YI. Lingua Francos, Pidgins and Creoles

 

Foreign languages are most often used for communication with speakers for whom the language concerned is their native language. A spe­cial case is where the language used is the native language of neither the speaker nor the listener, but where it may be the only medium of linguistic communication in common between the two. Where this practice is widespread in a given area, the status of the foreign language as an instrument of general communication is recognized by call­ing it a lingua franca.

The orginal 'lingua franca' (literally 'language of the Franks', the Arabic term of the day for all Europeans) came into being in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the Crusades about nine centuries ago, and evolved as a composite of Italian, Provencal, French, Spanish and Portuguese (Holm 1989: 607). Lingua francas in use today n) notably include English and Mandarin Chinese. Other large-scale lingua francas are Malay in Malaysia and Indonesia, Swahili in East Africa, Hausa in West Africa, Arabic from West Africa to Afghanistan, Afrikaans in Southern Africa and Spanish in South and Central America.

A lingua franca, is often a single homogeneous language. A pidgin language, by contrast, though used for much the same purposes of communication between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages (usually in the Third World), is developed out of a mixture of the languages of the communities concerned. Holm (1988: 5) gives one of the clearest definitions of a pidgin language:

A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common; it evolves when they need some means of verbal communication, perhaps for trade, but no group learns the native language of any other group for social reasons that may include lack of trust or of close contact. Usually those with less power (speakers of substrate languages) are more accommodating and use words from the language of those with more power (the superstate), although the meaning, form and use of these words may be influenced by the substrate languages. When dealing with the other groups, the superstrate speakers adopt many of these changes to make themselves more readily understood, and no longer try to speak as they do within their own group. They co-operate with the other groups to create a makeshift language to serve their needs.

the vocabulary of a pidgin is usually drawn primarily from the prestige language of the dominant group in a situation of language contact. Its grammar, however, retains many features of the native languages of the subordinate groups. The prestige language which supplies the bulk of the vocabulary is the one which is usually thought of as being pidginized, hence the name Pidgin English.

Thus a pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade. Pidgins are not the native language of any speech community, but are instead learned as second languages. Pidgins usually have low prestige with respect to other languages

When a pidgin is acquired as the first, native language of a group of speakers (as happened historically to generations of speakers under the social and geographical displacement that accompanied slavery), it is said to constitute a Creole language. Creole languages typically become more linguistically elaborated than pidgins, and become autonomous languages in their own right. The evolution of Creole languages is called creolizadon.

The creation of a pidgin usually requires:

Prolonged, regular contact between the different language communities;

A need to communicate between them;

An absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible interlanguage.

(Substrate and superstrate

The terms substratum and superstratum are often used to label the source and the target languages of a creole or in the context of second language acquisition. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon that language for another language (the superstrate. The outcome of such an event will be that erstwhile speakers of the substrate will be speaking a version of the superstrate, at least in more formal contexts. The substrate may survive as a second language for informal conversation (as in the case of Venetian and many other European non-official languages). Its influence on the official speech, if detectable at all, is usually limited to pronunciation and a modest number of loanwords. The substrate might even disappear altogether without leaving any trace.

However, these terms are not very meaningful where the emerging language is distilled from multiple substrata and a homogeneous superstratum. The substratum-superstratum continuum becomes awkward when multiple superstrata must be assumed (such as in Papiamentu), when the substratum cannot be identified, or when the presence or the survival of substratal evidence is inferred from mere typological analogies. However, facts surrounding the substratum-superstratum opposition cannot be set aside where the substratum as the receding or already replaced source language and the superstratum as the replacing dominant target language can be clearly identified and where the respective contributions to the resulting compromise language can be weighed in a scientifically meaningful way; and this is so whether the replacement leads to creole genesis or not.

With Atlantic Creoles, "superstrate" usually means European and "substrate" non-European or African.

A post-creole continuum is said to come about in a context of decreolization where a creole is subject to pressure from its superstrate language. Speakers of the creole feel compelled to conform their language to superstrate usage introducing large scale variation and hypercorrection).

Also, Keith Whinnom suggests that pidgins need three languages to form, with one (the superstrate) being clearly dominant over the others.

It is often posited that pidgins become creole languages when a generation whose parents speak pidgin to each other teach it to their children as their first language. Creoles can then replace the existing mix of languages to become the native language of a community (such as Krio in Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea). However, not all pidgins become creole languages; a pidgin may die out before this phase would occur.

Other scholars, such as Salikoko Mufwene, argue that pidgins and creoles arise independently under different circumstances, and that a pidgin need not always precede a creole nor a creole evolve from a pidgin. Pidgins, according to Mufwene, emerged among trade colonies among "users who preserved their native vernaculars for their day-to-day interactions". Creoles, meanwhile, developed in settlement colonies in which speakers of a European language, often indentured servants whose language would be far from the standard in the first place, interacted heavily with non-European slaves, absorbing certain words and features from the slaves' non-European native languages, resulting in a heavily basilectalized version of the original language. These servants and slaves would come to use the creole as an everyday vernacular, rather than merely in situations in which contact with a speaker of the superstrate was necessary.

Whose creole? By the very nature of the subject, the creoleness of a particular creole usually is a matter of dispute. The parent tongues may themselves be creoles or pidgins that have disappeared before they could be documented.

For these reasons, the issue of which language is the parent of a creole — that is, whether a language should be classified as a "Portuguese creole" or "English creole", etc. — often has no definitive answer, and can become the topic of long-lasting controversies, where social prejudices and political considerations may interfere with scientific discussion

Although it is considered that a large number of languages have contributed to the basis of modern Creole languages via their parent pidgins, including Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili. Hancock (1971: 507-23) lists more than 200 pidgin and Creole languages around the world. Well-known examples of Creole languages based on English are Krio in Sierra Leone and Jamaican Creole in the Caribbean.