A pidgin, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.
Liberian English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Liberia. Four such varieties exist:
A Spanish creole, or Spanish-based creole language, is a creole language for which Spanish serves as its substantial lexifier.
Jamaican Patois is an English-based creole language with influences from West African and other languages, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. Words or slang from Jamaican Patois can be heard in other Caribbean countries, the United Kingdom, New York City and Miami in the United States, and Toronto, Canada. The majority of non-English words in Patois derive from the West African Akan language. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language.
A mixed language, also referred to as a hybrid language, contact language, or fusion language, is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole or pidgin language in that, whereas creoles/pidgins arise where speakers of many languages acquire a common language, a mixed language typically arises in a population that is fluent in both of the source languages.
Chinese Pidgin English is a pidgin language lexically based on English, but influenced by a Chinese substratum. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, there was also Chinese Pidgin English spoken in Cantonese-speaking portions of China. Chinese Pidgin English is heavily influenced by a number of varieties of Chinese with variants arising among different provinces.
Simultaneous communication, SimCom, or sign supported speech (SSS) is a technique sometimes used by deaf, hard-of-hearing or hearing sign language users in which both a spoken language and a manual variant of that language are used simultaneously. While the idea of communicating using two modes of language seems ideal in a hearing/deaf setting, in practice the two languages are rarely relayed perfectly. Often the native language of the user is the language that is strongest, while the non-native language degrades in clarity. In an educational environment this is particularly difficult for deaf children as a majority of teachers who teach the deaf are hearing. Results from surveys taken indicate that communication for students is indeed signing, and that the signing leans more toward English rather than ASL.
A Fable is a 1954 novel written by the American author William Faulkner. He spent more than a decade and tremendous effort on it, and aspired for it to be "the best work of my life and maybe of my time". It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Historically, it can be seen as a precursor to Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
A contact sign language, or contact sign, is a variety or style of language that arises from contact between deaf individuals using a sign language and hearing individuals using an oral language. Contact languages also arise between different sign languages, although the term pidgin rather than contact sign is used to describe such phenomena.
Belizean Creole is an English-based creole language spoken by the Belizean Creole people. It is closely related to Miskito Coastal Creole, San Andrés-Providencia Creole, and Vincentian Creole.
Jonathan Edwards was an American theologian and linguist.
A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of late with that of wait or eight. Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait with that of eight. This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late, a second diaphoneme for words like wait, and a third diaphoneme for words like eight.
Japanese Pidgin English is any of several English-based pidgins spoken or influenced by the Japanese.
Bamboo English was a Japanese pidgin-English jargon developed after World War II that was spoken between American military personnel and Japanese on US military bases in occupied Japan. It has been thought to be a pidgin, though analysis of the language's features indicates it to be a pre-pidgin or a jargon rather than a stable pidgin.
Nativization is the process through which in the virtual absence of native speakers, a language undergoes new phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic and stylistic changes, and gains new native speakers. This happens necessarily when a second language used by adult parents becomes the native language of their children. Nativization has been of particular interest to linguists, and to creolists more specifically, where the second language concerned is a pidgin.
Nigerian English, also known as Nigerian Standard English, is a variety of English spoken in Nigeria. Based on British and American English, the dialect contains various loanwords and collocations from the native languages of Nigeria, due to the need to express concepts specific to the cultures of ethnic groups in the nation.
Nootka Jargon or Nootka Lingo was a pidginized form of the Wakashan language Nuučaan̓uł, used for trade purposes by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, when communicating with persons who did not share any common language. It was most notably in use during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was likely one precursor to Chinook Wawa, in Chinook Wawa's post-contact-form. A small number of words from Nuučaan̓uł form an important portion of the lexical core of Chinook Wawa. This was true, both in Chinook Wawa's post-contact pidgin phase, and its latter creole form, and remains true in contemporary Chinuk Wawa language usage.
Micronesian Pidgin is an English-based pidgin language spoken in nineteenth-century Micronesia. It may have been related to Melanesian Pidgin English, due to prolonged language contact via migrant workers from Melanesia, shared lexicon and similar grammatical innovations.
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) is a descriptive grammar of English written by Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan, first published by Longman in 1999. It is an authoritative description of modern English, a successor to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (ComGEL) published in 1985 and a predecessor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGEL) published in 2002. The authors and some reviewers consider it a complement rather than a replacement of the former since it follows – with few exceptions – the grammatical framework and concepts from ComGEL, which is also corroborated by the fact that one of LGSWE's authors, Geoffrey Leech, is also a co-author of ComGEL.
