Pidgin

A Pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of a mixture of other languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues. Pidgins have rudimentary grammars and restricted vocabulary, serving as auxiliary contact languages. They are improvised rather than learned natively.

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Pidgins can develop to become creole languages. This requires the pidgin to be learned natively by children, who then generalize the features of the pidgin into a fully-formed, stabilized grammar (see Nicaraguan Sign Language). At this stage the language is no longer a pidgin, as it has acquired the full complexity of a human language, and becomes a creole. Often creoles can then replace the existing mix of languages to become the native language of the current community (such as Krio in Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea). However, pidgins do not always become creoles—they can die out or become obsolete.

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The concept originated in Europe among the merchants and traders in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, who used Lingua franca (also named Sabir). Another well-known pidgin is the Beach-la-Mar of the South Seas, based on English but incorporating Malay, Chinese, and Portuguese words. Bislama, as it is now called in Vanuatu, is fairly mutually intelligible with Tok Pisin.

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Caribbean pidgins are the result of colonialism. As tropical islands were colonised their society was restructured, with a ruling minority of some European nation and a large mass of non-European laborers. The laborers, natives, slaves or cheap immigrant workers, would often come from many different language groups and would need to communicate. This led to the development of pidgins.

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The creation of a pidgin usually requires:

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• Prolonged, regular contact between the different language communities
• A need to communicate between them
• An absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible interlanguage.

Spanglish is not a Pidgin, it is a code switching because it shares vocabulary rather than inventing a new one.

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Pidgin: Evolution ►



 

Language: A language is a system of expression and communication. Individual languages use sound, gesture, and other means to express and communicate concepts, emotions, ideas, and thoughts. Expressions of a language are analysable into words, whose meanings are usually conventional. The word "language" is ...

Creole language: A Creole is a language descended from a pidgin that has become the native language of a group of people. The majority of creole languages are based on English, Portuguese, French, Spanish and other languages (their superstrate language), with local or immigrant languages as substrate languages....

Nicaraguan Sign Language: Nicaraguan Sign Language (or ISN, Idioma de Signos Nicarag?ense) is a signed language spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools along the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua in the 1970s. It is of particular interest to linguists because it offers a unique opportunity to study the "birt...