LING 122: ENGLISH AS A WORLD
LANGUAGE - 18
Language Contact:
Pidgins & Creoles
Readings:
Lipski, Crystal, Holman,
Sample Pidgins & Creoles
PIDGINS AND CREOLES
- Characteristics and origins of Pidgins and Creoles
- Expanded pidgins
- Creole origins
- From pidgins to creoles
-- Hawaiian Creole English
- Developments in the UK and the US
*Notes based on Jenkins, J. 2003. World Englishes, Routledge, pp. 55-60, 99-106, 154-162.
Pidgins
 Limited functions (esp. trade)
 No native speakers (nobody’s mother tongue)
 Contact language involving at least two, often
three different language groups
 That is, it is the product of a multilingual situation
in which those who wish to communicate must
find or improvise a simple language system that
will enable them to do so.
Pidgin Origins
 So Pidgins, in the stereotypical case, are formed
when speakers of one language engage in trade
with speakers of another, or work on plantations
managed by speakers of another, and neither
knows the other’s language.
 In plantation settings, their manual function is to
enable workers to communicate with each other,
since plantation laborers very often do not speak
the same language.
Pidgins
Very simple languages that develop just linguistically
and functionally enough to satisfy their purposes
Usually involve a European language (esp. English) and
non-European languages
Very often, the situation (i.e. the context of origin) is
one in which there is an imbalance of power among
the languages. The speakers of one language
dominate the speakers of the other languages
economically and socially.
That is, the superstratum language supplies most of
vocabulary (new domain of use for non-Europeans)
The substratum language supplies much of the
grammar
Expanded Pidgins
 Pidgins usually have limited life-span; can die out
when the interactions that they serve end (e.g.,
the end of a trade route)
 Pidgins will survive longer if at least two
substratum language groups are involved.
 E.g. Non-European language groups not in frequent
contact with each other until arrival of trans-oceanic
trade will continue to use the Pidgin created.
Expanded Pidgins
So the pidgin becomes a link language among the
non-Europeans, who sometimes continue to
develop and use it after the Europeans have left
True in many West African countries and South Pacific
islands (e.g., Sierra Leone in Story of English).
So it can become an expanded pidgin, like the Nigerian
pidgin Genesis, and remain in wide use.
Grammar and vocabulary expand as types of
interaction become broader and more complex.
But still no native speakers.
Expanded Pidgins
However, under certain circumstances, expanded pidgins can
start to have native speakers
Imagine that as trade along the rivers and the coastal areas
continues to expand,
Communities (ultimately cities) develop in which speakers of
different non-European languages interact frequently for
many purposes
The only language that they share is the pidgin
If woman and man from different native language
backgrounds meet frequently and eventually marry, they
can only communicate with each other in the pidgin.
Expanded Pidgins
What happens when they have children? What
language will the children speak?
The children will be native speakers of the pidgin, and
they will grow up with other children having similar
language backgrounds.
As they grow up and become involved in broad range of
activities (education, music, religion), their language
becomes more complex in terms of grammar,
vocabulary, and discourse.
Creole Origins
The pidgin has now developed into a creole, which is
“the mother tongue of a community.”
Creoles can become dominant languages of
communities and even post-colonial nations
e.g., Jamaica, Haiti
Creoles often co-exist with standard dialect of a former
colonial European language, which remains the
language of official power.
Creoles
Thus,
-A Creole is often defined as a pidgin that has
become the first language of a new generation of
speakers, i.e. creoles arise when pidgins become
mother tongues.
- A creole, therefore, is a ‘normal’ language in almost
every sense.
- A Creole is a pidgin which has expanded in structure
and vocabulary to express the range of meanings
and serve the range of functions required of a first
language.
Pidgins and Creoles
English-Based Pidgins and Creoles (35), E.g.
- Hawaiian Creole
- Gullah or Sea Islands Creole (spoken on the islands off the
coasts of northern Florida, Georgian and South Carolina)
- Jamaican Creole
- Krio (spoken in Sierra Leone)
- Sranan and Djuka (spoken is Suriname)
- Cameroon Pidgin English
- Tok Pisin
- Chinese Pidgin English (a modified form of English used as a
trade language between the British and the Chinese, first in
Canton, China, and later in other Chinese trade centers (e.g.,
Shanghai).
From Pidgins To Creoles
When a pidgin has become nativized, the history of the
resultant Creoles is, in essence, similar to that of any other
language.
Hence, whereas a pidgin is identifiable at any given time by
both linguistic and social criteria, a Creole is identifiable
only by historical criteria—that is if we know that it has
arisen out of pidgin.
There are no structural criteria which, in themselves, will
identify a Creole as such, in the absence of historical
evidence.
Characteristics of Pidgins &
Creoles
 Lexis (vocabulary)
 Pronunciation
 Grammar
 Social Functions
Lexis
 Drawn from dominant (lexifier) language (English,
French, Portuguese, Dutch)
 Lexis rules for pidgins are simpler than for mature
languages
 Concepts encoded in lengthy ways
 Yumitripela “we, us”
 Gras bilong pisin “feathers”
 Extensive use of reduplication
 Pikpik “pigs”
 Gutpela liklik “fairly good”
Pronunciation
 Five vowel sounds: / i e a o u /
 “deep” / “dip” -> /dip/
 “work” / “walk” -> /wak/
 Simplification of consonant clusters
 /-nd/ -> /-n/ : /paun/ “pound”
 /-ks/ -> /-kis/ : /sikis/ “six”
 Conflation of consonant sounds
 /f/ -> /p/ : /pren/ “friend”
 /š/ -> /s/ : /bus/ “bush”
 Larger number of homophones
 /tiŋ/ -> “thing” / “think’
Grammar
 Pidgins




Variable from speaker to speaker
Few if any inflections
Simple negation: “no” + X
Simple clause structure
 From pidgins to creoles





Consistency across speakers
Assimilation & reduction processes
Expanded vocabularies
Tense system
Greater sentence complexity
Social Functions
 Pidgins: Limited range of social functions
 As contact languages, used for minimal
communication purposes
 Extended pidgins and creoles: Wide range of
social functions
 Oral and written literature
 Education
 Mass media
 Advertising
 Religion
Creole Developments in the UK
 London Jamaican
 Patois of British blacks
 Origins in the Caribbean
 Spoken by London-born youth
 Reflects process of re-creolization (shift back to
earlier forms of the creole)
 Also spoken by young whites, Asians
 “Language crossing” – use of minority varieties by
ethnic outgroups
Jamaican Creole Grammatical
Features
 Interchangeable pronouns - /em/ = “he, she, it,
him, her,” etc.
 Present tense forms for present & past
reference: /ai se/ = “I said.”
 Elimination of tense suffixes (-s, -ed): /yu bret
stink/ = “Your breath stinks.”
 Pre-phrasal no for negation /no bret stink/ =
“My breath doesn’t stink.”
Jamaican Creole Phonological
Features
 /θ/ & /ð/ -> /t/ & /d/: /bret/ = “breath”
 Labialization after /b/: /bwoy/ = “boy”
 Deletion of final consonants: /bυlє/ = “bullet”
 /α/ & /ỏ/* -> /a/: “cloth” -> /klaat/
*/ỏ/ = “open o” as in
 Lack of unstressed schwa: “the” -> /da/ ~ /di/
The US: From Pidgin to Creole
to African American English?
 Ebonics
 African American English (AAE)
 Not all African Americans speak it
 Some non-African Americans speak it
 The language of descendents of slaves
 Traces origins to original slave pidgin and subsequent
creoles
 Shows possible traces of African languages
 Non-standard
 Rule-governed
Ebonics Grammatical Features
 Deletion of past tense suffixes
 “Yesterday he played” -> /ple/
 Deletion of auxiliaries where SAE can contract
 “He’s going” -> /hi gowiŋ/, but not
 “how pretty you are” -> */haw prIti yu/
 Multiple negation
 “He don’t know nothing.”
 Habitual be
 “Sometime she be angry” but not
 *“Sometime she angry.”
 Existential It’s
 “There’s a beer in the frig”  “It’s a beer in the frig”
Ebonics Phonological Features
 Reduction of final consonant clusters
 “burned my hand”  /bŗn ma hæn/
 “messed up”  /mεs əp/
 SAE /d/ and /t/ 
 “good man”  /gυ mæn/
 Monophthongization
 “time” /Taim/  /Tam/
 SAE /l/ and /r/  /ə/
 “steal” /stil/  /stiə/; “more” /mor/  /moə/
 SAE /ð/ and /θ/  /d/, /t/, /f/, /v/
 “thin”  /tin/; “they”  /de/
 “brother”  /brəvŗ/; “three”  /fri/
HAWAI’AN PIDGIN
In Hawai’i, a creole developed from an earlier pidgin (though
what is spoken today is often called Hawai’ian Pidgin!)
On the colonial plantations, frequent contact among several
Asian immigrant language groups (Chinese, Japanese,
Korean), indigenous Hawai’ians, and Caucasian Americans
As interactions among them become more frequent and
complex, expanded pidgin develops
Communicative functions expand, which requires more
complex grammar and vocabulary
When they intermarry, creole develops, which becomes first
language of their kids
Hawaiian Creole English
 A sample from the Bible