ABSTRACT
I review the contact ecologies that produced pidgins as opposed to creoles. I underscore the role played by interpreters during both the trade and the exploitation colonization of Africa (and less extensively Asia and the Pacific islands) and question the received doctrine. That is, pidgins lexified by European languages emerged in especially trade settings in which the European merchants and the indigenous populations had no language in common; they started as ‘jargons.’ In addition, creoles evolved from antecedent pidgins. I show instead that both creoles and pidgins emerged by basilectalization and the latter perhaps later than the former, in geographical settings that are complementary.
