Pidgin, Creole, Lingua Franca

      Throughout the course of geographic history, exploration and trade have caused various populations of people to come into contact with each other. Because these people were of different cultures and thus spoke different languages, communication was often difficult. Over the decades though, languages changed to reflect such interactions and groups sometimes developed lingua francas and pidgins.

A. PIDGIN

A pidgin language is a lingua franca which has no native speakers. Whereas most vernaculars (Ethnicity language) have a history and heritage like a nation or people, in a family of languages, a pidgin is spoken among speakers of different languages who need a common language to communicate.  But then so is a world or regional language.

A pidgin develops where there is a predominance of non-native speakers using that language among themselves, who speak the language in a manner determined by their mother tongues, limiting intelligibility with native speakers of the "inter-language." A pidgin is a simplified version of one language that combines the vocabulary of a number of different languages.

Pidgins are often just used between members of different cultures to communicate for things like trade. A pidgin is distinct from a lingua franca in that members of the same populations rarely use it to talk to one another. It is also important to note that because pidgins develop out of sporadic contact between people and is a simplification of different languages, pidgins generally have no native speakers.

There are several pidgins of Swahili in East Africa.  Speakers of standard Swahili can sometimes understand the pidgin speakers, but pidgin speakers (who call their language Swahili also) often cannot understand the standard speaker.

B. LINGUA FRANCA

A lingua franca is a language used by different populations to communicate when they do not share a common language.. The term "lingua franca" classifies a speech form by its function.  Such a language is similar to a pidgin, in that it is used as an interlanguage, often without any predominant native-speaker community to serve as a "standard" referent.  However, it is often a variety of a vernacular language, whose standard referent is a native-speaker community in another locale.

Generally, a lingua franca is a third language that is distinct from the native language of both parties involved in the communication. Sometimes as the language becomes more widespread, the native populations of an area will speak the lingua franca to each other as well.

This is the case with "English" in Kenya.  It has some "nonstandard" features, which can clearly be accounted for by features or usages in the local languages, but it remains clearly only a variant of the standard language stream.  Swahili also fits this description.  Nonnative speakers outnumber native speakers by about 400 to 1. Yet the preferred reference form of Swahili is the language as spoken by a native Swahili community, supported by a large literature.  Learning Swahili certainly puts the foreigner closer to the African, but how close compared with the vernaculars in the home?

Other lingua francas used in Africa are Lingala, varieties of Bobo and varieties of Fulani in various countries.  Various Arabic languages also serve as lingua francas in certain regions.

C. CREOLE

Creole languages are pidgins that have acquired native speakers. When a form of pidgin becomes the home language of a second generation, it is called a creole.  It takes on the social character of an ethnic language, and may become a vernacular.  This often occurs in urban settings, so a creole may have a literature and be consciously "developed" by its speakers into a full culture-bearing medium.

It would usually be classified by comparative linguists according to the structural features.  Thus a French creole might be classed as an Atlantic, not an Indo-European, language.  In Nigeria, it appears that "Pidgin" is actually a creole.  We determined that it is a viable social and ministry language after learning a vernacular.  Might it be considered as a first language?



References Link:

http://strategyleader.org/langlearn/pidginscreolesslrk.html
http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/linguafranca.htm