Language in a Petri Dish—Pidgins and Creoles

When someone points to a goose and says, "big fella kwak kwak maki go in wata", then we are justified in thinking that person is using a pidgin, the rudimentary code that makes it possible to have some level of communication across language lines, as here Cantonese speakers dealing with English traders whose language they didn't want to learn. There are very few words—only a few hundred—and very limited grammatical resources—little or no gender, only a few cases, marked by very few prepositions each of which does does a wide variety of jobs. Sometimes even time marking is limited. As their name pidgin, derived from Cantonese pei tsin (pay money) suggests, they often arise from cross-cultural business dealings.

At least as often, though, they are outcomes of a subordinate group of people forced to live and work in places where a dominant culture speaks a different language, such as in Portuguese India, the slaveholding colonies of Great Britain, the islands north of Australia, and Hawaii. While they draw much of their vocabulary from the dominant language into which they are placed, their grammar often comes from the home languages of the subordinate group, as we'll see in Hawaiian pidgin (which is actually a creole language that descended from a pidgin.  (Much of this material comes from the podcast we'll listen to part of.

An experiment carried out by John McWhorter's students tells part of the story:

Lecture 27 from The Story of Human Language, 9:54-11:04

The limits of vocabulary produce something like "big fella kwak kwak." Other elements are illustrated here: 

Lecture 27 from The Story of Human Language, 12:30-18:00

Pidgins don't last long, as we'll see. Soon, often in a single generation, they grow into full-fledged languages, called creoles. Two more McWhorter lectures give us a very good picture of this process:

Lecture 28  from The Story of Human Language

I'm interrupting here because we can look at an advertisement for toothpaste in the Tok Psin newspaper used across New Guinea.