Introduction

Pidgins and Creoles

Pidgins are languages that appeared in the context of slave trade and colonization and they can be defined as ‘simplified’ languages emerging from a multilingual situation, where people need to communicate but they don’t speak each other’s language and/or don’t want (or can’t) learn.

They are considered ‘simplified’ because they don’t have complex structures neither grammatical rules. Lexical items may come from the different languages involved in the process and the idea of error doesn’t exist.

Pidgins can’t be considered natural languages because there are no native speakers of pidgins. If a couple who communicates through a pidgin, and whose first languages are different, has a child, this child will grow up being exposed to the pidgin their parents speak. But as this child has no other native language, he/she will speak this pidgin but with more regularities in the forms and ‘creating’ rules. Therefore, this language is not a pidgin anymore, it is a creole, with rules and grammar.

English and Creole

English Based Creole

An English-based creole language is a creole that was significantly influenced by the English language. Most English creoles were formed in English colonies, following the great expansion of British naval military power and trade in the 17^th,18^th and 19^th centuries. There are two major groups of English-based creoles: the Atlantic, which developed mostly in the 17^th and 18^th centuries (spoken in West Africa and in the Caribbean) and the Pacific, which were established in the 19^th century. The Atlantic English-based creoles bear some resemblance with other creoles that emerged there, like Dutch and French based ones, especially due to the fact that the languages of the substrate had the same source (West African countries). The substrate languages of the Pacific group are, on the other hand, from the Austronesian languages.

There are 48 English-based creole languages and 8 English-based pidgins nowadays.

Click the link to see their location: http://www.muturzikin.com/cartepidgin.htm and, click on the links below to have a brief description of them:

Afro-seminole Creole

American Indian Pidgin English

Australian Kriol language 

Bahamian Creole

Cayman Creole

Chinese Pidgin English 

Hawaiian Pidgin 

Jamaican language

Norfuk language 

Singlish 

Tok Pisin

Trinidadian Creole English

Pidgins and Creoles: Definition

What are Pidgins and Creoles?

Strictly speaking, PCs are new language varieties, which developed out of contacts between colonial nonstandard varieties of a European language and several non-European languages around the Atlantic and in the Indian and Pacific Oceans during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Pidgins typically emerged in trade colonies which developed around trade forts or along trade routes, such as on the coast of West Africa. They are reduced in structures and specialized in functions (typically trade), and initially they served as non-native lingua francas to users who preserved their native vernaculars for their day-to-day interactions. Some pidgins have expanded into regular vernaculars, especially in urban settings, and are called `expanded pidgins.' Examples include Bislama and Tok Pisin (in Melanesia) and Nigerian and Cameroon Pidgin English. Structurally, they are as complex as Creoles. The latter vernaculars developed in settlement colonies whose primary industry consisted of sugar cane plantations or rice fields, which employed massive non-European slave labor. Examples include Cape Verdian Criolou (lexified by Portuguese) and Papiamentu in the Netherlands Antilles (apparently– Portuguese-based but influenced by Spanish); Haitian, Mauritian, and Seychellois (lexified by French); Jamaican, Guyanese, and Hawaiian Creole, as well as Gullah in the USA (all lexified by English); and Saramaccan and Sranan in Surinam (lexified by English, with the former heavily influenced by Portuguese and the latter by Dutch). Note that although Melanesian pidgins are associated with sugar cane plantations, they apparently originated in trade settings and were adopted on the plantations (Keesing 1988).

Source: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/

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Development

The Development of Creoles

The central question here is: how did Creoles develop? The following hypotheses are the major ones competing today: the substrate, the superstrate, and the universalist hypotheses.

Substratist positions are historically related to the `baby talk hypothesis,' which I have traced back to nineteenth-century French creolists (e.g., Adam 1883). Putatively, the languages previously spoken by the Africans enslaved on New World and Indian Ocean plantations were the primary reason why the European lexifiers which they appropriated were restructured into Creoles. These French creolists assumed African languages to be `primitive,' `instinctive,' in `natural' state, and simpler than the `cultivated' European languages with which they came in contact. Creoles' systems were considered to be reflections of those non- European languages. The baby-talk connection is that, in order to be understood, the Europeans supposedly had to speak to the Africans like to babies, their interpretation of foreigner talk.

The revival of the substrate hypothesis (without its racist component) has been attributed to Sylvain (1936). Although she recognizes influence from French dialects, she argues that African linguistic influence, especially from the Ewe group of languages, is very significant in HC. Unfortunately, she states in the last sentence of her conclusions that this Creole is Ewe spoken with a French vocabulary. Over two decades later, Turner (1949) disputed American dialectologists' claim that there was virtually no trace of African languages in AAE and showed phonological and morphosyntactic similarities between Gullah and some West-African (especially Kwa) languages. He concluded that `Gullah is indebted to African sources'.

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Creolistics

Creolistics and General Linguistics

There is much more literature on the genesis, sociology, and morphosyntax of PCs than on their phonologies, semantics, and pragmatics. With the exception of time reference and nominal number, studies in semantics and pragmatics are scant. On the other hand, the development of quantitative sociolinguistics owes a lot to research on AAE since the mid-1960s (see, e.g., Labov 1972) and Caribbean English Creoles (e.g., Rickford 1987). Numerous publications in American Speech, Language in Society, and Language Variation and Change reflect this. There are also several surveys of creolistics. Holm (1988, 1989), Arends et al. (1995), and Mühlhäusler (1986, 1997), cited here, are just some of the references, which vary both in adequacy and in geographical areas of focus. It ishopedthat,Corne(1999) is the beginning ofa new trend of comparative studies of Creoles lexified by the same language.

Studies of structural aspects of Creoles have yet to inform general linguistics beyond the subject matters of time reference and serial verb constructions. For instance, studies of lectal continua have had this potential, but little has been done by creolists to show how their findings may apply to other languages. The mixed nature of mesolects, those intermediate varieties combining features of both the acrolect and the basilect should have informed general linguistics against the fallacy of assuming monolithic grammatical systems. However, little has been done on the subject matter. Likewise, the debate on Creole genesis could have informed historical linguistics on the importance of varying external conditions to language change. 

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Videos!

Good Videos to See!

 

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ubbWDICnf0&feature=related

This video explains how pidgins develop into creole. Though the audio is not of very good quality, the explanation is very didactic and includes maps and photos. It talks about Jamaican and Tok Pisin creoles.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YieVSrzRqRo&feature=related

This is a one-minute video showing two men talking Chinese-English Pidgin with subtitles. It is very interesting to analyse the lexical items that come from English in this conversation. This video was produced by Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, Department of Linguistics & Modern Languages, in the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NesfQ2oNBcA&feature=related

A video, divided in three parts, about the Hawaiian pidgin. It shows different generations of the same family to explain how the pidgin was developed into the creole language. It also shows girls telling everyday life stories in their language.

Link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7X9AAeDCr4&feature=related

Part of a longer documentary: “Hawaii pidgin - the voice of Hawaii”, it shows how the Hawaiin pigdin was created - the different cultures that had influenced it and how it was developed.

Webography

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Creole_language

Very comprehensive website with straightforward information about what creoles and pidgins are, different types of creoles and some very basic characteristics. It is very limited but gives an interesting general idea of the subject.

http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/1775458

This page brings information exclusively about English-based creoles, such as names, types, location, influences. Unfortunately, there is nothing but the name of some of the creoles cited in the page, but it is worth having a look!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/multilingual/creole.shtml

This area of the BBC website brings the story of how the creoles evolved in the Caribbean. It is said that there are differences between the English-based creoles there but they are intelligible. It also says that the social class and the topic of the conversation play an important role in the use of creole or standard English. Many children today are bidialectal in the Caribbean, switching from the local British dialect to the creole. Creoles based on other European languages, such as French and Dutch, also exist in the region.

http://logos.uoregon.edu/explore/socioling/pidgin.html

Apart from explaining the origins of pidgin and creoles languages, the greatest contribution of this website it that it shows examples of creoles from Papua New Guinea, Cameroon and Seychelles. It is short, but very interesting!