Pidgins and Creoles

Pidgin and creole languages develop under situations of language contact.

A third language or lingua franca can also be used in contact situations.

Contact situations differ in terms of the prestige or power of the language speakers.

Where the speakers of the two languages have equal prestige, their languages are in an adstratal relationship.

Where speakers of the two languages have unequal prestige, the language of the dominant group is the superstratum language while the language of the group with less prestige is the substratum language.

One of the most striking characteristics of a pidgin is its limited vocabulary and morphology.

Despite such limitations, pidgins display the core generative features of human language.

Chinook Jargon developed among the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

It can be difficult to identify the source of the grammatical features in pidgin languages.

Superstratum languages usually serve as the lexifier.

Morphological and syntactic features may derive from the substratum language.

The nativization process distinguishes pidgins and creoles.

Type 1 creole languages emerged from unstable, rudimentary jargons.

The language acquisition process may be responsible for the grammatical features that are found in the widely dispersed Type 1 creole languages.

An alternative explanation would be that these features are due to a common linguistic tradition shared by the managers of the plantations in these different settings.

This week’s lecture notes