The origins of language

2. Pidgin and creole languages

 Pidgin and creole languages 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 cane plantations or rice fields, which employed massive non-European slave labor. Examples include Cape Verdian Criolou (lexified by Portuguese) and Papiamentu in the Netherlands Antilles (apparently– Portuguese-based but influenced by Spanish); Haitian, Mauritian, and Seychellois (lexified by French); Jamaican, Guyanese, and Hawaiian Creole, as well as Gullah in the USA (all lexified by English); and Saramaccan and Sranan in Surinam (lexified by English, with the former heavily influenced by Portuguese and the latter by Dutch). Note that although Melanesian pidgins are associated with sugar cane plantations, they apparently originated in trade settings and were adopted on the plantations (Keesing 1988).

The terms Creole and pidgin have also been extended to some other varieties that developed during the same period out of contacts among primarily non- European languages. Examples include Delaware Pidgin, Chinook Jargon, and Mobilian in North America; Sango, (Kikongo-) Kituba, and Lingala in Central Africa, Kinubi in Southern Sudan and in Uganda; and Hiri Motu in Papua New Guinea (Holm 1989, Smith 1995). In the original, lay people's naming practice, the term jargon was an alternate to pidgin. However, some creolists claim that pidgins are more stable and jargons are an earlier stage in the `life-cycle' that putatively progresses from Jargon, to Pidgin, to Creole, to Post-Creole by progressive structural expansion, stabilization, and closer approximations of the lexifier–the language which contributed the largest part of a Creole's lexicon.