What are pidgin languages?

Throughout history, people have moved from their birthplaces to others. With the trip, they take their religion, their customs and, of course, their language. It is possible that the mother tongue is one of the identity elements, if not the main one, that acquires the most importance for any person and that links it to their culture.

However, it often happens that when you arrive in a new place, the people who have ended up there do not speak the same language. This is a problem, since if they don't speak a common language, how are they going to understand each other?

Fortunately, the cognitive flexibility of people helps their survival, even in unfavorable situations, and they try by all possible means to communicate with others.

Pidgin languages ​​are the result of these contacts between people who speak different languages. but, for various reasons, they need to communicate, even if it is in a very basic and simple way. In this article we are going to address the fascinating world of these languages ​​and how they arise, as well as talk about some examples.

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What are pidgin languages?

The word pidgin refers to a language that is the product of contact between two or more ethnic groups with different languages, who have established contact living in the same place but do not share the same language. By not sharing the same language, nor learning the other's, these groups of people end up managing to understand each other, mixing words and grammatical structures from various languages.

Along the history, Pidgins have arisen in various contexts, the most common being commercial exchanges., where two merchants, coming from culturally very different regions, somehow need to agree while they make their transactions and, to facilitate this end, both learn a few words of the other language that are useful to them in such a way. situation.

Usually, pidgins are very simple communication systems, with a very limited vocabulary and phonology. In addition, they do not usually evolve in the same way as natural languages, as Spanish, Catalan, English or Russian have done.

As these languages ​​are the product of learning a few words and expressions from another language and adapting them to their own language, they are not usually viewed socially and are subjected to a very strong diglossia, acting as dominated languages.

Where does the word come from?

The origin of the term is obscure, but most linguists agree that the word pidgin product of a Chinese deformation of the English word business (business), and its origins date back to the XIX century. Chinese and English speakers made contact in Guangzhou, China throughout the 17th century, forming a mixed language of both languages ​​which was baptized with the name of 'pidgin', given that its function was to allow business between English and asians.

Over time, the word pidgin, which originally referred to this half-Chinese language, half English, came to mean any mix between two or more languages ​​simplified and with little complexity.

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How are these languages ​​formed?

Normally, for a pidgin to form, certain conditions need to be met. The main one is that people belonging to different language groups maintain contact over a long period of time.

The second condition is that the two or more language groups have a need to communicate, whether for business or some kind of power relationship.

Finally, the third necessary condition for a pidgin to form is that linguistic groups do not have a language that serves as a link to communicate with each other, or that the languages ​​of the two communities have a relatively low level of mutual understanding.

Although most of the community of philologists agrees that these three conditions must be met, there are those who say, as is the case of Keith Whinnom, that for it to be To form a pidgin, at least three languages ​​are necessary, with two being the languages ​​spoken by the two ethnic groups plus a third dominant language that would serve as the superstratum.

What the speakers do in these cases is to learn, in very broad terms, the dominant language. As it is not their mother tongue nor do they have the means to learn it in good conditions, people memorize only those words and expressions that will serve them in a certain context, such as terms related to business or the situation in which the dominant language is useful.

For this reason, pidgins are not seen as complete languages, because they are really very simplified versions of a natural language. Phonetics are simplified, especially since you do not intend to speak like a native of the dominant language. The grammar is not overly complex and the vocabulary is hardly useful for a narrow range of situations.

In the case that the pidgin has arisen from three languages ​​(the two mother tongues of the language groups together with the dominant language), the vocabulary is usually taken from the dominant language, while the phonetics and grammar are typical of the mother tongues.

What differentiates them from creole languages?

One of the most notable features of pidgin languages ​​is that they They are not the mother tongue of anyone, but the second language of those who have been developing it.. It is the result of two or more linguistic groups having established contact with each other and have needed to communicate in order to carry out some type of interaction.

But sometimes, especially when these ethnic groups take root in the same territory after many decades of coexistence, the new generations that have been born and raised there begin to speak naturally and as their mother tongue these pidgin.

So that, Pidgins begin to have their first native speakers, who did not use the language only for commercial interactions or for those situations in which it was originally invented. Like any natural language, the speakers of this language will use it for various situations: the home, the school, among friends, with those at work... with people who will be of the same generation and will also speak that same pidgin.

This is when the pidgin has acquired a greater degree of complexity, because its own speakers have searched for ways to fill in the vocabulary and grammatical gaps that the pidgin language showed to the principle.

So that, the main difference between pidgin and creole is that the latter has a higher level of complexity, can be used in a wide range of situations, as well as being the mother tongue of a linguistic community, the result of contact between two or more languages.

Some examples

Movements of human groups have given rise to many pidgins. Although this word comes from the 19th century, there is evidence of this type of language since ancient times.

One of the oldest pidgins was the well-known lingua franca, used at the time of the crusades.. Crusaders and traders destined for places to fight Islam came from many parts of Europe, with the Franks predominating among them. That is why many words of the Franconian language were learned by these people and that is how they managed to understand each other.

It should be said that this famous pidgin acquired such importance that today the expression lingua franca refers to the language used by two people whose mother tongues are not the same but who know how to speak one that allows them to communicate with each other they. For example, English between a German and a Japanese or Spanish between a Catalan and a Basque.

And, taking advantage of the fact that we have mentioned Basque, let's talk about a very curious medieval pidgin, a mixture of the Basque language and distant Icelandic. The Basque-Icelandic pidgin arose during the 17th century, a mixture of Basque, Icelandic and, to a lesser extent, Romance words.. This pidgin arose as a result of the Basque whalers going to hunt cetaceans off the coast of Iceland and needing to speak in a very basic way with the inhabitants of the island. To this day, hardly a few words of this pidgin are known.

Spanglish, half English and half Spanish, is a particular case, since it is not a specific pidgin, but a set of dialects, pidgins and creole languages ​​whose origin dates back to contact between English-speakers and Spanish speakers. Given the number of speakers that these two natural languages ​​have and the ease of finding resources to learn them, Today this Spanglish has progressively disappeared to be replaced by real bilingualism between the two languages.

Pidgins have existed in practically all countries, and if we talked about the most interesting cases we would not reach the end of this article, given that every imaginable language has at some point in its history had its pidgin version: Russian-Norwegian, Basque-Algonquian, Broken Slavey, Black German from Namibia…

As you can see, the world of pidgins is fascinating and, due to their characteristics, there are many conlangers or creators of artificial languages ​​who have ventured to create their own languages ​​from this guy.

Bibliographic references:

• Baker, P. (1994), "Pidgins", in Arends, Jacques; Muijsken, Pieter; Smith, Norval (eds.), Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction, John Benjamins, 26–39
• Hymes, D. (1971), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, Cambridge University Press,
• Sebba, M. (1997), Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles, MacMillan,
• Thomason, S. G.; Kaufmann, T. (1988), Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics, Berkeley: University of California Press,
• Todd, Loreto (1990), Pidgins and Creoles, Routledge,