A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 313
and creoles. 40 The linguistic and sociological issues that are raised by these varieties of
language in daily contact have already been suggested with respect to Jamaican English.
The theoretical interest to linguists, however, goes even deeper, because the study of
pidgin and creole languages may give clues to a better understanding of a number of
interrelated problems: the analyticsynthetic distinction, which we have considered in the
development of Middle English; the idea of a “continuum” among varieties of a single
language and between closely related languages; the acquisition of language by children;
the language-processing abilities of the human brain; and the origin of language. Because
English-based creoles are so numerous and so widespread, the study of present-day
English in all its worldwide varieties is useful not only in itself but also in the
illumination that it gives to some of these most basic issues in language and cognition. Of
the approximately 125 pidgin and creole languages throughout the world, spoken by
more than nine million people, about thirty-five are English-based. 41 Historical settlement
and colonization produced two major groups of English-based creoles, an Atlantic group
and a Pacific group. The Atlantic creoles were established in West Africa and the
Caribbean area mainly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and include
varieties in Sierra Leone (Krio), Liberia, Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana in northern
South America), Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica, and other West
African countries and Caribbean islands. The Pacific group, established largely during
the nineteenth century, includes varieties in Hawaii, Papua New Guinea (Tok Pisin), and
other islands.
The lexical impoverishment of pidgin and creole language often results in periphrastic
and metaphorical expressions to designate things and events which in established
language are signified by unrelated morphemes. The single word hum in English is
expressed in Tok Pisin (literally ‘talk pidgin’) by the circumlocution, singsing long taim
maus i pas (‘to sing when the mouth is closed’). English ‘grass’ in Tok Pisin is gras;
‘moustache’ is mausgras; ‘beard’ is gras bilong fes (‘grass on face’); ‘hair’ is gras bilong
hed; ‘eyebrow’ is gras antap longai (‘grass on top along eye’); ‘weed’ is gras nogut. In
these pidgin expressions, prepositions and word order rather than inflectional endings
signal the grammatical and semantic relationships. 42 The preposition
40
A creole, like a pidgin, is based on two or more languages, but unlike a pidgin it is learned as a
native language, and it contains fuller syntax and vocabulary.
41
For helpful surveys of pidgins and creoles, see Ian F. Hancock, “Appendix: Repertory of Pidgin
and Creole Languages,” in Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, ed. Albert Valdman (Bloomington, IN,
1977), pp. 362–91; and John Holm, Pidgins and Creoles, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1988–1989),
especially, for English-based creoles, 11.405–551.
42
See Suzanne Romaine, Pidgin and Creole Languages (London, 1988), pp. 26–36.