Contact Languages

Chapter 6 looked at people who already share two languages. Here the starting point is different: people with no shared language who need to talk anyway, or bilinguals who build something new from both of their languages. The outcomes are pidgins, creoles and mixed languages. Historical Linguistics and Language Families 6 and 9 met creoles from the family-tree side; this chapter asks who the speakers are and what the language does for them.

Pidgins

Wikipedia's Pidgin article defines a pidgin as a "grammatically simplified form of contact language" arising between groups with no shared language. Its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is used mainly for trade, or where the groups' languages differ from the national language. It is "not the native language of any singular speech community", though it can be learned as a second language.

• What it needs. The article says development usually needs prolonged, regular contact, a need to communicate, and no widely shared interlanguage. Keith Whinnom suggests three languages are involved, with one (the superstrate) clearly dominant.
• Not "broken". Pidgins were historically seen as unsophisticated forms of their lexifier languages and carry low prestige. The article counters that each pidgin has norms of usage that must be learned.
• Examples named. Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), Nigerian Pidgin, Chinese Pidgin English (the term "pidgin" was first applied to it), Bislama, Cameroonian Pidgin English, and Chinook Jargon (classed as a "jargon"). Tok Pisin and Nigerian Pidgin are marked as creolized.
• Trade pidgins can grow. The article says trade pidgins can grow into full languages, with Swahili as its example.

Creoles

The Creole language article defines a creole as "a stable form of contact language" that arises when languages simplify and mix into a new form, which then expands into a full language with native speakers in a fairly brief period. Three features "distinguish a creole language from a pidgin": a consistent grammatical system, large stable vocabularies, and acquisition by children as a native language.

Most linguists hold that a creole forms when children learn a pidgin as their first language (nativization). The sources are careful: not all pidgins become creoles, and Salikoko Mufwene argues pidgins and creoles can arise independently, so a pidgin need not always come first.

Case study: Tok Pisin

• Origin. It grew from a pidgin that developed when colonial authorities "forced people speaking numerous different languages to work on plantations", particularly during blackbirding. Most of its vocabulary came from English, with input from German, Malay, Portuguese and Austronesian languages. (The Pidgin article does not itself mention plantations; the Tok Pisin article does.)
• Status. Along with English and Hiri Motu it is one of Papua New Guinea's three official languages. It is "frequently the language of debate in the national parliament". English is the main language of education, though some schools use Tok Pisin in the first three years "to promote early literacy". Government documents are mostly in English.
• Speakers. The infobox lists 130,000 native speakers and 4,000,000 second-language speakers; the text estimates five to six million use it to some degree. It has "increasingly overtaken Hiri Motu as the dominant lingua franca among town-dwellers", and many urban families raise children in it.
• Side effect. The article says it is slowly "crowding out" other languages of Papua New Guinea. (That page was read only to its first 100,000 characters.)
• Sample. Em i slip i stap: "He/she is sleeping." Em i lusim bot pinis: "He had got out of the boat." (free translations from the page)

Case study: Jamaican Patois

• An English-based creole with substantial West African influence (also called Jamaican Creole). Ethnologue's figure of 3.2 million native speakers (2000–2001) is cited, and the article says most Jamaicans speak it as a first language.
• A continuum. The article describes an acrolect (closest to English), a mesolect (intermediate) and a basilect (most divergent rural varieties), which cannot always be told apart. A speaker's position on the continuum generally corresponds to social context. This is Chapter 4's style-shifting, along a creole's own range.
• Stigma. Creoles are "often stigmatised as low-prestige languages" even when they are the mother tongue of most of the population, and Standard English remains the more prestigious literary medium.
• Standardising. The Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies was set up in 2002; its aim is to support non-English-speaking Jamaicans, since state services are normally in English. It standardised the alphabet now known as the Cassidy/JLU orthography.
• Glossed examples. Mi run: "I run" (habitually), or "I ran". Mi a run: "I am running". Mi did run: "I have run" or "I had run". Dem a fight fi wi: "They are fighting for us".

Decreolization and Attitudes

Because creoles rarely attain official status, speakers may conform their speech to a parent language. The article calls this decreolization, typically producing a "post-creole speech continuum" marked by "large-scale variation and hypercorrection" (compare hypercorrection in Chapter 5). Creoles were long seen in popular opinion as "degenerate variants or dialects" of their parent languages, and many were stigmatized and became extinct. Since decolonization some have been standardized and are used in local schools and universities, and "some creoles have even been granted the status of official or semi-official languages of particular territories". The article also says the historical negative connotation of "creole" is mirrored in the use of the word "ebonics" for African-American Vernacular English.

Mixed Languages

A mixed language is "a type of contact language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages". Unlike pidgins and creoles, it "typically arises in a population that is fluent in both of the source languages". It differs from code-switching (Chapter 6) in that its fusion is fixed in grammar and vocabulary, though linguists think mixed languages often evolve from persistent code-switching.

• Identity. Some scholars propose Michif "emerged as a need to symbolize a new social identity"; Muysken links Media Lengua to "ethnic self-identification"; the page suggests Mednyj Aleut may reflect the community's new group identity. Bakker's account of Michif (paraphrased on the page): children of European men and Cree, Nakota and Ojibwe women learned a mix of French and Cree.
• Not Anglo-Romani. The page does not count it as a mixed language; it describes it as a register of English with many Romani loanwords.
• Disputed. Many linguists reject the category: some argue it would threaten the comparative method, others that all languages mix to some degree.

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