#pidgin languages

[linguisten]

Salikoko S. Mufwene:  How Pidgins Emerged? Not as We Have Been Told

[linguisten]

Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages

Most languages of the world are taken to result from a combination of a vertical transmission process from older to younger generations of speakers or signers and (mostly) gradual changes that accumulate over time. In contrast, creole languages emerge within a few generations out of highly multilingual societies in situations where no common first language is available for communication (as, for instance, in plantations related to the Atlantic slave trade). Strikingly, creoles share a number of linguistic features (the ‘creole profile’), which is at odds with the striking linguistic diversity displayed by non-creole languages 1–4 . These common features have been explained as reflecting a hardwired default state of the possible grammars that can be learned by humans 1 , as straightforward solutions to cope with the pressure for efficient and successful communication 5 or as the byproduct of an impoverished transmission process 6 . Despite their differences, these proposals agree that creoles emerge from a very limited and basic communication system (a pidgin) that only later in time develops the characteristics of a natural language, potentially by innovating linguistic structure. Here we analyse 48 creole languages and 111 non-creole languages from all continents and conclude that the similarities (and differences) between creoles can be explained by genealogical and contact processes 7,8 , as with non-creole languages, with the difference that creoles have more than one language in their ancestry. While a creole profile can be detected statistically, this stems from an over-representation of Western European and West African languages in their context of emergence. Our findings call into question the existence of a pidgin stage in creole development and of creole-specific innovations. In general, given their extreme conditions of emergence, they lend support to the idea that language learning and transmission are remarkably resilient processes. There are striking similarities among creole languages. Blasi et al. show that these similarities can in fact be explained by the same processes as for non-creole languages, the difference being that creoles have more than one language in their ancestry.

See also: 

http://www.uni-leipzig.de/service/kommunikation/medienredaktion/nachrichten.html?ifab_modus=detail&ifab_uid=251dbb5e5220170905105719&ifab_id=7402

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=34340 

http://sci-hub.bz/10.1038/s41562-017-0192-4

https://www.shh.mpg.de/608548/creole-languages

[linguisten]

This web site contains supporting electronic material for the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS), a publication of Oxford University Press. APiCS shows comparable synchronic data on the grammatical and lexical structures of 76 pidgin and creole languages. The language set contains not only the most widely studied Atlantic and Indian Ocean creoles, but also less well known pidgins and creoles from Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Australia, including some extinct varieties, and several mixed languages. APiCS Online is a separate publication, edited by Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath, and Magnus Huber. It was made possible by support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. APiCS Online contains information on 76 languages and 130 structural features, which was contributed by 88 contributors. There are 18526 examples illustrating the features and feature values. In addition, APiCS Online is designed to allow comparison with data from WALS (the World Atlas of Language Structures).

[linguisten]

The unlikely connection between the Basque Country and Iceland.

While reading up on the history of the Icelandic language, I came across a rather strange linguistic phenomenon I had never ever heard of before: a Basque-Icelandic pidgin (Basknesk-íslenskt blendingsmál).

What? A pidgin language blending the Icelandic and the Basque languages? This seems like a very unlikely match. [...]

And you thought that level 7 thing was a joke...?

[polysprachig]

"When speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity to learn one another's languages, they develop a makeshift jargon called a pidgin. Pidgins are choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of the colonizers or plantation owners, highly variable in order and with little in the way of grammar. Sometimes a pidgin can become a lingua franca and gradually increase in complexity over decades, as in the "Pidgin English" of the modern South Pacific." 

-Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, 20-21 

[arsondotpng]

I love how we basically have our own language on tumblr like I could say "omg I found the best 50K destiel au fic based on S04 E05 with like a little smut but mostly fluff and omfg it's so good like how do you writing" in the middle of a large crowd of people and chances are no one would understand it

[purplehost]

Pidgin Frenglish. No such thing.

But I'd like to think there is.  A good sixth of my English draft isn't even in English.  There are just random sentences written with phrases of French. It's just easier that way.  I'm totally not doing this to annoy the hell out of one of my friends that despises French. That was a lie.