Throughout history, people have moved from their birthplaces to others. With the trip, they take their religion, their customs and, of course, their language. It is possible that the mother tongue is one of the identity elements, if not the main one, that acquires the most importance for any person and that links them to their culture.
However, it often happens that, when you arrive at a new place, the people who have ended up there do not speak the same language. This is a problem, since if they do not speak a common language, how are they going to understand each other?
Fortunately, people’s cognitive flexibility helps their survival, even in unfavorable situations, and they try by all means possible to communicate with others.
Pidgin languages are the result of these contacts between people who speak different languages but, for various reasons, they need to communicate, even if it is in a very basic and simple way. In this article we are going to address the fascinating world of these languages and how they arise, in addition to talking about some examples.
The word pidgin refers to a language that is the product of contact between two or more ethnic groups with different languages, who have established contact by living in the same place but do not share the same language. By not sharing the same language, nor learning each other’s, these groups of people end up managing to understand each other, mixing words and grammatical structures from several languages.
Along the history, Pidgins have emerged in various contexts, the most common being commercial exchanges where two merchants, coming from culturally very different regions, need to somehow reach an agreement while making their transactions and, to facilitate this goal, both learn a few words of the other language that are useful in such a situation.
Typically, pidgins are very simple communication systems, with very limited vocabulary and phonology Furthermore, they do not usually evolve in the same way as natural languages, as Spanish, Catalan, English or Russian have done.
As these languages are the product of learning a few words and expressions from another language and adapting them to one’s own language, they are not usually well regarded socially and They are subject to a very strong diglossia acting as dominated languages.
The origin of the term is obscure, but most linguists agree that the word pidgin is a Chinese deformation of the English word business, and its origins date back to the 19th century. Chinese and English speakers established contact in Canton, China throughout the 17th century, forming a language that was a mixture of both languages and was called ‘pidgin’, given that its function was to allow business. between English and Asians.
Over time, the word pidgin, which originally referred to this half-Chinese, half-English language, came to mean any mixture between two or more languages, simplified and with little complexity.
How are these languages formed?
Normally, for a pidgin to form, certain conditions need to be met. The main one is that of that people belonging to different linguistic groups maintain contact over a long period of time
The second condition is that the two or more linguistic groups have the need to communicate, whether for business or some type of power relationship.
Finally, the third condition necessary for a pidgin to form is that linguistic groups do not have a language that serves as a link to communicate with each other or that the languages of the two communities have a relatively low level of mutual understanding.
Although the majority of the community of philologists agrees that these three conditions must be met, there are those who say, as is the case of Keith Whinnom, that for a pidgin to be formed, at least three languages are necessary, two being spoken languages. by the two ethnic groups plus a third dominant language that would serve as a superstratum.
What speakers do in these cases is learn, broadly speaking, the dominant language. Since it is not their mother tongue nor do they have the means to learn it under good conditions, People memorize only those words and expressions that will serve them in a certain context as terms related to business or the situation in which the dominant language is useful.
For this reason, pidgins are not seen as complete languages, because they are really very simplified versions of a natural language. Phonetics are simplified, especially because one does not intend to speak like a native of the dominant language. The grammar is not too complex and the vocabulary is usually only useful for a small range of situations.
In the event that the pidgin has emerged from three languages (the two mother tongues of the linguistic groups together with the dominant language), The vocabulary is usually taken from the dominant language, while the phonetics and grammar are typical of the mother tongues
What differentiates them from creole languages?
One of the most notable characteristics of pidgin languages is that They are not anyone’s mother tongue, but they are the second language of those who have been developing it It is the result of two or more linguistic groups having established contact with each other and needing to communicate in order to carry out some type of interaction.
But, sometimes, especially when these ethnic groups take root in the same territory after many decades of coexistence, the new generations that have been born and raised there begin to speak these pidgins naturally and as their mother tongue.
So that, pidgins begin to have their first native speakers, who did not use the language only for commercial interactions or for those situations in which it was originally invented. Like any natural language, speakers of this language will use it for various situations: home, school, among friends, with those at work… with people who will be from the same generation and will also speak the same pidgin.
This is when the pidgin has acquired a greater degree of complexity, because its own speakers have sought ways to fill in the vocabulary and grammatical gaps that the pidgin language showed at the beginning.
So that, The main difference between pidgin and creole is that the latter has a higher level of complexity can be used in a wide range of situations, in addition to being the mother tongue of a linguistic community, the result of contact between two or more languages.
Some examples
The movements of human groups have given rise to many pidgins. Although this word comes from the 19th century, there has been evidence of this type of language since very ancient times.
One of the oldest pidgins was the well-known lingua franca, used at the time of the Crusades The crusaders and traders destined for places to fight Islam came from many places in Europe, with the Franks predominating among them. That is why many words of the Frankish language were learned by these people and this is how they managed to understand each other.
It should be said that this famous pidgin acquired such importance that today the expression lingua franca refers to the language used by two people whose mother tongues are not the same but who know how to speak one that allows them to communicate with each other. For example, English between a German and a Japanese or Spanish between a Catalan and a Basque.
And, taking advantage of the fact that we have mentioned Basque, let’s talk about a very curious medieval pidgin, a mixture of the Basque language and distant Icelandic. The Basque-Icelandic pidgin emerged during the 17th century, a mixture of Basque, Icelandic and, to a lesser extent, Romance words This pidgin arose after the Basque whalers went to hunt cetaceans off the coast of Iceland and needed to speak in a very basic way with the inhabitants of the island. Today, only a few words of this pidgin are known.
Spanglish, half English and half Spanish, is a particular case, given that it is not a specific pidgin, but rather a set of dialects, pidgins and creole languages whose origin dates back to contact between English and Spanish speakers. Given the number of speakers of these two natural languages and the ease of finding resources to learn them, today this Spanglish has been progressively disappearing to be replaced by real bilingualism between both languages.
Pidgins have existed in practically all countries, and if we talked about the most interesting cases we would not reach the end of this article, given that every imaginable language has had its pidgin version at some point in its history: Russian-Norwegian, Basque-Algonquian , broken slavey, black German from Namibia…
As you can see, the world of pidgins is fascinating and, due to its characteristics, there are many conlangers or creators of artificial languages who have ventured to create their own languages of this type.
