ABSTRACT
Originally, by very definition, all pidgins were restricted with regard to user and use. In the early stages they would have had small vocabularies and few syntactic rules; they would have been capable of dealing with only a limited range of subjects, with commands, yes/no questions, and with the simplest of explanations. They would have utilized gesture to reinforce or clarify meanings and they would have proved inadequate for sustained conversation. From these origins they developed either as extended pidgins or as creoles and became capable of expressing the views and beliefs of their users, became capable of permitting intergroup communication in areas where it had not existed before, became capable of sustaining a considerable literature. How did this happen? Although the process of pidginization is not limited to such areas, it seems likely that extended pidgins and creoles develop only in multilingual areas. Where the contact is between two languages only, one or both groups acquire the other language, either keeping or relinquishing their own in the process. But in a multilingual area, a lingua franca, accessible to all groups, is essential if viable and mutual communication is to occur. Once even the most rudimentary form of English developed in, say, West Africa, it would have been used by sailors, traders and settlers to the Africans they contacted and especially to their African wives and concubines. Presumably, some of the children of such unions would have been bilingual in the mother’s language and in the pidgin spoken by the parents to each other. It would also have been used by African to African when they spoke mutually unintelligible languages. At first this would only have happened when Africans were brought as slaves from different regions and kept at the ports while the ships were prepared for the journey to the New World. Naturally, the slaves communicated with each other on board ship and more especially while living and working on plantations. It is likely that the use of the pidgin in domestic and slave situations was a vital factor in its expansion because, in such conditions, the pidgin was the only available lingua franca and thus had to be developed to serve a wider range of communication needs than were required for simple barter. Continuing to focus attention on English-based languages, four main phases in the expansion process can be distinguished. Phase 1 would have involved casual and unsustained contact between English speakers and the local people. From such contact a marginal pidgin evolves; capable, with the help of gestures, of communicating physical needs and trading arrangements, etc. Phase 2 would have begun as soon as the pidgin English was used by and between local people. At this stage it could be expanded in only one way, from the users’ mother tongues. This phase helps to account for the indigenous lexical items and the numerous direct translations found in all pidgin and creole Englishes. As inter-racial contact increased phase 3 occurred. At this time vocabularies were extended by borrowing lexical items
from the ‘dominant’ language. Usually, as in Hawaii and Sierra Leone, this language was English, but occasionally, as in Surinam, it was another European language, Dutch in the case of Surinam. Phase 4 is limited to areas where English continued to be an official state language. When the contact between English and the related pidgin or creole was sustained and as education in standard English became more widespread, a process of decreolization occurred. The pidgin/ creole became more and more influenced by the standard in phonology, lexis and syntax until we found, and find, ‘a considerable range of English…from the homegrown pidgins and creoles at one end of the spectrum to the universally accepted formal written registers of standard English’ (Spencer, 1971 p. 6). Evidence for such a continuum is to be found in the West Indies, in West Africa, in Hawaii, in parts of Papua New Guinea and indeed in all anglophone areas of the world where a creole or extended pidgin is an important lingua franca. Some students of American ‘black English’, like Dillard (1972), have argued that the English of black Americans should be viewed, not as substandard white English, descended from the English spoken on the Mayflower, but as a related language descended from varieties of creole English spoken by African slaves throughout the West Indies and the southern states of North America. Such theories have had a profound effect on the teaching of English to speakers of Black American English and to creole speakers in the Caribbean and in Britain.
