ABSTRACT
The question of comparability of results from pidgin/creole studies to studies of "ordinary" language contact has been raised by a number of earlier publications, but has hardly been resolved. Unfortunately, most pidgin/creole specialists have their hands full keeping up with studies within this subfield and do not have extensive experience with other forms of language mixing, while specialists in "ordinary" mixing (European contact zones, American immigrant languages or European Gastarbeiter languages, American Indian acculturation studies, etc.) tend not to have much exposure to pidgins and Creoles. Nor is it particularly easy to find the information one needs for synthesizing purposes in libraries; for example, there are hardly any decent monographs on mixing involving small neighbouring tribal groups, and the situation is not much better concerning (post-)colonial contact zones (which is, of course, why the present case study was undertaken). The situation is not helped by the widely publicized disagreements among pidgin/ Creole specialists as to the basic dynamics of these speech varieties, nor by less visible but none the less present diagreements among students of "ordinary" language contact as to the nature of code-switching and borrowing. I will therefore confine my attention here to considering some relatively uncontroversial aspects of pidgin/creole research on the one hand, and the present case study of language contact on the other.
