#englang

  • is nobody’s native language but arises when two speakers share no common language so develop a form of communication that is somewhat unstructured.

In some locations, the children of mixed couples learn the creole as their first language. Thus, a language is changes from a pidgin to an ‘extended pidgin’  and then to a creole language.

Superstrate Language :: provides the bulk of the vocabulary and is more prestigious (also called the ‘lexifier language’)

Substrate Language :: provide a few words but may have significant influence on the grammatical structure.

Extended Pidgin :: a pidgin which never creolised, but it is standardised and used in all domains, aka an expanded pidgin

copula :: a part of speech which links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement such as the word ‘is’ in the sentence “The sky is blue.” All copulas are verbs. state of being

clefting :: when a sentence is rearranged such that some element is moved to a different clause, usually to add emphasis

Pidgin and Creole Studies

Pidgin and creole languages have been studied extensively in linguistics:

  1. Sociolinguistic aspects
  2. Grammaticalisation
  3. The innateness hypothesis