Pidgins & Creoles Flashcards
Outline
in human history, people have been brought together in circumstances in which they had no language in common. i.e Africans as slaves to the Americans, workers transferred to work in the sugar plantations of Hawaii
Pidgin
a system of communication which has grown up among people who don’t share a common language, but who want to communicate, usually for trade.
Features
a limited vocabulary, reduced grammatical structure and a narrow range of functions. But for simple purposes it does work, and everyone in the community learns to handle it
What happens next?
increasing numbers of people begin to use a pidgin as their principle means of communication and causes a major expansion in grammar, vocabulary and context.
Creole
the children of these people come to hear pidgin more regularly, and in due course some of them begin to use it as a mother tongue
The children
they learn a language their parents do not know, and didn’t even exist before
Grammatical features
Jamaican creole - ‘Him go a school every day last year, now sometime him go, sometime him no go’
Nouns
often don’t use -s to mark a plural ‘two book, dem creature’
Pronouns
No case distinctions are used - ‘she see he come, take he coat’
Verbs
past tenses are expressed using the base form without an ending: ‘Mary go last week’
Neologisms
they create new words using affixes (no jokifying) and through conversion: all dis murder and kill mus’ stop
Reduplicated forms
are common: picky-picky
Doubling of grammatical items
dis here, an’ plus
