ABSTRACT
Pidgins and creoles are languages which result from language contact under specific kinds of social and historical circumstances, leading to the development of a new language which is different from any of the languages involved in the earlier stages of the contact (the ‘input languages’). Pidgins and creoles are commonly described as less complex morphologically and syntactically than the input languages, and as having smaller lexicons which are also more transparent semantically and morphologically (for more detail, see Mühlhäusler 1986; Holm 1988; Romaine 1988; Todd 1990; Sebba 1997). It is also frequently the case that the pidgin or creole lexicon, in particular its core vocabulary, is mainly derived from just one of the languages involved in the contact. Such a language is referred to as the lexifier and is usually the language of the group which predominated in terms of economic and political power, though rarely in numbers, during the original period of contact. This chapter is devoted to English-lexicon pidgins and creoles, which by definition have ‘English’ – in the broadest sense – as their lexifier language.
