Pidgin and Creole Languages

What is Lingua Franca?

- Can be defined as:
“a language which is used habitually by
people whose mother tongues are different in
order to facilitate communication between
them”
For example: In Malaysia -
Bahasa Malaysia – lingua franca – a language
of communication between people whose first
languages differ
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Other terms that are used to refer to lingua
francas:
(a) a trade language

(Swahili in East Africa)

(b) a contact language
(Greek Koine in ancient world)
(c) an international language
(English)
(d) An auxiliary language
(Esperanto)

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English – lingua franca:
- Spoken in many countries – a native language
- Second language in other countries (India, the
Philippines and Singapore) used extensively
- Spoken in many ways and at many levels of
proficiency
Other languages – lingua franca:
(a) Russian – Former USSR states
(b) Classical Arabic – Arab world
(c) Swahili – East Africa and Tanzania
(d) Chinook Jargon (American Indians) – Northwest of
the US, British Colombia and Alaska (19th Century)

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Lingua Franca – initially developed as a trade
language
For example:
(a) Swahili

(b) Hausa

(c) Tok Pisin (which is now developed into a

Creole)

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Pidgins
- a new language which develops in situations

where the speakers of different languages

need to communicate but don’t share a
common language

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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

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(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

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Life span of Pidgin
- 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

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Example of Pidgin:
Tok Pisin
- Dialect of Melanesian Pidgin

- Spoken more than 2.5 million PNG

- Used in the broadcast, print media and

parliamentary debate
- Expanded pidgin

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Vocabulary
 English is the lexifier language of Tok Pisin

 Most words – English

 Often pronounced in a different way and

meanings
For example:
‘spak (spark)’ means drunk
‘baksait’ (backside) refers to someone’s back,
not their butt

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 Words have a meaning much wider than
English
For example:
a) ‘kilim (from kill him)’ – multiple meanings:
hit, beat or kill
b) ‘gras (from grass)’ : means not only grass but
also hair, fur and feathers
 Some combinations of words have different
meanings:
For example:
‘bel hevi’ (from belly heavy) means sad

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 Includes words from other languages too
For example:
 From Tolai (PNG language)

Lapun – old
Palai – lizard
 From Malay

Binatang – insect
Sayor – leafy vegetable
 From German and Portuguese too

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Grammar
Is TP just simplified English?
 at first glance yes

 Don’t have to add an ‘s’ to show plural

 wanpela pisin – one bird
 tripela pisin – three birds
 Don’t have to add ‘ing’ or ‘ed’ to show tense
 Mi wok nau – I’m working now
 Mi wok asde – I worked yesterday

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 The word ‘em’ can mean : ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘she’,
‘her’ or it (depending on the context)

For example:
 Em i stap long haus – He’s / She’s in the house
 Em i lukim mi – He / She / It saw me
 Mi lukim em – I saw him / her / it.

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 TP – own grammatical rules

For example:
 Mi wok – I worked
 Yu wok – You worked
 Em i wok – He / She worked
 Tom i wok – Tom worked

 Note the last two sentences have the little ‘i’

before the verb

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 The little word ‘i’ – ‘predicate marker’
 Must occur in a sentence when the subject is

‘em’ or a noun (like ‘Tom’ or ‘the bicycle’)

 To show plural, the word ‘ol’ is used instead

of ‘s’
For example:
 Mi lukim dok – I saw the dog
 Mi lukim ol dok – I saw the dogs

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In conclusion, Pidgin :
 is not baby talk

 is not a product of laziness

 not a language which is corrupted / broken

down
 has their own rules of use and usage

 has own structures – adapted from other

languages
 needs to be learnt just like other languages

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Creole
What is Creole?
 When children start learning a pidgin as their

first language, it becomes the mother tongue

of a community = creole
 Like a pidgin, a creole is a distinct language –

vocabulary taken from another language, the

lexifier but has own unique grammar rules

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 Most creoles – employed by descendants of
African slaves in America and the Caribbean
 Have fulfilled functions – more elaborated
usage (for education, parliament, government
documents)
 Status lifted as national language / official
language
For example:
 Tok Pisin – PNG official language / lingua franca
 Bahasa Indonesia – developed from Malay pidgin

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Examples of Creole:
 Hawaii Creole English (HCE) – locally known

as ‘Pidgin’
 Spoken by at least 600 000 people in the US

(Hawaii)
 An important marker of local identity

 Used widely in literature

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Vocabulary

 English is the lexifier – most words come from English

 Pronounced differently
 Some may have different meanings
For example:
‘beef’ means fight
 Some combinations of words different meanings
For example:
‘stink eye’ means dirty look
‘chicken skin’ means ‘goose bumps’
 HCE includes words from other languages too
Japanese ‘obake’ – ghost
Portuguese ‘malasada’ - doughnut

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Grammar
 has a system of signal tenses
 needs to add ‘bin’ to show past tense
 the suffix ‘-bad’ to indicate the
progressive
For example:
i) Im megim he makes present tense
ii) Im bin megim he made past tense
iii) Im megimbad he is making present prog
iv) Im bin mengimbad he was making past prog

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 no morpho phonemic variation
For example in English: space, spacious
electric, electricity and sign, signature
 Sentences giving location use the word ‘ste’ (stay)
For example:
Da kaet ste in da haus (The cat is in the house)
 The word ‘get’ is used for ‘there is/are’
For example:
Get tu mach turis naudeiz (There are too many tourists
nowadays)
 ‘Haed’ (Had) is used for ‘there was/were’
For example:
Haed dis ol grin haus (There was this old house)

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 Pidgins Creoles
 have no native speakers  have native speakers

 Are the result of extended  develop from pidgins, they are

contact between groups with no learnt as a first language by a
language in common, they are large number of speakers
used mostly for trade
 are more complex in structure,
 Have simple grammatical they also have a wider range of
structures vocabulary to express a wide
range of meanings
 Are not used for group
identification  may take on national and
official functions

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Diglossia
 Defined – relatively stable language situation where
primary dialects exist alongside a divergent and very
highly codified variety
 Happens when a society has 2 distinct language
codes with a very clear functional separation
For example:
Classical Arabic (high variety) and the various
colloquial varieties (low variety).
Classical Arabic – language of the Quran and not for
ordinary conversation
Colloquial variety – ordinary everyday social chores
and functions

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How a diglossic situation happens
Society

Language Language
Code 1 Code 2

Separation of language functions

Occurrence of diglossic situation

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Characteristics of Diglossia

 More complex grammatical structure

 Has a respected body of written literature
 formally learned and used for formal written /
spoken purposes
 Both high and low varieties – different
functions

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High varieties
 Used formal lectures and delivering sermons and

literature
 Perceived more prestigious variety

 Taught in formal setting

 Technical terms used: conservation, psychometric

Low varieties
 Used for giving directions

 In conversations

 Children learn

 Simpler terms used: saucepan, shoe

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Variables that influence style:
a) Addressee
b) Social class
c) Context and social roles
d) Ethnics Groups
Register
– speech related to a certain specialty
- concerns with how we use language to express
our social identity and social competence
For example:
Sports commentators, the language of pilots, court
room and classroom financiers, disc jockeys

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Registers – language of groups of people with common
interests / jobs
- language used in situations associated with such
groups
For example: Sports announcer talk
Cooley – steaming in now – bowls to Karim again –
stroking it out into the covers – just thinking about a
single – Dinesh stuttering steps down the wicket from
the bowler’s end.
Language used – distinguishable from other contexts

Vocabulary - obvious distinguishing feature

Terms : related to cricket
silly mid on, square leg, the covers – describe positions
Off-break, googly, and leg break – describe deliveries

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Grammar – distinctive
Sports announcers uses – ‘play-by-play’
description
- Focus on action

- Involves features such as :

(i) syntactic reduction

(ii) inversion of normal word order in
sentences
(iii) heavy noun modification
(iv) routines and formulas

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(i) Syntactic reduction
(b) [It] bounced to second base
(c) [It’s] a breaking ball outside
(d) Karim [is] in difficulty
(e) [He’s a] guy who’s a pressure player

Sports announcers :
(i) Omit the subject noun or pronoun (a)
(ii) Omit the verb ‘be’ (b) and (d)
(iii) Omit only ‘be’ (d)
However – meaning is not loss
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(ii) Syntactic inversion
(a) In comes Hassan

(b) And all set again is Pat Haden

(c) On deck is big Peter Lim

Reversal / inversion
– another feature of sports announcer talk
- Allows the announcer to focus on the action
- Provides him/her time to identify the subject of the action

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(iii) Heavy noun modification
(a) This much sought-after and very expensive
footballer
(b) First class referee David Foreman

(c) Clark, the new Chelsea skipper and a player

worth every pound they paid for him
Sports announcers – focus on the people instead of
the action
- Heavily modified before the noun (a) and (b) or
after the noun (c).

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(iv) Routines and Formulas
(a) A very good morning to our principal (name),
teachers and friends. First of all I would like to
thank (name) for giving me this opportunity to
speak today. The topic of my speech today is
(title)
(b) A very good afternoon to the adjudicators, the
opposition team, ladies and gentlemen. We, the
government, firmly believe that (title).
Before I proceed any further, please allow me to
define the word (word) Therefore, based on our
definition, we, the government, firmly believes that
the motion of today, (title)

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Routines and Formulas enable :
(a) give the impression of fluency
(b) to convey information with minimal demand on short
term memory
(c) retain the listener’s interest and convey the drama of
the event

In short, the use of specialised registers:

(a) Develop the desire – quick, efficient and precise
communication
(b) Express shared meanings concisely and precisely
(c) Language to develop more and more characteristics
– lexical, syntactic and phonological

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JARGON
 A specialized terminology or set of words used by a certain
groups of people
 Refers to speech related to a certain specialty
 It can be considered a slang (‘awek’) or technical (‘tetikus’) –
depending on the status of the users
 Used for clarity of communication or group identification
 Used extensively by professionals & social groups which resulted
in the existence of technical dictionaries
 Spreads from narrow group (original users) until it is understood
& accepted by the mass
 Sometimes these terms do not last long – die
 Speakers do not use them
 Many jargons pass into standard language

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