Pidgins and Creoles

Adopting a lingua franca is not the only solution to the problem of communication between groups of people speaking different lan­guages. In some cases, a pidgin develops.

A pidgin is a restricted language system which arises in order to fulfil essential communication needs among people with no common language. It is no one's first language, and is used at first in a limited set of circumstances. Such a system typically develops on trade routes and in coastal areas.

A pidgin is usually based on one language, though it soon acquires an admixture of other languages, as well as independent construc­tions of its own. For example, Ток Pisin (also known as Melanesian Pidgin English and Neo-Melanesian) which is spoken in Papua New Guinea, is based on English, and many of the words sound somewhat like English ones:

Mi go long taun. 'I go/went to the town'.

Yu wokabaut long rot. ‘You walk/walked along the road'.

But there are plenty of others, which cannot be predicted from English, such as lotu 'church', diwai 'tree', susu 'milk'. In addition, it has acquired syntactic constructions which do not figure in English. For example, there is a consistent distinction between verbs with an object ('transitive' verbs) which take the ending -im, as with bagarapim 'wreck', and those without ('intransitive' verbs) as in bagarap 'collapse', 'break down':

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Mi bagarapim ka bilongyu. 'I crashed your car'.

Kabilong mi i bagarap. 'My car broke down'.

Another innovation is the particle i which usually has to be placed before the verb (as in the second sentence above).

The phonology, syntax, and lexicon are simpler in a pidgin than in an ordinary language. There are fewer phonemes. In Ток Pisin, [pi and [f] are often merged, so are [s] and [l], and there are only five vowels. English 'fish' was borrowed as pis, and English 'ship' as sip. In order to avoid confusion, 'piss' (urinate) became pispis, and 'sheep' becamesipsip. There аre very few word endings, the sentences have a simple structure, and there is a small vocabulary. One or two items stretch over a wide area, as with the following uses of the word pikinini 'child':

pikinini man 'son' (lit. child man).

pikinini meri 'daughter' (lit. child woman).

pikininihos 'foal' (lit. child horse).

pikinini pis 'minnow' (lit. child fish).

pikinini bilong rais 'rice kernels' (lit. child of rice).

pikinini bilong diwai 'fruit of tree' (lit. child of tree).

Sometimes, pidgins die out of their own accord. At other times they increase in importance, and become used in more and more areas of life. If someone then acquires a pidgin as a first language - perhaps because of intermarriage between people whose only common lan­guage is the pidgin - the language has then become a creole.

Once it has become a creole, the system tends to develop rapidly. Speech is speeded up, the syntax becomes more complex, and extra vocabulary items are created. Fairly soon, if it continues to develop, a creole is likely to be indistinguishable from a 'full' language.

In some circumstances, however, a creole can be devoured by its parent. If a creole is spoken in an area where the base language is also used, then there may be social pressure on the creole speakers to speak the base, which often has more prestige. Therefore, little by little, the creole becomes decreolized, as words and constructions from the base language replace the creole ones.

The study of pidgins and creoles has grown rapidly, because their implications and interest spread far beyond sociolinguistics. They are valuable for the insights they provide into language change, and some people have claimed that they shed light on language universals- that they present language in a stripped down and basic state. This claim is controversial, but the interest it has aroused has increased the

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attention given to the topic. Only time will tell whether such grandiose claims are justified.

However, language universals are more commonly associated with the study of language and mind. This is the topic of the next chapter.