will begin to change in the direction of the source language. The change in direction involves the processes of purification (removal of words and forms which are not derived from the source language) and complication (re-introduction of irregularity, etc.).

10 Example of the chronological development 1655: British sailors and soldiers landed in Jamaica, and started to bring a large number of slaves from Africa. Source Language: English; Other Languages: Akan (Ghana, West Africa) and Bantu languages (Central Africa) 1807: The abolition of the slave in Jamaica. The pidginization led to a pidgin because the pidginized forms became important as a lingua franca and acquired stability with widely shared norms of usage. 6 August 1962: Jamaica became an independent country. Jamaican Patois (creole) has acquired native speakers. The standardization efforts and the change in the direction of the source language (British English) lead to the promotion of Jamaican English (post-creole).

11 Creoloid: Beyond the Traditional Pidgin and Creole Life Cycle Model There are varieties of language in the world which look like post-creoles but which actually are not. Such languages can be called “creoloids”, and the process which leads to their formation is called “creoloidization”. Creoloids have no pidgin-creole history, i.e. they have not experienced a history of reduction followed or “repaired” by expansion. A good example of a creoloid is Afrikaans, which is clearly a creoloid relative to Dutch.

12 Main Reference: Trudgill, Peter Dual source pidgins and reverse creoles: northern perspectives on language contact. In I. Broch & E.H. Jahr (eds.), Language contact in the Arctic: northern pidgins: and contact languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter