When you think of creole languages, you might think of Louisiana Creole, Haitian Creole or Jamaican Patois.
But what if I told you that according to some linguists, I'm speaking a creole language to you right now, English.
We already know that English borrows from everybody, but can it really be considered a creole? I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords." To learn more about pidgin and creole languages, I spoke with Dr. Keisha Wiel, a Creolist and linguistic anthropologist who is also a speaker of Papiamentu, the Creole language spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, the ABC islands of the Dutch Caribbean.
Can you define a creole and a pidgin language for me?
Creole languages are basically languages that were created by different communities of speakers who came together and needed to interact with each other.
For the most part, we think mostly about like colonialism for example, and those languages sort of persevered.
Pidgins are similar in that sense, but they're not as are what many linguists would say.
They're not as "well-developed" as creole languages. It's sort of like basic communication within pidgins.
Pidgins typically developed in situations of consistent trade or colonization or, as was often the case, regions where there was the enslavement of people.
They often had limited vocabularies and simplified grammar, sufficient to fulfill their communication purposes.
