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date: 10 February 2025

Pidgins and Creoles With Germanic Lexifier Languageslocked

Pidgins and Creoles With Germanic Lexifier Languageslocked

  • Peter BakkerPeter BakkerAarhus University

Summary

There are pidgins with Dutch, English, German, and Scandinavian lexifiers, and creoles with Dutch (three), German (one), and English (dozens) lexifiers. Pidgins and creoles have been documented in all parts of the world. They have developed in contact between Europeans and indigenous populations, often as part of the colonial enterprise. Pidgins are often associated with trade and initial phases of contact, and they do not display all design features of natural languages, whereas creoles tend to be mother tongues and complex natural languages. Pidgins that have developed into creoles may maintain the original label “pidgin” (e.g., Tok Pisin < Talk Pidgin), even though they have developed into full-fledged complex languages and hence creoles, or pidgincreoles. Germanic-lexifier pidgins share properties with other pidgins, such as invariant forms for nouns and verbs, personal pronouns, optional tense marking, lack of aspect marking, and a limited lexicon. Germanic creoles likewise share properties with other creoles, such as preverbal marking of aspect, mood, and/or tense, the development of optional plural marking, and the presence of definite and indefinite articles. Germanic pidgins, however, often show articles, whereas other pidgins rarely display them. Creole languages worldwide share a number of properties, in that similar grammatical categories developed independently from one another, after having lost most of the grammatical system of the lexifiers. Most creole languages are associated with forced population displacement (blackbirding, slavery), but the German creole Unserdeutsch of Papua New Guinea is associated with a school. The three Dutch-lexifier creoles came into being in Guyana and the Virgin Islands, and they all developed independently. Berbice Dutch Creole is quite deviant, and several theories have been launched to explain the presence of a significant component from one specific Nigerian language, Eastern Ijo. English-lexifier creoles are conveniently divided into two groups, Pacific creoles and Atlantic creoles. Both groups seem to go back to one source, judged by the quantity of shared lexical and grammatical similarities that are so specific that they cannot be due to independent processes of creolization. There are also mixed languages and other contact phenomena involving Germanic languages, and a full list of these is provided with selected references.

Subjects

  • Historical Linguistics
  • Language Families/Areas/Contact
  • Sociolinguistics

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