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Pidgins and Creoles

Pidgins and Creoles. ‘Pidgin’. from Chinese pronunciation of business - or from Portuguese ocupacao business, and pequeno small (baby talk), or Hebrew pidjom barter

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Pidgins and Creoles

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  1. Pidgins and Creoles

  2. ‘Pidgin’ • from Chinese pronunciation of business - or from Portuguese ocupacao business, and pequeno small (baby talk), or Hebrew pidjom barter • a contact language that draws on elements from 2 or more languages; a hybrid makeshift language used by and among traders, on plantations (with slaves) and between Europeans and indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa, Americas (17th-20th cc.) • often used pejoratively (‘pidgin English’: childish, corrupt, lazy, inferior, oversimplified, simple-minded) - extended (pidgin Latin, pidgin Marxism) • basic difference with a Creole: it's a learned language, not a native one • features: small vocabulary (a few hundred or thousand words; English has maybe a million) - mostly drawn from the superstrate language

  3. • reduction of grammatical features, such as inflectional morphology: • Tok Pisin (pidgin of Papua New Guinea): mi kam (I come, I am coming, I came) wanpela haus (house) tupela haus (two houses) • grammar influenced by substrate language(s) - lack of grammatical complexity - no redundancy - e.g., English one man comes, six men come - singular and plural are marked in both noun and modifier, and concord is shown in both noun and verb • TP wanpela man I kam, sikspela man I kam • thus, depends heavily on context - little or no inflectional morphology

  4. • English marks possession: John’s house • TP haus bilong John (from English ‘belong’ - shifts from a verb to a preposition) • multifunctionality: same word functions in many ways • English ill (adjective), illness (noun) • TP mi sik (I am sick), Em I gat sik malaria (I have malaria) • circumlocution: English branch, TP han bilong diwai (‘hand belonging to tree’)

  5. Creoles • from Latin creare (to create), Portuguese criar (to nurse, breed) • Portuguese, Spanish and French colonies in the New World: a noun from this word meant ‘a person or animal born in the home’ (Fr. creole) • Caribbean usage in 17th-18th centuries, creole meant: A local descendant of European settlers (white creole, creole white) Descendant of African slaves (Negro creole, creole Negro) A mixture of both, usually capitalized (the local Creoles, the local Creole population) • extended to Louisiana

  6. • late 19th century, creole extended to languages throughout colonial and postcolonial tropics, all over the world (Americas, Australasia, Indian Ocean, elsewhere) • French Creole, Creole French (Martinique, Mauritius) • English Creole, Creole English (Belize, Jamaica) • Roper River Creole (Australia) • Hawaii Creole English (Pacific) • people of any background in a place where a creole is used are likely to speak, whether or not it is their mother tongue • creoles are acquired as a first language by children • speech becomes faster, vocabulary increaes, development of tenses increases, development of relative clauses increases • for more on pidgins and creoles, see http://logos.uoregon.edu/explore/socioling/pidgin.html

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