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.
Norfuk or Norf'k is the language spoken on Norfolk Island by the local residents. It is a blend of 18th-century English and Tahitian, originally introduced by Pitkern-speaking settlers from the Pitcairn Islands. Along with English, it is the co-official language of Norfolk Island.
Hawaiian Pidgin is an English-based creole language spoken in Hawaiʻi. An estimated 600,000 residents of Hawaiʻi speak Hawaiian Pidgin natively and 400,000 speak it as a second language. Although English and Hawaiian are the two official languages of the state of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian Pidgin is spoken by many residents of Hawaiʻi in everyday conversation and is often used in advertising targeted toward locals in Hawaiʻi. In the Hawaiian language, it is called ʻōlelo paʻi ʻai – "hard taro language". Hawaiian Pidgin was first recognized as a language by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2015. However, Hawaiian Pidgin is still thought of as lower status than the Hawaiian and English languages.
Pitkern, also known as Pitcairn-Norfolk or Pitcairnese, is a language spoken on Pitcairn and Norfolk islands. It is a mixture of English and Tahitian, and has been given many classifications by scholars, including cant, patois, and Atlantic creole. Although spoken on Pacific Ocean islands, it has been described as an Atlantic or semi-Atlantic creole due to the lack of connections with other English-based creoles of the Pacific. There are fewer than 50 speakers on Pitcairn Island, a number which has been steadily decreasing since 1971.
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.
Nigerian Pidgin, also known simply as Pidgin or Broken or as Naijá in scholarship, is an English-based creole language spoken as a lingua franca across Nigeria. The language is sometimes referred to as Pijin or Vernacular. First used by British colonists and slave traders to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century, in the 2010s, a common orthography was developed for Pidgin which has been gaining significant popularity in giving the language a harmonized writing system.
In linguistics, a chroneme is an abstract phonological suprasegmental feature used to signify contrastive differences in the length of speech sounds. Both consonants and vowels can be viewed as displaying this features. The noun chroneme is derived from Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos) 'time', and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme or morpheme. Two words with different meaning that are spoken exactly the same except for length of one segment are considered a minimal pair. The term was coined by the British phonetician Daniel Jones to avoid using the term phoneme to characterize a feature above the segmental level.
Kalasha is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Kalash people, in the Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. There are an estimated 7,466 speakers of Kalasha accirding to the 2023 Census of Pakistan. It is an endangered language and there is an ongoing language shift to Khowar.
An English-based creole language is a creole language for which English was the lexifier, meaning that at the time of its formation the vocabulary of English served as the basis for the majority of the creole's lexicon. Most English creoles were formed in British colonies, following the great expansion of British naval military power and trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The main categories of English-based creoles are Atlantic and Pacific.
West African Pidgin English, also known as Guinea Coast Creole English, is a West African pidgin language lexified by English and local African languages. It originated as a language of commerce between British and African slave traders during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. As of 2017, about 75 million people in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Equatorial Guinea used the language.
Waigali, also known as Nuristani Kalasha, is a language spoken by about 10,000 Nuristani people of the Waigal Valley in the Nuristan Province of Afghanistan. The native name is Kalaṣa-alâ 'Kalasha-language'. "Waigali" refers to the dialect of the Väi people of the upper part of the Waigal Valley, centered on the town of Waigal, which is distinct from the dialect of the Čima-Nišei people who inhabit the lower valley. The word 'Kalasha' is the native ethnonym for all the speakers of the southern Nuristani languages.
Kannauji is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Kannauj region of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Kannauji is closely related to Hindustani, with a lexical similarity of 83–94% with Hindi. Some consider it to be a dialect of Hindustani, whereas others consider it a separate Western Hindi language. Kannauji has at least 9.5 million native speakers as of 2001.
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.
For the Korean language, South Korea mainly uses a combination of East Asian and European punctuation, while North Korea uses more of the East Asian punctuation style.
Native languages of Oceania fall into three major geographic groups:
Kyowa-go or Xieheyu is either of two pidginized languages, one Japanese-based and one Mandarin-based, that were spoken in Manchukuo in the 1930s and 1940s. They are also known as Kōa-go, Nichiman-go, and Daitōa-go.
Pidgin Madam is a pidgin language that is a mixture of Lebanese Arabic and traditional Sinhalese. Since the oil boom of the 1970s, several forms of Pidgin Arabic, such as Gulf Pidgin Arabic, evolved to become a popular form of communication due to foreign workers coming from South and South Eastern Asian countries. These workers tend to live and work in major cities.
Japanese-based creole languages or simply Japanese Creoles are creole languages for which Japanese is the lexifier. This article also contains information on Japanese pidgin languages, contact languages that lack native speakers.
