Pidgins And Creoles

So let’s talk about meetings. When we cross into different worlds, and deal with different cultures, amazing things can happen. All of us are changed by the people that we encounter, and the same goes for languages. But when we need to speak with someone who doesn’t speak the same language, that's when the real magic happens. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space. People really get around. Maybe they have stuff they want to buy and sell, or important places they want to visit. Maybe they’re seeking refuge from a war or disaster, or maybe they’re a conquering army on the search for new territory. Or maybe they just want to see what’s beyond the horizon, find some fantasy land to live in. But the odds are, when you go somewhere new, you’re going to find other people there. We’re almost unbelievably good at populating places, even if they’re really cold, really hot, or really hard to find. So what happens when you arrive somewhere and you meet a group of people who haven’t even heard of your language, let alone speak it? If you want to stick around for a while, you’re going to have to find some way to talk to each other. But where do you even start, when you don’t have any words in common? It’s not like you have magic spells to ease communications. Well, maybe you’ll start with simple gestures, or learn a few of each other’s words for things. But soon enough, if you have a community that springs up without a shared language, you’ll get a way of talking that’s woven together from the different strands that make it up. This kind of system is called a pidgin, and we’ve been creating them in these pressure-filled conditions for centuries, at least. The amazing thing is, no matter what languages go into a pidgin, there are some characteristics that they all tend to have. Because it’s got to be simple, you lose a lot of the more complicated, unusual properties of the languages that go into it. Like, think about the phonology, the sound system. Pidgins usually get the most common and straightforward set of sounds, the ones most likely to be acceptable in the different languages. So for vowels, that’s a five-vowel inventory: a, i, u, e, and o. And you want really simple syllables, so you try to avoid consonants bunching together, or letting consonants hang out after the vowel. And, although a lot of pidgins include content from tonal Asian or West African languages, they usually lose any of the tone the original languages might have had. So for a word like Brakebills, you’d change the second vowel, break up the [bɹ] and [kb] bunches, chuck the consonant at the end, and get bareki bili. Nice! Your syntax and morphology get affected, too. Pidgins usually have a subject-verb-object word order, even if the languages they draw from don’t. And, you won’t mark for things like number or gender or case, or put tense on your verbs. For example, instead of past tense and future tense, like hunted - hunt - will hunt, instead you get something like hunt yesterday, hunt, hunt tomorrow. Here, ‘yesterday’ doesn't actually mean yesterday, it just means that something happened in the past. But you don’t only shrink things down when you’re crunching together a pidgin. A lot of the time, you add in a process called reduplication, which exists in languages around the world, like Khmer, Maltese, and Warlpiri, but is not common in the languages that are being combined. It's used as a plural, like in Warlpiri, where child is kurdu, and children is kurdukurdu. Or it can be a superlative, like in Maltese, where homor is red, and homor homor is totally red. A pidgin isn’t anyone’s first language; it’s a system adult speakers stick together so that they can communicate, so at most, it's a second language. I mean, they may not even be languages at all. At least, not natural ones. In their favour, pidgins do have a set of norms about how you should use them, and differing levels of proficiency. But even though a whole community will usually learn to speak the pidgin, there’s more variability from speaker and speaker or time and time than there is in a natural language. And we just saw that pidgins aren’t complete grammars, either. They lack a lot of the complex patterns of syntax, sound, and meaning that we find in the world’s natural languages. So in a way, pidgins aren’t really languages in the way we’ve been talking about them. In fact, maybe the closest parallel we can draw is constructed languages. If you think back to our episode on constructed languages, we concluded that most of them probably aren’t languages in the strictest sense of the word. Even if you put a ton of effort into your new language, unless you’re a real wizard, it's probably not going to follow all the rules and parameters of Universal Grammar. And the same goes for pidgins. After all, in a way, pidgins are constructed languages - there might not be a single mind shepherding the language together, but it still does get crafted. Most of the pidgins we know today came into being in colonial situations. Historically, some of the most notable centers for the development of pidgins have been Pacific trade routes and Caribbean plantations. In both cases, you get exactly the right formula for linguistic innovation: people from multiple language groups who don’t understand each other but need to work together. The colonizing language - usually European - lends a lot of vocabulary to the pidgin, and the rest comes together through necessity. But even if there have been a lot of them, pidgins tend not to last for very long. They need a specific set of conditions to thrive, so if you take away the situation of contact, or you get one language becoming more popular than the others, the needs for a hybrid means of communication disappear. But sometimes, pidgins evolve. It is really cool that people come up with these ways to speak with each other. But even more amazing is what happens when new generations of kids grow up where the pidgins are spoken. We’ve already said that babies are linguistic geniuses - they come hardwired to learn language, and whatever input they get, they use it to set up their mental grammars, according to Universal Grammar, or UG. So what happens when babies are exposed to a pidgin? They regularize patterns, fill out more of the grammar, and force the pidgin to follow all the UG rules that they have. This transformative process of a pidgin becoming something new is called creolization, and the languages that come out the other side are known as creoles. And unlike pidgins, creoles are full-fledged natural languages. Let’s take the example of one of the most well-known creoles out there, Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tok Pisin started off as a pidgin. The name even means “talk pidgin”, or “pidgin language”. It arose from the intermixing of different Pacific Islander communities working on plantations in Australia and elsewhere. The main prestige language of the plantation owners was English, so English was the raw material that the original pidgin drew from. But you also have German, Portuguese, and Malay, as well as all the Austronesian languages that the workers already knew. And over the past few decades, people who learned Tok Pisin as a pidgin have been raising families using it at home. Given that Papua New Guinea alone has over 800 different language communities, having a pidgin really came in handy. So as kids have picked up Tok Pisin as their first language, it’s undergone creolization. Now, Tok Pisin has about 120,000 native speakers, as well as 4 million second language speakers. Because Tok Pisin has been documented before, during, and after its creolization, we can use it to examine some of the differences between a pidgin and a creole. So one of the traits of a pidgin is that it doesn't have embedded clauses. In older versions of Tok Pisin, if you didn't know that somebody had built a house, you might say this: “Mi no save. Ol i wokim dispela haus.” Like two separate sentences: I didn’t know. They had built this house. But today, part of the creolization of Tok Pisin involved syntactic embedding, where you put one clause and you put it inside of another. “Mi no save olsem ol i wokim dispela haus”. So now you have the word “olsem” acting a bit like “that” in I didn’t know that they had built this house. Or, if you look at the intonation patterns of pidgins, they often have a very even, flat melody to them, without much going up and down in the pitch, or lengthening or shortening of syllables. So in Tok Pisin, you used to say "we usually build houses like this" by expressing the "usually" using the verb “save”. So: “Mipela save wokim haus olsem”. But now, that verb has been reduced into the shorter form “se”, like: “Mipela se wokim haus olsem“. This short form just tacks onto the main verb of the sentence, “wokim”, and it doesn’t get stress on it, so you start getting sentences that sound more fluent and melodious. You also get things that used to be whole phrases getting boiled down into words or morphemes. Before, to express the future, you used to use the phrase “baimbai”, from the English "by and by". Now, it's been reduced to the word “bai”, as in “bai mi kam long haus“, or "I will come to the house." The discussion of creoles would not be complete without talking about Nicaraguan Sign Language. Sign languages are a rich and complex topic, and we will be returning to talk about them in much more detail. But for this particular case, the first thing that you need to know is that there wasn’t really a Deaf community in Nicaragua until the latter half of the 20th century. So when a school for deaf children was opened in the 80s, no formal sign language was taught - just lipreading and spoken Spanish. The thing is, that school had a bunch of people who didn't share a signed language, and who were spending a lot of time together. And they were as keen on communicating as you could imagine a school full of kids would be. Each of them brought in some signs and structures that they used at home, and before long, the students of this Nicaraguan school had developed a fluent signed pidgin between them. But getting a pidgin going wasn’t the end of the story. Within a few years, as the older students started teaching their system to the younger ones, their language developed into a full-on creole, with a more complex grammar and extensive vocabulary. The younger children passed this input through the filter of Universal Grammar, without even trying or knowing anything about linguistics, and another pidgin blossomed into a complete language. There are now over 3000 native signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language, and that number just keeps rising as graduates from the school spread the creole around the country. So the systems that we make when two languages crash into each other are already really interesting. We use the same kinds of strategies, simplifying our communication in the same sorts of ways, whatever the original languages are. But when kids get their brains working on the new system, whole new languages can appear, melded from the old ones. And that’s something magical. So, we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you regularized my grammatical structures, you learned that pidgins are created when different cultures with different languages meet up and need to communicate; that pidgins are simplified versions of language, with a lot of similarities in how they get boiled down; that when children acquire a pidgin as their first language, they turn it into a more complex system, a creole; and that creoles show all the hallmarks of a regular, natural, UG-compliant language. The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost, and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back to our website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And, we’ll see you next Wednesday. Na wè!