Language And Variation Pidgins And Creoles

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The consequences of teachers5 and school administrators5 ignorance of pidgin and Creole language varieties can be enormous for children who enter school speaking them. This chapter will discuss attitudes toward pidgins and Creoles in general, as well as structural and functional features of specific Creoles that twentieth-century educators are likely to encounter. Attitudes, structures, and functions are equally significant for educational settings, interwoven as these aspects of pidgin and Creoles are in daily language use. The origin and development of these languages will also be discussed, along with problems associated with studying them.

Attitudes toward pidgin and Creole languages

      Pidgins and Creoles, which are essentially new language varieties created out of old cloth, allow us to observe the birth and evolution of a language within a highly compressed time frame. Often coexisting with a more prestigious variety, they present educators with special challenges: (1) they are typically spoken, not written, and (2) they are often viewed with disdain by both their users and by society at large - in part because they do not yet have a respected body of written literature.

Origins and development of pidgins and Creoles

      Pidgins and Creoles are linked in a continuum of language development.

      Pidgins come into being because they are needed during times of population upheaval, when normal mechanisms of language transmission are disrupted. No one sits down and decides to create a pidgin. It comes into being through the interaction of large numbers of people who speak several different languages and who have little reason or opportunity to learn another one of the many languages spoken in the contact situation.

      Harris (1986) summarizes the three conditions needed for emergence of a pidgin language: 

     (1) lack of effective bilingualism, 

     (2) need to communicate, and 

     (3) restricted access to the sasaran language.

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