Pidgin

A pidgin (pronounced in English /pɪdʒɪn/) is a simplified language, created and used by individuals from communities that do not have a common language or sufficiently know any other language to use with each other. Pidgins have been common throughout history in situations such as trade, where the two groups speak different languages, or colonial situations where there was forced labor (frequently pidgins were used temporarily among slaves in the colonies).

In essence, a pidgin is a simplified code that allows bare-bones linguistic communication, with simple structures and randomly constructed conventions, between the groups that use it. A pidgin is not the mother tongue of any community, but a learned or acquired second language. Pidgins are characterized by combining the phonetic, morphological and lexical features of one language with the lexical units of another, without having a stable structured grammar.

Introduction

Pidgin is not usually the mother tongue of any ethnic or social group; It is usually the language used by an immigrant in their new place of residence, or a lingua franca used in an area of intense contact between linguistically differentiated populations, such as a very active port. The pidgins were also frequent in the colonies, mixing elements of the language of the dominant nation with those of the natives and the slaves introduced into it.

The speaker of the pidgin uses the formal structures of his mother tongue, which he completes with words from the language of his interlocutor. Since they are used to maintain communications between individuals with different linguistic skills, their grammar is usually reduced to the essentials. It is commonly accepted that if a pidgin stabilizes as a language of a group, so that it comes to have native speakers, it begins to become a creole or creole language., which is characterized by acquiring, on the basis of the pidgin, all the characteristics of a complete natural language. However, some linguists, such as Salikoko Mufwene, consider that this fact is not well established.

History

The oldest known pidgin is lingua franca or Sabir, a dialect used by Mediterranean seafarers and merchants since the 17th century XIV which continued in use until the end of the XIX century . Many other pidgins have originated from the commercial activity of Europeans; the Guangzhou pidgin – from which a popular but probably fallacious etymology derives the very term “pidgin” – originated in Chinese trading ports.

Another rich source of pidgins was the introduction into the American and Caribbean colonies of slaves of African origin. The combination of the different languages that they spoke -since the slaveholders indistinctly captured members of different ethnic groups, often unknown or hostile to each other- with the languages of the colonial landowners and the native Amerindians gave rise to numerous mixtures, of which most eventually stabilized in creole languages. In South America, the combination of Portuguese, Spanish, and the Tupi-Guarani languages gave rise to Língua geral or ñe'ẽngatú, spoken in the Amazon basin and throughout Paraguay (called there "jopará"), used for umbanda rites to this day.

Etymology

The origin of the term is unclear. It has been suggested that the word was taken from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business ("negocios"), but could also be due to the expression pigeon English ("English for pigeon"), referring to the homing pigeon. The Chinese word for pidgin, in Traditional Chinese, 洋涇濱; in simplified Chinese, 洋泾滨; Pinyin, yáng jīng bīn, originated from the name of the Jīng River, located along the border between French and English leased land in Shanghai.

Pidgin English is the name given by English speakers to the Sino-Anglo-Portuguese pidgin used for trade in Canton during the 18th and 19th centuries; in China this lingua franca was called Cantonese English.

Development

Creating a pidgin requires:

• Prolonged regular contact between the different languages of the communities
• Need for communication between them
• Absence of widespread and accessible inter-language

pidgins become creoles when a generation of children learns a pidgin as their mother tongue. This phenomenon seems to support Noam Chomsky's thesis that there is an innate brain structure that allows us, as children, to learn something as complex as grammar (universal grammar).