On pidgins and other restricted linguistic systems

In discussions on language genesis and evolution, ‘‘degraded forms of language’’ are widely held to provide a primary source for proposing hypotheses, and among such systems, pidgin languages are taken to provide one of the main sources of evidence: They are believed to exhibit properties that shed light on earlier forms of human languages.¹ Accordingly, it has been claimed that human language began like an early stage pidgin without syntax (Calvin and Bickerton 2000: 137) or must have had characteristics of (unstable) pidgins (Hurford 2003: 53), and Bickerton (1990, 1995, 2005) and Givo̒n (1995, 2002a, 2005) relate pidgins to what they call, respectively, ‘‘protolanguage’’ or ‘‘proto-grammar’’:

Are degraded forms of language (Jackendoff 1999) or restricted linguistic systems (Botha 2003b, 2005, 2005/6) really windows that may shed light on presumed earlier stages of language evolution, as has widely been assumed or implied (e.g. SankoV 1979; Bickerton 1990, 1995; Romaine 1992b: 234; Aitchison 1996; Jackendoff 1999: 275; Comrie 2000: 1000; Calvin and Bickerton 2000: 137; Givo ´n 2002a, 2002b: 35, 2005; Hurford 2003: 53; Bakker 2003; Botha 2005/6)? We will be dealing with this question by looking in more detail at one kind of such languages or systems. Pidgin languages (in short: pidgins) are paradigm instances of restricted linguistic systems, but they are also a heterogeneous type of language (Bakker 1995: 39). The social and linguistics pace covered by the term ‘‘pidgin’’ is commonly classified into jargons (‘‘unstable’’ or ‘‘rudimentary pidgins’’), stable pidgins, and extended or expanded pidgins (or pidgin/creoles)—a classification that has never been properly defined (Philip Baker, p.c.). Extended pidgins are either first languages for some of their speakers or the main language of a community of speakers; all other categories are spoken essentially only as second languages. In discussions on language evolution, pidgins tend to be described as representing fairly ‘‘structureless’’ means of communication that are formed ad hoc and do not exhibit any marked degree of consistency—in other words, as something commonly associated with ‘‘jargons’’. As we hope to demonstrate, such a description is hardly appropriate when one looks at a wider range of pidgins, especially pidgins that developed in Africa (Heine 1973).

In a number of relevant studies, pidgins are treated in tandem with creoles. In fact, it is frequently not easy to trace a clear boundary between the two, and Mufwene (1996) uses the term ‘‘creole’’ in a wider sense to include pidgins that serve as vernaculars or primary means of communication for at least a portion of their speakers. For the purposes of the present discussion we will keep the two apart and ignore creoles and the issues concerning the relationship between the two, including all the controversies surrounding creole studies (see, for example, Mufwene 1996; McWhorter 1998; DeGraff 2000). As Bakker (1995) has shown, there are a number of structural properties that justify keeping pidgins and creoles apart.

On the basis of a survey of pidgins in different parts of the world (Heine 1979; Romaine 1992a; Boretzky 1983; Tosco and Owens 1993; Holm 2000; Bakker 1995, 2003), we use the term ‘‘pidgin’’ as a relative notion, meaning that pidgins are defined with reference to the languages from which they are historically derived, that is, their respective source (or ‘‘lexifier’’) languages: They are reduced languages that result from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common (Holm 2000: 5). Thus, English is the source language of Nigerian Pidgin, Ghanaian Pidgin, Solomons Pijin, Tok Pisin, Bislama, etc., while Zulu (or Nguni) is the source language of Fanagalo, and Kikongo that of Kituba. Except for extended pidgins, pidgins have essentially no native speakers, and in the development from their source languages many of them have undergone what, following Romaine (1992b: 232), we will call a ‘‘stripping’’ process that involves most or all of the changes listed in (1). Note that this process tends to be confined to the early stages of pidginization, in their more advanced stages, pidgins develop new grammatical structures; we will turn to this issue in “The rise of new functional categories”.

(1) The ‘‘stripping’’ process of pidginization

a. In phonology, the number of phonemic distinctions is reduced, distinctions in vowel length and tone tend to be given up, and consonant clusters tend to be simplified.

b. Inflectional and derivational morphology tends to be drastically reduced or lost.

c. Grammatical distinctions of gender, number, valency, and of tense, aspect, and modality tend to be lost, typically in that order (see Bakker 2003).

d. Mechanisms of clause subordination are also likely to disappear.

e. Words tend to become multifunctional.

f. The lexicon shrinks to a fraction of the size it has in the source language.

The result of pidginization is a form of language having little affixal morphology, hence it has hardly any distinction between morphemes and words, which means that words tend to be unanalyzable entities. Grammatical functions are likely to be expressed either by lexical material or by word order, or else are not formally expressed; but word order is flexible (Bakker 1995: 31). There are only a limited number of lexical items, and context plays a central role in utterance construction and interpretation. With these generalizations we are ignoring the many particular properties exhibited by individual instances of pidgins (see below). Pidgins may show some unexpected properties; for example, a number of pidgins have been found to have affixes separating nouns from verbs (Bakker 1995: 32); the Arabic-based pidgin Turku of north-central Africa distinguishes morphologically between verbs (-u) and nouns, whereas the varieties of Arabic that provided the source of Turku lack such a morphological distinction (Tosco and Owens 1993).

In spite of such observations, we do not propose a synchronic-typological definition of pidgins, for the following reason: Most of the structural properties exhibited by pidgins can also be found in some form or other in languages that clearly are not pidgins. For example, pidgins are commonly considered to have only a minimum of inflection and derivation, but this also applies to many languages of West Africa or Southeast Asia, including Chinese; note further that all pidgins known so far have at least some derivational morphology (Bakker 1995: 32). Much the same applies to the restricted phonological inventories that tend to characterize pidgins: There are also ‘‘fully-fledged’’ languages that have severely restricted phoneme inventories, and Bakker (2003) observes that those of pidgins are not necessarily smaller than the smallest inventories of the languages spoken as first languages by pidgin speakers. To be sure, the size of vocabulary characterizing pidgins amounts only to a fraction of what can be found in ‘‘fully fledged’’ languages; however, there are also other linguistic communication systems that clearly are not pidgins but have a restricted lexicon. One salient sociolinguistic characteristic of pidgins can be seen in the fact that their use tends to be restricted to relatively few domains of social interaction, such as trade or labor; but again, this also applies to other linguistic systems, such as lingua francas that are not pidgins.

¹ We are grateful to Philip Baker and Peter Bakker for the critical comments here.

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Kenya Pidgin Swahili (KPS)

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Language-like abilities in animals

Discussion Some cognitive abilities of animals Problems

Taxonomic concepts