Page created in collaboration with Michel Launey & Alain Kihm, 2009.
 

A pidgin language is an idiom developed among speakers of very different or remote languages (as opposed to a koine language) in the aim to ease exchange between them. Most of the time the vocabulary of a pidgin language is essentially drawn from on the languages already present (Chinese Pidgin English, for example, spoken over all of the 19th century between Chinese and European merchants in the Chinese harbors that allowed foreign presence (Guangzhou, especially). Words of Chinese origin were the minority, as were the French and English borrowings in Chinook Jargon, developed along the 19th century (and possibly still used in the beginning of the 20th century) between American Indians and European settlers in western America and Canada (Oregon, Washington, British Columbia). But some pidgins are actual blends, such as Russenorsk and its evenly proportioned Russian/Norwegian vocabulary, used between Norwegian fishermen and Russian merchants who’d come to buy cod-fish in the northern harbors of Norway. (Russenorsk disappeared along with the cod-fish trade shortly after the 1917 revolution). Sometimes pidgin vocabulary comes from different languages that are close enough to be difficult to distinguish from one another, which is the case of Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir, and their blends of lexical Italian, Spanish and Occitan borrowings.

Pidgins are nobody’s mother language. Their limited use implies (a) limited vocabulary; (b) a near total absence of morphological devices generating the flexing of words according to time, number, etc. and thus the emergence of new ones; (c) a simple syntax. Pidgins sometimes disappear when they lose their uses (like in the case of Russenorsk, if a language ends up growing over the others and the local population becomes plurilingual).

When they last long enough (over generations), their lexical, morphosyntactic, and discursive resources can become so rich that the language itself becomes hardly distinguishable from an « ordinary language » although it still remains a second language. That was the case of Tok Pisin (formerly Pidgin English) in Papua New Guinea, until about thirty years ago. It could also still be the case of Kriyol (Portuguese) in Guinea-Bissau.

At this point, however, some speakers simply adopt pidgin as their « own » language and start handing it down to their children as their mother tongue. The pidgin language then becomes a creole language. This is what happened to Bislama, in Vanuatu, which became the mother tongue for children of the cities; Tok Pisin, mentioned above, is also undergoing the same process nowadays.

 
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