Pidgins and creoles

1. Pidgins and creoles “There are English-based languages whichdepartradically from the standardtypes, namely pidgins and creoles”

2. A pidgin is an auxiliary language used in the first place for the purposes of trade between groups that have no common language. It thus arises when two or more languages are in contact, and is a simplified form of the dominant one, with influence from the other(s). • It sometimes happens that a pidgin becomes the first language of a group. The language is the called a creole.

3. Characteristics • In English-based pidgins, the main features taken over into the pidgin are lexical: the new language system draws on English for vocabulary but only minimaly for phonology and hardly at all for grammar. • A pidgin tends to preserve the absolutely minimal grammatical structures needed for effective communication, and reduces redundancy to almost nil. These characteristics make English-based pidgin to be considered a different language and not a dialect.

4. The gratsimplification of pidgin-creole lstructures as compared with the donor language is seen in both phonology and grammar: • The number of phonemes is usually reduced: e.g. in Jamaican creole, the same vowel is used in block and black /blak/ • Among the consonants / / and / / are replaced by /t/ and /d/: e.g. in Jamaican creole thin is /tin/and father is /fa:da/ • There is a tendency to simplify consonant-clusters: in Jamaican creole, the final consonant is dropped from such words as act, bend, left

5. Nouns and verbs commonly have only one form. There is no distinction between singular and plural. The same verb form is used throughout the present tense • Tenses and aspects are shown either by adverbs or special particles placed before or after the verb: e.g. West African pidgin i bin kam “he came” • A single form like i is often found for he, she and it • Negation is achieved without the auxiliary “do”: e.g. wi no sabi

6. Interrogation is achieved simply by intonation. • Pidgins and creoles lack inflections and rely on free morphemes to indicate grammatical relations. • Some words are used with new meanings like West African chop “to eat” • A common device is reduplication or repetition: e.g. in Jamaican creole smalsmal means “very small” • Pidgins tend to use a small number of prepositions.