PIDGIN AND CREOLE LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

One of some factors in sociolinguistics that makes language becomes interesting to be investigated is the contact of the people in certain community. The outcome of this contact result new languages, those are Pidgin and Creole language. These languages are spoken between people who do not speak each other’s language. When they meet for different aims (trade, plantation work, business) they immediately look for a quick means of communication. These two languages have their own characteristics that are able to be used to distinguish between them. A pidgin is a reduced language resulting from contact between groups with no common language, while a Creole is a pidgin or jargon that has become the native language of an entire speech community, often as a result of slavery or other population displacements. In,Keywords: language contact, Pidgin, Creole

INTRODUCTION

Primarily, Pidgins and creoles are used in third world nation, occurred in

response to changes in the political and social environment of the community where

they are spoken in. Today, over one hundred pidgins and creoles are spoken around

the world. Actually, most pidgins and creoles are based on European languages,

primarily on English, Spanish and French.

Pidgin

Pidgins often serve as the means of communication between two language

groups. For example, they are often used between immigrants and locals or

missionaries and natives in order to be understood by each other without having to

learn the language of the other group.

The language on which the majority of the lexicon is based is called the base

(usually the European language). The language on which the grammatical structure is

based is called the substrate. In a pidgin, gender and case as well as other elements of

language are often dropped from the base European language. The phonology is

extremely unstable and changes often. Characteristics of a pidgin vary tremendously

from speaker to speaker. Anything can be said in pidgin that can be said in any other

language, but at a great disadvantage, because the pidgin language lacks the building

blocks provided in other native languages for successful communication. For

example, articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and subordinate clauses are often

absent or sporadic in pidgin. Pidgin sentences are often little more than strings of

nouns, verbs and adjectives. Although the substance of the idea gets across, many of

the details and contextual information gets lost in the pidgin version.

From the introduction above, we can say that Pidgin is a new language which

develops in situations where the speakers of different languages need to communicate

but don’t share a common language. Pidgin has the following seven qualities:

a. No native speakers – no one’s native language. Yet spoken by millions as

means of communication

b. A product of multilingual – 3 languages – one is dominant. The dominant

language superior (economical or social factor). Two languages involved

a power struggle for dominance

c. Combined effort of speakers (different language) contribute to a new

variety phonology, morphology and syntax)

d. The dominant group –more vocabulary (lexifier –superstrate) while the less

dominant languages –grammar (substrate)

e. Reduced grammatical structure, limited vocabulary and a narrow range of

functions –does not have inflections to mark plural.tenses, - does not contain

any affixes

f. Main function –trading

g. Not used as a means of group identification

The pidgin language that spoken by a certain people in a certain place or area,

has it life span to be indicated:

- Short –limited function

- Exists for several years – rarely more than a century

- Remains if the need exists

For example

In Vietnam: Pidgin French disappeared – French left; used for trading –

disappear when trading between the group members comes to an end

Here is the example of Pidgin:

Nigerian Pidgin in Nigeria

Bislama in Vanuatu

Tok Pisin in PNG

Chinese Pidgin English in China

Solomon Island pidgin English in Solomon Island

Creole

It is from Latin creare, meaning "to beget" or "create". The term was coined

in the sixteenth century during the great expansion in European maritime power and

trade and the establishment of European colonies in the Americas, Africa, and along

the coast of South and Southeast Asia up to the Philippines, China, India, and in

Oceania . Originally, therefore, "Creole language" meant the speech of those Creole

peoples. A stable language that originates seemingly as a nativized pidgin. When

children start learning a pidgin as their first language and it becomes the mother

tongue of a community, it is called a Creole. Like a pidgin, a Creole is a distinct

language which has taken most of its vocabulary from another language, the lexifier,

but has its own unique grammatical rules.

Presumably, between six and twelve million people still using pidgin

languages and between ten and seventeen using descendents from pidgins. Unlike a

pidgin, however, a Creole is not restricted in use, and is like any other language in its

full range of functions. Creoles have certain grammatical similarities to each other

and, arguably, not languages that they are derived from. Creoles exhibit more

internal variability than other languages. Creoles are simpler than other languages.

Creole languages have generally been regarded as degenerate, or at best as

rudimentary dialects of one of their parent languages. "Creole" has come to be used

in opposition to "language" rather than a qualifier for it, for example, Gullah,

Jamaican Creole and Hawai`i Creole English. 'Pidgin' and 'Creole' are technical

terms used by linguists, and not necessarily by speakers of the language. For

example, speakers of Jamaican Creole call their language 'Patwa' (from patois) and

speakers of Hawai’i Creole English call theirs 'Pidgin'.

There are some Creole Languages around the words:

Aku in Gambia,

Krio in Siera Leone,

Kru Englsih in Liberia

Kamtok in Cameroon

Bajan in Barbados

Creolese in Guyana

Miskito Coast Creole in Nicaragua

Sranan in Surinam

Trinbagonia in Trinidad and Tobago

Bislama in Vanutu

Broken in Torres Straits

Hawaii Creole English in Hawaii

Theories to describe Creole phenomenon:

1. The monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles A single origin for these

languages, deriving them through relexification from a West African Pidgin

Portuguese of the 17th century and ultimately from the Lingua franca of the

Mediterranean. Originally formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th

century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Douglas Taylor as

well as in Whinnom (1956 ), Thompson (1961) and Stewart (1962).

2. European dialect origin hypotheses The French creoles are the foremost

candidates to being the outcome of "normal" linguistic change creoleness to be

sociohistoric in nature and relative to their colonial origin though.

3. The Domestic Origin Hypothesis Proposed by Hancock (1985) for the

development of a local form of English in West Africa. Towards the end of the

16th century, English-speaking traders began to settle in the Gambia and Sierra

Leone rivers as well as in neighboring areas such as the Bullom and Sherbro

coasts. These settlers intermarried with the local population leading to mixed

populations and as a result of this intermarriage, an English pidgin was created,

which in turn was learned by slaves in slave depots, who later on took it to the

West Indies and formed one component of the emerging English Creoles.

4. Foreigner talk or baby talk A pidgin or Creole language forms when native

speakers attempt to simplify their language in order to address speakers who do

not know their language at all. Because of the similarities found in this type of

speech and the speech which is usually directed at children.

One class of creoles might start as pidgins, rudimentary second languages

improvised for use between speakers of two or more non-intelligible native

languages. Keith Whinnom (in Hymes (1971 )) suggests that pidgins need three

languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others.

The lexicon of a pidgin is usually small and drawn from the vocabularies of its

speakers, in varying proportions. Morphological details like word inflections, which

usually take years to learn, are omitted; the syntax is kept very simple, usually based

on strict word order. In this initial stage, all aspects of the speech — syntax, lexicon,

and pronunciation —tend to be quite variable, especially with regard to the speaker's

background. If a pidgin manages to be learned by the children of a community as a

native language, it may become fixed and acquire a more complex grammar, with

fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. Pidgins can become

full languages in only a single generation. "Creolization" is this second stage where

the pidgin language develops into a fully developed native language. The

vocabulary, too, will contain more and more words according to a rational and stable

system.

Universalist models stress the intervention of specific general processes

during the transmission of language from generation to generation and from speaker

to speaker. The process invoked varies: a general tendency towards semantic

transparency, first language learning driven by universal process, or general process

of discourse organization. Creoles are inventions of the children growing up on

newly founded plantations. Around them, they only heard pidgins spoken, without

enough structure to function as natural languages. The children used their own innate

linguistic capacities to transform the pidgin input into a full-fledged language.

CONCLUSION

Those languages, Pidgin and Creole, are often considered simplified

languages uncounciously born from a practical situation of interlinguistis

communication. They have their own characteristics that make them to be unique to

be investigated and learnt. By comparing them, we will perhaps finds some

information that useful for language development.

PIDGIN CREOLE

1. Have no native speakers

2. Are the results of extended contact

between groups with no language in

common, they are used mostly for

trade

3. Have simple grammatical structures

4. Are not used for group identification

1. Have native speakers

2. develop from pidgins, they are learnt as

a first language by a large number of

speakers

3. Are more complex in structure, they

also have a wider range of vocabulary to

express a wide range of meanings

4. may take on national and official

functions

REFERENCES

Knapik, Aleksandra.2009.On the Origin of Pidgin and Creole: An Outline. Taken www.journals.univ.danubius.ro.pdf

Sebba, Mark. 2010. Review of Deconstructing Creole Edited by Umberto Ansaldo, Stephen Matthews, and Lisa Lim. John Benjamins Publishing Company 2007 taken from www.hku.hk.pdf

Winford, Donald.2007.Some Issues in the Study of Language Contact. Taken from JLC_THEMA_1_2007_01Winford.Pdf