Varieties of
English; Pidgin & creoles
A
pidgin is a restricted language which arises for the purposes of communication
between two social groups of which one is in a more dominant position than the
other. The less dominant group is the one which develops the pidgin.
Historically, pidgins arose in colonial situations where the representatives of
the particular colonial power, officials, tradesmen, sailors, etc., came in
contact with natives. The latter developed a jargon when communicating with the
former. This resulted in a language on the basis of the colonial language in
question and the language or languages of the natives. Such a language was
restricted in its range as it served a definite purpose, namely basic
communication with the colonists. In the course of several generations such a reduced
form of language can become more complex, especially if it develops into the
mother tongue of a group of speakers. This latter stage is that of creolization.
Creoles are much expanded versions of pidgins and have arisen in situations in
which there was a break in the natural linguistic continuity of a community,
for instance on slave plantations in their early years.
The
interest of linguists in these languages has increased greatly in the last few
decades. The main reason for this is that pidgins and creoles are young
languages. In retracing their development it may be possible to see how new
languages can arise. Furthermore, the large number of shared features among
widely dispersed pidgins and creoles leads to the conclusion that creoles at
least show characteristics which are typical of language in the most general
sense, the features of older languages, such as complex morphology or intricate
phonology, arising due to the action of various forces over a long period of
time after the birth of these languages. In type, creoles are all analytic and
generally lack complexity in their sound systems.
The
terms ‘pidgin’ and ‘creole’
There
are a number of views on the origin of the term pidgin, none of which has
gained sole acceptance by the academic community.
1)
Chinese corruption of the word business. As the word is used for any action or
occupation (cf. joss-pidgin ‘religion’ and chow-chow-pidgin ‘cooking') it
should not be surprising that it be used for a language variety which arose for
trading purposes.
2)
Portuguese ocupaçao meaning ‘trade, job, occupation’. This suggestion is
interesting as the Portuguese were among the first traders to travel to the
third world and influence natives with their language. Phonetically the shift
from the original word to a form /pidgin/ is difficult to explain.
3)
A form from the South American language Yayo ‘-pidian’ meaning ‘people’ (claim
put forward by Kleinecke, 1959). This form occurs in tribal names like
‘Mapidian’, ‘Tarapidian’, etc. This claim rests on a single occurrence of the
word ‘Pidians’ in a text from 1606. But as several authors have pointed out
this might be a spelling error for ‘Indians’ seeing as how the author has other
misspellings in the text in question.
4)
Hancock (1972) suggested that the term is derived from ‘pequeno portugues’
which is used in Angola for the broken Portuguese spoken by the illiterate.
This view is semantically justified seeing that the word ‘pequeno’ is often
used to mean ‘offspring’, in this case a language derived from another.
Phonetically, the shift to /pidgin/ is not difficult to account for: /peke:no/
> /pege:n/ > /pigin/ > /pidgin/ (stages not attested, however).
5)
Hebrew word ‘pidjom’ meaning ‘barter’. This suggestion is phonetically and semantically
plausible, hinges however on the distribution of a Jewish word outside of
Europe and its acceptance as a general term for a trade language.
The
term ‘creole’ There is less controversy on this issue than on the previous one.
The term would seem to derive from French ‘creole’, it in its turn coming from
Portuguese ‘crioulo’ (rather than from Spanish ‘criollo') which goes back to an
Iberian stem meaning ‘to nurse, breed, bring up’. The present meaning is
‘native to a locality or country’. Originally it was used (17th century) to
refer to those from European countries born in the colonies. The term then
underwent a semantic shift to refer to customs and language of those in the
colonies and later to any language derived from a pidgin based on a European
language, typically English, French, Portuguese, Spanish or Dutch. Now the term
refers to any language of this type, irrespective of what the input language
has been.
Theories of origin
There
are various theories about the origin of pidgins which have been proposed in
the last hundred years or so. These can be presented as a basic group of five
theories which show a degree of overlap; note that a mixture of origins is also
a possibility which should also be considered.
1)
The baby-talk theory At the end of the last century Charles Leland, when
discussing China coast pidgin English, noted that there were many similarities
with the speech of children such as the following features:
a)
High percentage of content words with a correspondingly low number of
function words
b)
Little morphological marking
c) Word classes more flexible than in adult
language (free conversion)
d) Contrasts in area of pronouns greatly
reduced
e) Number of inflections minimized
Later
linguists, notably Jespersen and Bloomfield, maintained that the
characteristics of pidgins result from ‘imperfect mastery of a language which
in its initial stage, in the child with its first language and in the grown-up
with a second language learnt by imperfect methods, leads to a superficial
knowledge of the most indispensable word, with total disregard of grammar’
(Jespersen 1922: 234). The evaluative nature of such views would be rejected by
linguists today.
2)
Independent parallel development theory This view maintains that the obvious
similarities between the world’s pidgins and creoles arose on independent but
parallel lines due to the fact that they all are derived from languages of
Indo-European stock and, in the case of the Atlantic varieties, due to their
sharing a common West African substratum. Furthermore, scholars like Robert
Hall specify that the similar social and physical conditions under which
pidgins arose were responsible for the development of similar linguistic
structures.
3)
Nautical jargon theory As early as 1938 the American linguist John Reinecke
noted the possible influence of nautical jargon on pidgins. It is obvious that
on many of the original voyages of discovery to the developing world many
nationalities were represented among the crews of the ships. This fact led to
the development of a core vocabulary of nautical items and a simplified grammar
(at least as regards English). Later pidgins show many of these lexical items
irrespective of where the language varieties are spoken. Thus the word capsize
turns up with the meaning ‘turn over’ or ‘spill’ in both West Atlantic and
Pacific pidgins. So do the words heave, hoist, hail, galley, cargo. One of the
shortcomings of this otherwise attractive theory is that it does not help to
account for the many structural affinities between pidgins which arose from
different European languages.
4)
Monogenetic/relexification theory According to this view all pidgins can be
traced back to a single proto-pidgin, a 15th century Portuguese pidgin which
was itself probably a relic of the medieval lingua franca (also known as sabir
from the Portuguese word for ‘know') which was the common means of
communication among the Crusaders and traders in the Mediterranean area. Lingua
franca survived longest on the North African coast and is attested from Algeria
and Tunesia as late as the 19th century.
The
theory maintains that when the Portuguese first sailed down the west coast of
Africa in the 15th century they would have used their form of lingua franca
(sabir). Afterwards in the 16th and 17th centuries when the Portuguese
influence in Africa declined, the vocabulary of the then established pidgins
would have been replaced by that of the new colonial language which was
dominant in the area, say English or French. As the Portuguese were among the
first traders in India and South East Asia a similar situation can be assumed
to have obtained: the vocabulary of the original Portuguese pidgin was replaced
by that of a later European language.
Note
that with this theory the grammatical structure of pidgins would not have been affected
by the switch in vocabulary (this is what is meant by the term relexification).
Thus the obvious similarity in structure of all pidgins would go back to the
grammar of the proto-pidgin coming from the Mediterranean area. What this
theory does not explain is why the structure (analytic) should be of the type
it is. Furthermore there are a number of marginal pidgins (Russenorsk, Eskimo
Trade Jargon) which cannot conceivably be connected with Portuguese and which
are nonetheless analytic in structure just as the pidgins based on the main
European colonial languages are.
5)
Universalist theory This is the most recent view on the origin of pidgins and
has elements in common with the other theories. However, the distinguishing
mark of this theory is that it sees the similarities as due to universal
tendencies among humans to create languages of a similar type, i.e. an analytic
language with a simple phonology, an SVO syntax with little or no subordination
or other sentence complexities, and with a lexicon which makes maximum use of
polysemy (and devices such as reduplication) operating from a limited core
vocabulary. To put it in technical terms, a creole will be expected to have
unmarked values for linguistic parameters, e.g. with the parameter pro-drop,
whereby the personal pronoun is not obligatory with verb forms (cf. Italian
capisco ‘I understand'), the unmarked setting is for no pro-drop to be allowed
and indeed this is the situation in all pidgins and creoles, a positive value
being something which may appear later with the rise of a rich morphology.
Developmental stages of
pidgins/creoles
Social
situation Linguistic correlate
1)
Marginal contact Restricted pidgin
2)Dativization
Extended pidgin
3)Mother
tongue development Creole
4)
Movement towards standard language (not necessarily input language) Decreolization
Pidgins
are generally characterized as restricted and extended. In the life-cycle of
pidgins one can note that they start off as restricted language varieties used
in marginal contact situations for minimal trading purposes. From this original
modest outset a pidgin may, assuming that there are social reasons for it to do
so, develop into an extended type. The latter is characterized by the extension
of the social functions of a pidgin. One very frequent scenario in the later
development of a pidgin is where it is used as a means of communication not
just among black and white speakers but among native speakers themselves who
however have very different native languages. This is the major reason for the
survival of pidgin English in West Africa. The function of pidgin English is thus
as a lingua franca, i.e. a common means of communication between speakers who
do not understand their respective native languages.
The
process of pidginization is very common in any situation in which a lingua
franca is called for. Normally any such variety dies out very quickly once the
situation which gave rise to it no longer obtains. If the situation does
continue to exist then the pidgin is likely to survive. The steps from
restricted to extended pidgin and further to creole are only taken by very few
languages, particularly the major restructuring typical of pidgins is not
normally carried out by any but a very small number of input varieties.
Reasons
for creole development Creoles may arise in one of two basic situations. One is
where speakers of pidgins are put in a situation in which they cannot use their
respective mother tongues. This has arisen in the course of the slave trade (in
the Caribbean and the southern United States) where speakers were deliberately
kept in separate groups to avoid their plotting rebellion. They were then
forced to maintain the pidgin which they had developed up to then and pass it
on to future generations as their mother tongue thus forming the transition
from a pidgin to a creole. A second situation is where a pidgin is regarded by
a social group as a higher language variety and deliberately cultivated; this
is the kind of situation which obtained in Cameroon and which does still to
some extent on Papua New Guinea. The outcome of this kind of situation is that
the children of such speakers which use pidgin for prestige reasons may end up
using the pidgin as a first language, thus rendering it a creole with the
attendant relinquishing of the native language of their parents and the
expansion of all linguistic levels for the new creole to act as a fully-fledged
language.
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