Pidgins and Creoles: Evolution of New Englishes

Posted on Jan 5, 2025 in Social sciences

New Englishes (2): Pidgins and Creoles

Historical Context

There are three types of English colony (1 and 2 are ‘settlement’; 3 is ‘exploitation’):

1. L1 speakers displaced the precolonial population (e.g., America, Australia).
2. More reduced colonial settlements maintained the precolonial population and allowed a proportion of them access to learning English as a second or additional language (e.g., Nigeria).
3. The precolonial population was replaced by new labor from elsewhere, principally West Africa (e.g., Caribbean islands: Barbados, Jamaica).

The third type led to the development of pidgins and creoles.

Pidgin

• A contact language with no native speakers.
• Arises to fulfill restricted communication needs (basic transactions) between people who do not share a common language.
• Initial stages involve a small vocabulary and little need for grammatical redundancy.

Compare:

• The two big newspapers
• Los dos grandes periódicos
• Di tu big pepa (Cameroon English)

Creole

• Arises when the children of pidgin speakers use their parents’ pidgin language as their mother tongue (i.e., they become native speakers).
• Involves an expansion of vocabulary and an increase in grammatical complexity, making it capable of expressing the entire human experience of its mother tongue speakers.
• Nevertheless, there are cases of pidgin languages that have developed in this way without any intervention from child L1 learners (e.g., Cameroon Pidgin, some varieties of Tok Pisin).

Stages of Creolization

Commonly occurs over one or two generations, but there are different possibilities:

• Type 1: Hawaiian Creole English
• Type 2: Torres Straits Broken (Queensland and South-Western Coastal Papua)
• Type 3: New Guinea Tok Pisin

Decreolization: When a creole comes into extensive contact with the dominant language (e.g., AAVE = Ebonics).

Possibly, a decreolized creole can move back towards the creole, e.g., London Jamaican (among younger speakers).

Terms ‘Pidgin’ and ‘Creole’

The term ‘pidgin’ is controversial, perhaps originating from a Chinese corruption of the English word “business”.

The term ‘creole’ comes from the Portuguese word ‘crioulo’ (a diminutive of ‘criar’), referring to an African slave born in the New World (Brazil).

Theories of Origin

Despite differences, European-based pidgins and creoles show similarities. There are three groups of theories:

A) Independent Origin (Polygenesis)

1. The Independent Parallel Development Theory:
   • Common linguistic ancestor: European languages, hence Indo-European origin.
   • In Atlantic pidgins, additionally West African languages.
   • Developed in similar social and physical conditions.
2. The Nautical Jargon Theory:
   • Sailors on European ships, speakers from different language backgrounds, were forced to create a lingua franca and passed this lingua franca to Asian and African people through trade.
   • Nautical jargon was the base of the pidgins, from where they expanded. It formed the nucleus for the various pidgins, subsequently expanded in line with their learners’ mother tongues.
   • Evidence: Several nautical words are common to different pidgins.

B) Single Origin (Monogenesis)

3. The Theory of Monogenesis and Relexification:
   • Ultimate derivation from one proto-pidgin source, a Portuguese pidgin used in the world’s trade routes during the 15^th and 16^th centuries.
   • In turn, it is derived from “Sabir,” an earlier lingua franca used by Crusaders and traders in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages.
   • Sabir is not only based in Portuguese but was later lexified by this language when they were sailing along the coast of West Africa, becoming the first European language acquired by the indigenous population.
   • There was a subsequent decrease in Portuguese influence and an increase in the influence of other dominant languages: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, etc.
   • Evidence: Many lexical and syntactic similarities between Portuguese-based and other European-based pidgins and creoles. E.g., “savi,” “sabi” (Portuguese “saber”), “pikin,” “pikini” (Portuguese “pequeno”).

C) Deriving from Universal Strategies

4. The Baby-Talk Theory:
   • Similarities between forms of certain pidgins and the early speech of children:
   • Large proportion of content words.
   • Lack of morphological change.
   • Lack of structural words.
   • Approximation of the standard pronunciation.
   • Promoted by foreigner talk, a simplified speech used by speakers of the dominant language addressing L2 speakers.
5. A Synthesis (Loreto Todd):
   • Extension of the baby-talk theory.
   • Universal patterns in contact situations.
   • Simplification processes by L1 speakers in:
   • Children learning their L1.
   • Adults learning an L2.
   • Ellipsis by proficient speakers (informal: ‘Got a light?’)
   • Innate ability to simplify by means of redundancy reduction when communication of the message is more critical than the quality of the language used.
   • Languages are simplified in similar ways because all languages have a simple register.
   • L1 children feel the pressure to conform to the adult version of the language; children of pidgin speakers did not have this possibility because there were no speakers of the non-simple register available to provide input.

Characteristics of Pidgins and Creoles

Lexis

Generally, the lexifier language comes from the dominant language, not from the native one.

A) Lengthier ways of codification (analytic means)

Analytic vs. synthetic.

TOK Pisin ‘bilong’ (belong) -> ‘of’.

• Papa bilong mi -> My father.
• Hause bilong you -> Your house.

B) Reduplication

• Partly to intensify meaning:

Tok Pisin:

• Tok -> talk.
• Toktok -> chatter.
• Look -> look.
• Looklook -> stare.

• Partly to avoid confusions resulting from homophones:

Pacific Pidgins:

• Sip -> ship.
• Sipsip -> sheep.

Atlantic Pidgins:

• Pis -> peace.
• Pispis -> urinate.

Pronunciation

Fewer sounds than those of the corresponding standard language (both in pidgins and creoles).

• Vowels: Tok Pisin has 5, most Caribbean Creole speakers have 7, while English has 12 (Gam has 17, RP has 20).
• Consonants:

a) Simplification of consonant clusters:

• friend -> fren
• Cold -> col
• Salt -> sol

b) Conflation:

Most Caribbean Creoles:

• /t/ -> /θ/
• /d/ -> /ð/
• /tʃ/ -> /ʃ/

Tok Pidgin also:

• /f/ -> /p/
• /s/ -> /ʃ/ -> /tʃ/

Result: Even allowing for the effects of reduplication, there is a much larger number of homophones.

Reduplication tries to avoid homophones, though there are plenty still.

Grammar

a) Few inflections in nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives (especially in pidgin phrases).

• Nouns are not marked for number and gender, which is a lexical category in English.
• Verbs have no tense markers.
• Pronouns are not distinguished for case: ‘me’ -> ‘I’ and ‘me’.

Tok Pisin (Melanesian): ‘we’ (including and excluding the speaker).

• ‘yumi’: you and me (inclusive we: addressee and speaker)
• ‘mepela’: me + fellow (non-inclusive we: speaker and others, but not the addressee)

• Attributive adjectives describing people and things take the suffix ‘fela’/’pela’.

• Naispela haus -> nice house.
• Gutpela meri -> good woman

b) Negation: simple negative particle, often ‘no’.

Krio (Sierra Leone)

• I no tu had -> ‘It’s not too hard’

c) Uncomplicated clause structure; no embedded clauses, e.g., relative clauses.

When they develop into creoles, four changes occur:

1. People begin to speak them much faster. Processes of reduction and assimilation occur.

• Tok Pisin: man bilong mi > mambloni ‘my husband’

2. Expansion of vocabulary:

a) New shorter words are formed alongside phrases

• Paitman – man bilong pait ‘fighter’

Eventually, the longer expression dies out.

b) Development of word-building capacity:

• Suffix ‘-im‘ for deadjectival verbs:
• Bik (big, large) -> bikim (to enlarge)
• Brait (wide) -> braitim (to widen)

c) Borrowing of technical words from standard English

3. Development of a tense system in verbs (analytically)

• ‘bin’ + verb -> past tense
• ‘bi’ + verb -> future tense

4. Development of greater sentence complexity (e.g., formation of relative clauses)

Social Function

Unlike original pidgins, extended pidgins and creoles are, or can easily become, capable of expressing all the needs of their speakers. They are used in literature, education, mass media, advertising, the Bible, etc.