ABSTRACT
The question of how Cameroon Pidgin arose merges into the larger questions of why any pidgin arises, why the full language does not take root and why pidgins differ so fundamentally from dialects (see Todd, 1974). There are many conflicting answers to such puzzles. It has been suggested that Europeans adopted a superior attitude to the peoples in other continents, that they spoke to them as if they would not understand the adult language, so that pidgins are, according to such theories, modified versions of 'baby talk'. It has also been claimed that pidgins derive from a nautical jargon and it is certainly true that crew members were often of different nationalities and a shipboard lingua franca would thus have been extremely useful. A more modern theory suggests that pidgins and creoles derive from a relexification of a Portuguese pidgin which might, itself, have been related to the medieval Lingua Franca used by the Crusaders. This last point seems less improbable when one realises that relics of this Lingua Franca were to be found in Medi terranean ports as recently as the nineteenth century. According to the relexification theory, Portuguese pidgin took root along explora
