Lindsay Bluth
Dr. Bob Loblaw
ANTH 14
15 March 2015
Pidgins and Creole Development
Pidgins, basic languages that arise in polyglot situations, are implemented to carry out
simple communication, though these “languages” may not even be considered such due to how
limited these forms of communications are. The phrases used in pidgins are propagated by a
lifestyle centered around work of some sort. They can be formed in situations of slavery, with
slaves being brought from several different cultures and languages to work for a common goal.
With the need to establish communication weighing on these individuals and their performance,
pidgins are naturally formed to fill this role, albeit very simply. Though they begin as a utility to
fill the gap between these speakers of different languages, they soon develop into complete
languages with their own vocabularies and grammars. After this transformation and
development, the language is referred to as a creole (Findlay 2015).
Keith Whinnom, in his 1966 work titled Pidginization and Creolization of Languages,
compared the formation of pidgins to a tertiary form of biological hybridization between at least
three languages. The primary hybridization that must start this chain of inter-breeding is
represented linguistically as the formation of individual dialects within a language. These
dialects can be understood as the language that contains them in a “smooth, bridged
organization” (Whinnom 102). Secondary hybridization is linguistically compared to two
different languages intermixed within a community, though not completely melded together, or
as the creation of a “plethora of variant forms” in a species that cannot be so easily organized as
those primary hybrids. The tertiary hybrid, a term constructed by Whinnom, describes the
formation of an entirely new language (or species), by interbreeding within secondarily
hybridized individuals. Whinnom uses the cocoliche secondary language, used between Italian
immigrants and Argentinian natives in South America, as an example of a secondary
hybridization. The original individuals spoke Italian and Spanish, though the individuals were
rarely fluent in both languages, so the secondary language they used to communicate was only
comprised of those two languages and nothing more. Whinnom argues that a pidgin cannot arise
between the intermixing of these people who speak only these languages together, for they will
usually default to either Spanish or Italian depending on whom they are speaking to. Instead, the
pidgin will begin to arise when two speakers of two entirely different secondary languages meet
to communicate. For example, a boy who speaks mainly English and some French will speak
with another boy who speaks mainly German and some French only in a composite of his
English-French lexicon while the German boy will communicate back with his German-French
lexicon.
The two hybrids of two different primary lexical backgrounds find their common ground,
French, and though it is rudimentary, the individuals transform the phrases and syntax that they
know into some mutually intelligible, proto-Pidgin that gains stability through
environmentally-forced use. Their possibly poor pronunciation of the French might then be
“reinforced by repetition… and might soon render their ‘French’ unintelligible to a native
speaker.” (Whinnom 106). Constructs like verb conjugation and noun gender have the potential
to be completely forgotten during this formation by way of mere simplification. Though pidgins
are not formed by just two individuals but by whole communities, this example explains the
rudimentary basis behind pidgin formation.
A key characteristic of all pidgins, due to their rudimentary nature, is a reduction in
function that the new “language” has. Fewer topics, less brevity, and a lack of grace are
compounded as the pidgin develops. Constructs from the substrate language become
implemented, though they may not normally be found in the superstrate language. If the speaker
is not fluent with pronouns in the superstrate language, he or she may abandon them for the
nouns they stand for. If the majority of the pidgin-speakers chooses also to abandon these
pronouns, then the pidgin becomes one more step away from the language it is based on.
In the Caribbean during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, pidgins and creoles were
conceived to promote communication between the African slaves who spoke no uniform
language. Today, a prominent creole in Jamaica is known as Patois. Originally colonized by the
British in 1655, Jamaica has its creole language rooted in English. Between the years of 1675 to
1734, the slave population went from 9,500 to 86,000, while the white population remained
around 7,500 (Holm 470). 10% of the slave population was from Suriname, leading to the
creole’s heavy Maroon influence and preservation of the language during ritual speech. Slaves
taken from West Africa brought with them French language to influence the creole’s formation
as well (Holm 470).0