What is a Creole language? What is a pidgin?
The very definition of Creoles and/or pidgins is subject to debate because it is intimately linked to one’s view of their genesis. Probably the best approach is to define a prototypical Creole and pidgin and then see how some differ from this theoretical standard. A pidgin is a contact language that develops through regular but limited contact between two or more groups that need to communicate for a short term or for restricted purposes such as trade, where none of the groups has competency in the other’s language. It is nobody’s mother tongue, but arises through a process of linguistic negotiation where ease of learning and restricted communicative use is in focus. Its lexical reach is limited and it exhibits significant gaps in various linguistic features. Lexical items and grammatical features from both languages combine to create the pidgin. Pidgins usually take their limited vocabulary predominantly from one of the languages in the contact situation, which is why one can speak of
