What Are Pidgins and Creoles? Languages Built From Scratch in a Generation

A pidgin is a contact language with no native speakers: everyone who uses it has another first language, and the pidgin is a reduced tool for a limited purpose. It typically draws most of its vocabulary from one language, usually the socially dominant one, called the lexifier, while its structure owes more to the others. A creole is what a pidgin becomes when a community of children acquires it as a first language, at which point it expands enormously: the vocabulary grows, a consistent grammatical system appears, and speakers can do everything with it that anyone does with any language. The distinction is about sociolinguistic status rather than about quality, and it is not always sharp, since some varieties sit between the two and some creoles appear to have formed without a clearly identifiable pidgin stage.

The features are remarkably consistent across unrelated cases, which is the first clue that something systematic is happening:

• •A small vocabulary, often a few hundred words, with heavy use of compounds and circumlocution, so that a single word may cover a wide semantic range
• •Little or no inflection, so verbs and nouns do not change form for tense, number or case
• •Simple, mostly fixed word order, with relationships expressed by position and by separate words rather than by endings
• •Few or no subordinate clauses, so complex ideas are strung together rather than embedded
• •Meaning carried substantially by context and shared situation, which works for trade and fails for anything else
• •No native speakers, which means nobody has the intuitions that let a speaker judge whether a novel sentence is acceptable

The expansion is rapid and it goes beyond simply adding words. Creoles develop a consistent system of markers preceding the verb for tense, modality and aspect, in a strikingly similar order across creoles with entirely different lexifiers and geographical origins. They develop relative clauses, embedding, articles, a settled pronoun system and productive word formation. They develop the fine distinctions of meaning that a full language requires, and they acquire native speaker intuitions, so that speakers agree about what is and is not grammatical. Where this comes from is the central theoretical question. Derek Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis proposed that children confronted with impoverished input fall back on innate grammatical defaults, which would explain the cross-creole similarities and would be strong evidence for a universal grammar. Critics have argued that the similarities are better explained by the substrate languages of the original speakers, by the gradual nature of the process in many documented cases, and by the fact that the historical evidence is thinner than the hypothesis assumes, and the argument continues.

The history is overwhelmingly one of trade and coercion. The Atlantic creoles, including Haitian, Jamaican Patois, Gullah, Papiamento and Sranan Tongo, arose on plantations where enslaved people from many different language communities were deliberately mixed to prevent organisation, with lexifiers drawn from French, English, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish. Pacific varieties including Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Bislama in Vanuatu grew from plantation and trade contact in the nineteenth century, and Tok Pisin is now an official language with a parliament, newspapers and a translated Bible. Chinook Jargon served trade across the Pacific Northwest, Russenorsk linked Russian and Norwegian fishermen in the Arctic, and Lingua Franca, the Mediterranean trade pidgin that gave the phrase its name, operated for centuries. Nicaraguan Sign Language, which emerged among deaf children brought together in schools from the late 1970s, went through the same transition in full view of linguists, with the first cohort producing a rough system and the next turning it into a grammatically consistent language.

These languages are routinely described, including by their own speakers, as broken or bad versions of their lexifier, which is linguistically false and socially consequential. A creole is a separate language with its own grammar, not a degraded form of English or French, and the resemblance of vocabulary conceals the difference, which is why speakers of the lexifier assume they understand more than they do. The practical effects are in education and in law, since children taught in a language that is not theirs, and told that the one they speak is a mistake, do measurably worse, and a defendant who is assumed to understand a courtroom may not. Some communities have pushed successfully for recognition: Haitian Creole became an official language of Haiti in 1987, Papiamento is official in Aruba and Curacao, and Tok Pisin is official in Papua New Guinea. The linguistic point, made since the 1960s and still not widely absorbed, is that a language with a few hundred years of history is not less of a language than one with two thousand.

A pidgin is a simplified contact language with no native speakers, characterised across unrelated cases by a small vocabulary, no inflection, fixed word order and reliance on context. When children acquire it as a first language it becomes a creole, expanding within a generation into a full language with consistent pre-verbal tense and aspect markers, embedding and native intuitions, and the striking similarities between creoles are argued to reflect either innate defaults or the languages of the original speakers. Most arose from trade and from plantation slavery, and they are widely and wrongly treated as broken speech.