What are pidgins and creoles?
A. See SCL member and SCL past president Don Winford’s article Languages in Contact. See also Yves Dejean’s FAQs on Haitian Creole. Of significance is SCL member Michel DeGraff’s paper against “creole exceptionalism”, the common view that creoles are typologically unusual and aberrant. One might well ask the following question. Much of early historical linguistics (cf. the comparative method) was based on the study of systematic phonological relationships and correspondences between and among different languages (see Grimm’s Law and Werner’s Law). For example, philologist Sir William Jones posited a relationship between Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Farsi based on common phonological patterns seen in specific words. If these languages were seen to have common ancestors based on phonology and lexicon, then is French Creole a Romance language? They share the same vocabulary. Is English Creole Germanic? Don’t these languages rightfully belong in the Indo-European family tree?
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 c
