How do you think they communicated with people from other lands? The answer is easy: they had to find linguistic solutions easy to understand for both parties. You would need to use a real map, ask around to find a hotel, choose a restaurant without reading Google reviews… Sounds tough, right? Well, centuries ago, when the first explorers and merchants sailed the seven seas, they didn’t have machine translation apps in their smartphones.

Most linguists believe that a creole develops through a process of nativization of a pidgin when children of acquired pidgin-speakers learn and use it as their native language.Imagine having to plan a trip without Internet. Unlike pidgins, creoles have fully developed vocabulary and patterned grammar. Ī pidgin differs from a creole, which is the first language of a speech community of native speakers that at one point arose from a pidgin. Each pidgin has its own norms of usage which must be learned for proficiency in the pidgin. However, not all simplified or 'unsophisticated' forms of a language are pidgins. Pidgins have historically been considered a form of patois, unsophisticated simplified versions of their lexifiers, and as such usually have low prestige with respect to other languages.

As the lexicon of any pidgin will be limited to core vocabulary, words with only a specific meaning in the lexifier language may acquire a completely new (or additional) meaning in the pidgin. Ī pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from a multitude of languages as well as onomatopoeia. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language. Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people.

Pidgin language example