From Pidgin to Creole Language

Iwan Fauzi, M.A.iwanfauzi09@yahoo.com

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Two or more different languages

Pidgin

Creole2

What Pidgin?

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When two or more groups who do not speak the same language come into contact, their needs to communicate to one another may lead to a pidgin situation, in which one language, which is more dominant, becomes the source language.

Some pidgins have been called 'trade languages' or 'trade jargons' and have clearly arisen as the result of contact between people without a language in common who were seeking to do business with each other.

Lexical features of pidgin

1. Reduction refers to the fact that there is a simply less of a language as compared to the form in which it is spoken by native speakers: the vocabulary is smaller, there are fewer syntactic structures, and so on.

2. Admixture refers to the interference – the transfer of features of pronunciation and grammatical and semantic structure from the native language to the new language.

3. Simplification refers to the regularization of irregularities, loss of redundancy, and an increase in analytic structures and transparent forms.

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Pidginization process

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In some cases, pidginization may lead to a pidgin, e.g. in the absence of native speakers of the original language, the pidginized forms become important as a lingua franca and acquire stability with widely shared norms of usage.

A pidgin is a stable language, without native speakers, which is the outcome of pidginization processes of a source language, and where intelligibility with the source language is no longer possible.

Types of Pidgin • Maritime or Nautical Pidgins

Maritime or nautical pidgins developed as a consequence of the communication between sailors and people from other nations on board vessels or in coastal areas.

• Interethnic Contact LanguagesThese languages are used in domains such as

spreading religion, political negotiations and other procedures where people with no common language try to communicate.

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... the types• Work Force Pidgins

First, there is the sort of pidgin which developed with the contact between the colonial people and the local workers in their households.

The second type developed in multilingual work forces, for example, the Hawaiian-lexifier and English-lexifier pidgins of Hawaii or the Japanese-Malay pidgins in Australia. In these cases the pidgin simply developed due to the contact between workers from different cultural backgrounds.

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The fortune of Pidgins• Because of their limited function, pidgin languages

usually do not last for very long —sometimes for only a few years, and rarely for more than a century. They die when the original reason for communication diminishes or disappears, as communities move apart, or one community learns the language of another. (Alternatively, the pidgin may develop into a creole).

• E.g., The pidgin French which was used in Vietnam all but disappear when the French left; similarly, the pidgin English which appeared during the American Vietnam campaign virtually disappeared as soon as the war was over. 8

What Creole?Creoles are languages which, originally having been pidgins, have become established as a mother tongue in some speech communities.

Normally, creoles co-exist with the standard language that was originally pidginised.

New creoles do not have an established library of written language and so are often influenced by the standard, which is why they tend to change frequently and rapidly. 9

How become Creole?

First

• Within a community, increasing numbers of people begin to use pidgin as their principal means of communication.

Then

• their children hear it more than any other language, and gradually it takes on the status of a mother tongue for them. Within a generation or two, native language use becomes consolidated and widespread. The result is a creole, or ‘creolized’ language. 10

Creolization process

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A creole is a pidgin which has acquired native speakers and has undergone non-contact-induced expansion, where the expansion process repairs the results of the reduction process which occurred during pidginization.

Creolization occurs when the expansion is non-contact-induced. The outcome is a creole.

Types of Creole• Plantation Creoles

the Plantation Creole, is self explanatory - these creoles developed in the plantation fields of certain countries such as Cuba, Jamaica, etc.

• Fort CreolesFort Creoles developed at the so-called 'forts', the

fortified posts along the West African coast, from which the Europeans deployed their commercial activities. In the forts some medium of communi-cation must have been used, both among Africans from different linguistic backgrounds and between Africans and Europeans.

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... the types• Javanese Creoles

the Javanese Creoles, developed as a result of send for workers by the Dutch colonial to Suriname. Workers finally lived there till now and never returned back to their homeland. Such communities arose in Suriname and used Javanese creole to communicate among them.

• Portuguese Creolesthe Portuguese Creoles, developed as a result of

colonialization around 17th century in Indonesia. Today we may find in Kampoong Tugu of the Northern Jakarta.

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Example of CreolesAmerican businesses established plantations in Hawaii in the late 1800s, staffing them with Portuguese foremen and workers from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. The first generation of workers spoke a pidgin English with little grammar, as in:

Gud, dis wan. Kaukau enikain dis wan. Pilipin ailaen no gud. No mo mani.

money [to buy food with].”People often used word order according to their native language. 14

Another example:The children born to these workers in Hawaii streamlined and expanded the pidgin into a creole English, with the same rules used by all speakers whatever the language they were using at home. This creole is now the casual language of Hawaii, spoken by people of various ancestries:• dei bai they buy• dei bin bai they bought• dei stay bai they are buying• dei go bai they will buy• dei bin stay bai they were buying• dei go stei bai they will be buying

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Relation of creole, language, and dialect• A language shades into dialects or into creoles. A creole

usually is made up of two languages while a dialect is the variant of a language.

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Language Dialect 1 Dialect 2

• L-A• L-B

Langu-ages CL-ACreo

-les• D-A• D-B

Dialect

Final words• Pidgin is a process to produce a standard

language (Creole). • Pidgin’s occurred when there is no standard

language initiated between two or more different language. Or, it might be said pidgin is a lingua franca among them.

• Creole is a language produced from pidgin and it has native speakers which are occurred not from induced-speaker contact, but it is more inherited through generation. 17

Thank you

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