Here are some thoughts on Pidgins a little more fully developed than the handout I gave in class.
Pidgins are important as the least common denominator in cross linguistic communication.
They are not like "top-down" phenomena such as obligatory foreign language instruction in schools or language policies of governments where a small group of people make decisions for the majority.
Instead they represent a "bottom-up" of people who need to communicate about practical subjects and everything that does not serve that immediate aim is jettisoned.
They are also important because cross linguistic communication using other languages are often subjected to the same process (though in greatly reduced form).
Four factors seem to be necessary to create a pidgin:
· 1. Speakers of different languages in regular or prolonged (not assimilatory) contact
· 2. A desire or need to communicate
· 3. No accessible interlanguage. This means there is no common third language and there is no need and/or desire and/or ability for one group to learn the language of the other. It can also mean one group cannot force its language on the other
· 4. Time for user base to develop and vocabulary to stabilize (to some degree)
Given these conditions pidgins arise spontaneously and easily. In some parts of the world (especially Africa) there are still pidgins emerging, especially in urban conglomerations which bring together large numbers of people with no common language.
Pidgins have a number of trains in common:
Phonological simplification:
Phonetic features such as vowel length, tone, or any other relatively rare kind of sound, (like the 'th' sounds of English or rounded front vowels of French or German) are lost and replaced with more commonly occurring sounds. There is also loss or reduction of consonant clusters.
Grammatical 'simplification'
There is a general loss of inflectional and agreement categories (such as gender, number, tense, noun classes etc). Words in Pidgins usually undergo no modification. Changes in meaning are achieved by adding more words.
There is a general replacement of inflection with analytic structures, so that 'she went' might become 'e done go' or even 'e go'.
There is a general lack of embedding. Ideas are expressed through a serious of juxtaposed short simple clauses.
Instead of "That book I bought last week is really interesting" a pidgin might express the same idea as:
"Me buy book last week. Book interesting. True."
Semantic simplification
Many areas of life unaddressed in pidgins as they do not serve anyone's full time communicative needs. Often pidgins are limited to commercial transactions. Russenorsk was in use between Norwegian and Russian fishermen for over a hundred years but was only used to discuss issues related to fishing.
Semantic categories are also coflated. Often this is done by either mapping the qualities of the human body onto inanimate objects as in 'boat nose' instead of 'prow (of a boat)' alternately human body parts might be described metaphorically as in 'grass belong head' for 'hair (on the human head)' Both these kinds of constructions seem to be based on a principle of making very limited vocabulary stretch as far as possible.
Some specific bibliographical entries on Pidgins are below the cut. Note that some of them will also apply to Creoles.
Bickerton, Derek. 2009. Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguit Finds Clues to our Common humanity in the world's lowliest languages. Macmillan.
Bickerton, Derek 1981, Roots of Language, Karoma Publishers
Hall, Robert A. (1966), Pidgin and creole languages, Ithaca: Cornell University
McWhorter, John H. (1998): Identifying the creole prototype: Vindicating a typological class, Language 74: 788-818
McWhorter, John H. (2005), Defining Creole, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Mufwene, Salikoko (1998): Creolization is a social, not a structural, process: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mufwene/mufw_creo.html
Mufwene, Salikoko (2001): Creoles, Pidgins and the Evolution of Languages: http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701718/
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