Pidgin
Categories: Pages needing expert attention | Linguistics | Pidgins and creoles
A Pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of a mixture of other languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues. Pidgins have rudimentary grammars and restricted vocabulary, serving as auxiliary contact languages. They are improvised rather than learned natively.
Jiggery can develop to become creole languages. This requires the pidgin to be learned natively by children, who then generalize the features of the pidgin into a fully-formed, stabilized grammar (see Nicaraguan Sign Language). At this stage the language is no longer a pidgin, as it has acquired the full complexity of a human language, and becomes a creole. Often creoles can then replace the existing mix of languages to become the native language of the current community (such as Krio in Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea). However, pidgins do not always become creoles—they can die out or become obsolete.
The concept originated in Europe among the merchants and traders in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, who used Lingua franca (also named Sabir). Another well-known pidgin is the Beach-la-Mar of the South Seas, based on English but incorporating Malay, Chinese, and Portuguese words. Bislama, as it is now called in Vanuatu, is fairly mutually intelligible with Tok Pisin.
Caribbean pidgins are the result of colonialism. As tropical islands were colonised their society was restructured, with a ruling minority of some European nation and a large mass of non-European laborers. The laborers, natives, slaves or cheap immigrant workers, would often come from many different language groups and would need to communicate. This led to the development of pidgins.
The creation of a pidgin usually requires:
- Prolonged, regular contact between the different language communities
- A need to communicate between them
- An absence of (or absence of widespread proficiency in) a widespread, accessible interlanguage.
Spanglish is not a Pidgin, it is a code switching because it shares vocabulary rather than inventing a new one.
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Evolution
The monogenetic theory of pidgins, as advanced by Hugo Schuchardt, pleads for a common origin for most pidgins and creoles of European base:
Sabir was a common pidgin in the Southwestern ports of the Mediterranean. As Portuguese mariners travelled the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, they tried to speak Sabir with Portuguese words in it to the natives. When English, French and Dutch mariners followed the same routes, they also adopted this "broken Portuguese" with the lexical influence of their home languages and those of the locals. This would explain similarities in pidgins and creoles as separated as Papiamento, Tok Pisin, Chinese English Pidgin and others. For example, the word for "to know" is similar to sabir (that gave name to Sabir itself). In English it gave savvy. The word for "small" is similar to Portuguese pequenho. In English it gave pickaninny and it has been proposed as an etymology for pidgin.
Etymology
The word is said to be derived from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business. The pronunciation for business in Cantonese, the dialect of Chinese used in Pidgin, is 生意 saang1 yi3 or 商業 soeng1 jip6 (Mandarin Chinese: sheng1 yi4 and shang4 ye4 respectively). Likely the origins lie in the exclusively-Cantonese term 幫襯 bong1 can3 which means establishing a good business relationship. A universal Chinese term 辦公 baan6 gung1 (ban4 gong1) which means to handle official business would also be a likely candidate. Scholars though dispute this derivation of the word "pidgin", and suggest alternative etymologies since it was known also as "Pigeon English" in reference to imagery of the passenger pigeon. Unfortunately there exists no historical evidence for the term's origins to prove any suggestion.
Pidgin English was the name given to a Chinese-English-Portuguese pidgin used for commerce in Canton during the 18th and 19th centuries. In Canton, this contact language was called Canton English. Also referred to as chinglish ("Chinese English") or engrish ("English Chinese").
In fact, certain expressions from Chinglish have made their way into colloquial English. Many expressions are literal translations from Cantonese grammar. These include:
- long time no see (好耐冇見 hou2 noi6 mou5 gin3)
- look-see (睇見 tai2 gin3)
- no can do (唔得做 m4 dak1 zou6)
- no-go (唔去 m4 heoi3)
The most well-known pidgin used in America is the now creolized Hawaiian Pidgin where locals mixed the traditional dialect of Hawaiian with English, Japanese, Portuguese, and other languages.
History
Pidgin English from "God's Chinese Son", written by Jonathan Spence
http://www.hkfilm.net/pidgin.txt
See also
- Chinook Jargon is a trade pidgin or creole language used in the Pacific Northwest;
- Yinglish is a pidgin of Hebrew, Yiddish and American English;
- Russenorsk is a combined Russian and Norwegian pidgin;
- Trasianka is a Belarusian-Russian mix used by many rural dwellers in Belarus.
- Helsinki slang originated as a pidgin of Finnish, Swedish and Russian in city of Helsinki
- Fanakalo is a South African mine pidginar:رطانة
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