creole

1.What is the relationship between Pidgin, Creole and lingua franca?

Lingua franca is a common language, used for communication between groups of people, each speaking a different language. The lingua franca could be an internationally used language (e.g. English)and it could be the native language of one of the groups.

When sellers and buyers wanted or needed to trade in an unfamiliar part of the world where there was no established lingua franca,They will have to invent a makeshift language which is called a pidgin. A pidgin is a system of communication which has grown up among people who do not share a common language, but who want to talk to each other, or usually for reasons of trade. Such languages typically have a limited vocabulary, a reduced or simplified grammatical structure, and a narrow range of purposes, compared to the languages from which they derived. They are used only when they need to be, as a “contact language” in circumstances where communication would not otherwise be possible. They are the native languages of no one. Pidgins are restricted languages, a mixture of languages. Pidgins were not as a rule written down, they changed rapidly, they were quickly learned by those who needed them ,and when trading stopped they were discarded and soon forgotten. There must have been many pidgins of which we have no record.. They are evidence of human inventiveness, have very low prestige.

In some rather special circumstances a pidgin is adopted by a group of speakers engaged in all sorts of human activities, not just in trade. As they make use of it they extend the number of functions it can have . That means more vocabulary. It also means extending the grammar and inventing or, more often, adapting a writing system that will make another set of functions possible. The pidgin rapidly becomes a language----useful for that group of users in all the ways that language is useful. In this way contact between different languages produces another language ,related to both, and different from either. The resulting language is called a creole. In due course some of them begin to use it as a mother tongue. creoles and pidgins are both mixed language---usually mixtures of languages belonging to different families.Creole can be used as national language ,but pidgins can’t . A pidgin has no more than a restricted range of functions---restricted to buying and selling or to the giving and taking of orders. Creolization happens when it is taught and learned as mother tongue, and then it has the rang of language functions that a speech community, however small, must have.