Pidgin and Creole in Second Language Acquisition

1. Second Language Acquisition
Topic: Pidgin and Creole
GCWU Sialkot
Prepared By:
Mahrukh
Ayesha Shabbir

2. DEFINITION AND INTRODUCTION
• Pidgin is a mixture of two or more existing varieties, created jointly for some
special purpose, and different from both varieties in term of lexicon, syntax and
morphology.
• Pidgin drives from a Chinese pronunciation of the English word business, and all
attestations from the first half of the nineteenth century given in the third edition
of the oxford English dictionary mean ‘business; an action, occupation, or affair’
(the earliest being from 1807).

3. WHY PIDGIN IS CREATED?
• TRADE:
• PIDGIN IS CREATED WHERE TWO (OR MORE) COMMUNITIES WITH LANGUAGES
INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO EACH OTHER START TRADE AND BUSINESS.
• HERE, THE NEED TO COMMUNICATE WITH MEMBERS OF OTHER COMMUNITY
ARISE, RESULTING IN A PIDGIN- MIXTURE OF TWO DIFFERENT LANGUAGES OF
BOTH TRADING COMMUNITIES.

4. TO BE CONTINUED….
• BUT
• NOT ALL PIDGINS ARE RESTRICTED TO BEING USED AS TRADE LANGUAGES,
ONLY.
• NOR ALL TRADE LANGUAGES ARE PIDGINS.E.G. ENGLISH AND FRENCH ARE
WIDELY USED AS TRADE LANGUAGES IN MANY PARTS OF AFRICA.

5. TO BE CONTINUED......
• GENERAL COMMUNICATION:
• PIDGIN MAY BE CREATED SPECIALLY FOR THE PURPOSE OF COMMUNICATING
WITH SOME OTHER GROUP, AND NOT USED BY ANY COMMUNITY FOR
COMMUNICATION AMONG THEMSELVES.

6. LINGUISTIC PROPERTIES OF PIDGINS
• SINCE PIDGIN VOCABULARY IS PRETTY LIMITED, MEANINGS ARE EXTENDED.
• SO, STICK IS NOT ONLY USED FOR STICKS, BUT ALSO FOR TREES, IN SOLOMON
ISLANDS PIDGIN.
• PHONOLOGY:
• PHONEME INVENTORY: CONSONANTS AND VOWELS THAT ARE PHONETICALLY
EASY.
• SYLLABLE STRUCTURE: TYPICALLY CV OR CVC
• STRESS: FIXED STRESS LOCATION

7. LINGUISTIC PROPERTIES OF PIDGINS
• MORPHOLOGY:
• PRETTY, MUCH NONE. NO TENSE OR ASPECT MARKING. NO AGREEMENT, EITHER
• SYNTAX:
• SENTENCES ARE SIMPLE AND SHORT WITH NO EMBEDDING

8. PIDGIN THEORIES
• BABY TALK:
• ACCORDING TO BABY TALK THEORY, THE PIDGINS AND CREOLES RESULT FROM
EUROPEANS DELIBERATELY SIMPLIFYING THEIR LANGUAGES IN ORDER TO
COMMUNICATE WITH OTHERS.

9. PIDGIN THEORIES
• POLYGENESIS
• ACCORDING TO POLYGENESIS THEORY, PIDGINS AND CREOLES HAVE A VARIETY
OF ORIGINS; ANY SIMILARITIES AMONG THEM ARISE FROM THE SHARED
CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE ORIGINS.
• FOE EXAMPLE, SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH HAVE TO MAKE THEMSELVES
UNDERSTOOD FOR THE PURPOSES OF TRADE AND THOSE WITH THEM, HAVE TO
BE UNDERSTOOD.

10. PIDGIN THEORIES
• RELEXIFICATION:
• ACCORDING TO RELEXIFICATION THEORY, IN 15TH OR 16TH CENTURY PORTUGUESE
RELEXIFIED THAT LANGUAGE, THAT IS, THEY ADDED THEIR OWN VOCABULARY
TO GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE OF SABIR. EVIDENCE FOR THIS VIEW COMES
FROM THE FACT THAT THERE IS A CONSIDERABLE NUMBER OF PORTUGUESE
WORDS IN THE PIDGINS AND CREOLES OF THE WORLD.

11. PIDGIN THEORIES
• MONOGENESIS:
• PERHAPS PIDGIN AND CREOLES ALL CAME FROM THE SAME ANCESTOR
LANGUAGE THEN?
• THIS IS THE MONOGENESIS VIEW. A CANDIDATE COMMON ORIGIN HAS ACTUALLY
BEEN SUGGESTED. ALL THE PRESENT EUROPEAN LANGUAGE BASED PIDGINS
AND CREOLES ARE DERIVED FROM A SINGLE SOURCE I.E., THE MEDITERRANEAN
LINGUA FRANCA KNOWN AS SABIR.

12. CHARACTERISTICS OF PIDGIN
• NO NATIVE SPEAKER
• NO LANGUAGE
• SIMPLE STRUCTURE
• NO IDENTIFICATION
• UNSTABLE

13. CREOLE
When a pidgin is acquired as a first language by a Generation of
children, it becomes a creole. A creole thus, unlike a pidgin, is a natural
language .
A creole is often defined as a pidgin that has become the first language of
a new generation of speakers.
A creole is a pidgin which has expanded in structure and vocabulary to
express the range of meanings and serve as a first language as when it
turns out, kids impose structure on the language input they receive,
ending up with a language that has prepositions, articles, tense
marking, aspect , morphology, embedded sentences, etc.

14. Continued……
When a pidgin becomes nativized, the history of the resultant
creoles, in essence, is similar to that of any other language.
A pidgin is identifiable at any given time by both linguistic and
social criteria, but a creole is identifiable only by historical
criteria; that is if we know that it has arisen out of pidgin.
There are no structural criteria which, in themselves, will identify a
creole as such, in the absence of historical evidence.

15. CREOLE
• The term comes from the Portuguese crioulo, and originally meant a person of
European descent who had been born and brought up in a colonial territory.
Later, it came to be applied to other people who were native to these areas, and
then to the kind of language the spoke.
• Creoles are typically classified based on their lexifier language, e.g., English-
based, French based ,etc.

16. To be Continued……
• Since most creole languages developed in the colonies and are typically based
on english, french, portuguese, and spanish, the languages of the superpowers of
the time. However, there are also numerous creoles based on other languages
such as arabic, hindi, and malay.

17. CHARACTERISTICS OF PIDGIN AND CREOLE
• Lexis (vocabulary)
• Pronunciation
• Grammar
• Social functions

18. GRAMMATICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
PIDGIN AND CREOLE
• Pidgins
• Variable from speaker to speaker
• Few if any inflections
• Simple negation: “no”
• Simple clause structure
• From pidgins to creoles
• Consistency across speakers
• Assimilation & reduction processes
• Expanded vocabularies
• Tense system
• Greater sentence complexity

19. SOCIAL FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
PIDGIN AND CREOLE
• Pidgins: limited range of social functions
• As contact languages, used for minimal communication purposes
• Extended pidgins and creoles: wide range of social functions
• Oral and written literature
• Education
• Mass media
• Advertising
• Religion

20. TO BE CONTINUED….
• Since most creole languages developed in the colonies they are typically based
on english, french, portuguese, and spanish, the languages of the superpowers of the time.
However, there are also numerous creoles based on other languages such as arabic, hindi,
and malay.
• The world’s creoles display many differences in their sound systems, grammar, and vocabulary.
At the same time, they share some common features. There is no single accepted theory that
explains why creole languages have certain similarities.

21. FEATURES OF CREOLE VOCABULARY
• Since vocabulary is restricted, words in a creole languages usually have a
greater range of meanings than in the language from which the word was
borrowed, e.G., In tok pisin, stap ‘stop’ means “be located, to remain, to
continue’. Some concepts are expressed by phrases rather than by single words,
e.G., In tok pisin skru bilong arm means ‘ elbow’ (literally ‘screw (joint) of the
arm’),

22. FEATURES
• Grammar
creole grammars are generally simpler than the grammars of the languages on
which they were originally based. Below are some of the features of creole
grammars:
• PLACEMENT OF A NEGATIVE PARTICLE BEFORE THE VERB; AS NO ANGRY
• ABSENCE OF COPULA(CONNECTING WORDS/VERBS TO DESCRIBE DEPENDENCE),
E.G., MAI SISTA SKINI ‘MY SISTER IS SKINNY’, YU DA BOSS ‘YOU ARE THE BOSS’;

23. DECREOLIZATION
• CREOLES TEND TO CO-EXIST WITH THEIR LEXIFIER LANGUAGES IN THE SAME
SPEECH COMMUNITY. SINCE THEY ARE BASED ON THESE LANGUAGES, AT LEAST
LEXICALLY, THEY COME TO BE VIEWED AS “NONSTANDARD” VARIETIES OF THE
LEXIFIER LANGUAGE.
• AS WE NOTED A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, UNDER DESIRES FOR OVERT PRESTIGE,
SOME SPEAKERS START TO MOVE AWAY FROM THE CREOLE TO THE STANDARD
LEXIFIER LANGUAGE, IN WHAT IS OFTEN CALLED DECREOLIZATOIN.
•

24. THE POST-CREOLE CONTINUUM
• As a result of decreolizatoin, a range of creole Varieties exist in a continuum.
• The variety Closest to the standard language is called the Acrolect
• the one least like the standard is Called the basilect.
• And the one in between these two is a range of creole varieties that are called
mesolects:
<-------------------------------------------------->
Acrolect Mesolect Basilect

25. CREOLE AND PIDGIN
Pidgin Creole
No Native speaker Native speaker
No language First language
Simple structure Complex structure
No identification Have identification
Unstable Stable