Re: Creole vs. Pidgin

Daniel Seriff wrote:

> Can someone give me a definition of creoles and pidgins, and the
> differences between the two? For some reason I just can't grasp the concept
> from a short encyclopedia entry.
Well, basicly a pidgin is a new language that comes into being when
two other language communities which have no common language need
to communicate with one another for one reason or another, usually trade.

Usually one of the two languages will be the lexifier language, the one
which provides basic vocabulary (which is not to say, of course, that
the other community cannot also provide lexical items); the second of
these two will usually provide many elements of the grammar.  For
example, when English colonizers traded with the West Coast of Africa,
pidgins developed (e.g., Krio) in which English was usually the lexifier
language, while many elements of English grammar that were foreign to
the languages in that region, say, obligatory tense marking or subject-verb
agreement, were dropped in favor of more nativelike grammatical functions
(like optional marking for aspect). Usually, and more importantly, unlike
natural languages which one speaks from birth, pidgins tend to tolerate a
very high degree of variation within the language in terms of what's
grammatical and what isn't.

The critical difference between a creole and a pidgin is that a creole is
a pidgin which has gained a large enough* body of native speakers, such
as Tok Pisin in New Guinea, to become "self-actualized", so to speak.
Creolization has often been used as evidence for Chomsky's theory of
an inate, genetic faculty of language which all human beings, he says,
eventually display given the right circumstances.  This is because when
children learn the pidgin, it's been found they systematicly organize it and
add layers of structure and complexity to it, regularizing this or that feature
and perhaps doing away with some, too. Whether he's right or not is of
course a debateable question, but nonetheless the evidence is interesting.

* What that actually is depends on the social context, I would guess.

===========================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

"Things just ain't the way they used to was."
     - a man on the subway
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