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

However, it often happens that when you arrive at a new place, the people who have ended up there do not speak the same language. This is a problem, because if they do not speak a common language, how will they understand each other?

Fortunately, the cognitive flexibility of people helps them to survive, even in unfavorable situations, and tries by all possible means to be able to communicate with others.

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

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 by living together 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.

Throughout history, pidgin have emerged in various contexts, the most common being commercial exchanges , where two merchants, coming from very different cultural regions, need to agree in some way while doing their transactions and, to facilitate this, both learn a few words of the other language that are useful in such a situation.

Pidgin are usually very simple communication systems, with a very limited vocabulary and phonology . Moreover, 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 one’s own, they are not usually socially well regarded and are subject 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 is a product of a Chinese deformation of the English word business, and its origins date back to the 19th century. Chinese and English speakers made contact in Canton, China throughout the 17th century, forming a language that was a mixture of both languages and was named ‘pidgin’, as its function was to enable business between the English and Asians.

Over time, the word pidgin, which originally referred to this half-Chinese, half-English language, came to mean any mixture between two or more languages in a simplified and uncomplicated way.

How are these languages formed?

Normally, for a pidgin to be formed, certain conditions must be met. The main one is that people belonging to different language groups keep in touch over a long period of time .

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

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

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

What speakers do in these cases is learn, in very broad terms, the dominant language. As it is not their mother tongue and they do not have the means to learn it under good conditions, people memorize only those words and expressions that will be useful in a certain context , such as terms related to business or to the situation in which the dominant language is useful.

For this reason, pidgin are not seen as complete languages, because they are really very simplified versions of a natural language. The phonetics are simplified, especially since one does not intend to speak like a native of the dominant language. The grammar is not too complex and the vocabulary is rarely useful in a narrow range of situations.

In the case that pidgin has emerged 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 makes them different from Creole languages?

One of the most remarkable characteristics of Pidgin languages is that are not anyone’s mother tongue, but they are the second language of those who have developed it . This is the result of two or more language groups having established contact with each other and needing to communicate in order to be able to carry out some kind of interaction.

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

Thus, pidgin begins to have its first native speakers , who will not use the language only for business interactions or for those situations in which it was originally invented. Like any natural language, speakers of this language will use it for various situations: home, school, among friends, with those at work… with people who will be from the same generation and will also speak the same pidgin.

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

Thus, the main difference between pidgin and Creole is that the latter has a higher level of complexity , it can be used in a wide range of situations, besides being the mother tongue of a language community, resulting from contact between two or more languages.

Some examples

Human group movements have given rise to many pidgin. Although this word comes from the 19th century, there is evidence of this type of language since very ancient times.

One of the oldest pidgin was the well-known lingua franca, used in the time of the Crusades . The crusaders and merchants destined for places to fight against Islam came from many parts of Europe, with the Franks being the predominant ones among them. That is why many words of the Frankish 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. 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 the Basque language, let’s talk about a very curious medieval pidgin, a mixture of the Basque language and the distant Icelandic language. Basque-Icelandic pidgin emerged during the 17th century, a mixture of Basque, Icelandic and, to a lesser extent, Romanesque words . This pidgin arose as a result of Basque whalers going to hunt cetaceans off the coast of Iceland and needed to talk in a very basic way with the inhabitants of the island. Today, only a few words are known about this pidgin.

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 the contact between English and Spanish speakers. Given the number of speakers of these two natural languages and the ease of finding resources to learn them, nowadays this Spanglish has been progressively disappearing to be replaced by real bilingualism between both languages.

Pidgins have existed in practically all countries, and if we were to talk about the most interesting cases we would not reach the end of this article, given that every imaginable language has had its pidgin version at some point in its history: Russian-Norwegian, Basque-Algonquin, broken slavey, black German from Namibia…

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

Bibliographic references:

  • Bakker, 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.; Kaufman, T. (1988), Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics, Berkeley: University of California Press,
  • Todd, Loreto (1990), Pidgins and Creoles, Routledge,