ABSTRACT
Our attention in this chapter will focus on creoles and extended pidgins rather than on the extreme phases hypothesized earlier. A restricted pidgin can only either expand or die and the potential of international languages is too well known to need documenting. From the evidence examined it is clear that pidgins and creoles are capable, or can easily become capable, of expressing the needs, opinions and desires of their speakers. In the case of English-based varieties, since the entire lexicon of English is potential pidgin/creole material, no subject is automatically excluded as being beyond their lexical scope. During the Second World War Neo-Melanesian was used for government propaganda, a service to which Nigerian pidgin was also put during the Civil War; politicians have found that Krio is a decided asset in Sierra Leone speech-making; Cameroon pidgin has been used in a broadcast advising listeners of the dangers of leprosy; and all the English varieties have been found adequate for the teaching of a doctrine involving such concepts as ‘grace’, ‘redemption’, ‘transubstantiation’ and ‘three divine persons in one God’. As spoken media their potential is at least as great as any other language, greater than some in that they facilitate intercommunication over wide areas; but in an increasingly literate world it is arguable that if they are to survive they must also show their value as written media. In the past, pidgins and creoles have been almost exclusively spoken languages, but this fact has not prevented their sustaining a vital literature, albeit an oral one. Atlantic pidgins and creoles have, for centuries, been the vehicles for proverbs and work-chants, songs and folktales. The African love of storytelling found expression in whatever language adults were obliged to use to children. Like all traditional raconteurs, African storytellers introduced modifications to suit the area and the listeners, but the same basic stories have been recorded thousands of miles apart and across language barriers. The theme of two large animals being manipulated into having a tug-o’-war by the local trickster has turned up in the French-based creoles of Louisiana and Mauritius and in Cameroon pidgin English; many of Harris’s Brer Rabbit stories have equivalents in hundreds of West African townships; and the Georgian ‘Tar Baby Story’ told by Jones (1888, pp. 7-11) is found both in the Krio of Freetown and in Seychellois creole. Such an oral literature, one that has survived changes of culture and language, suggests that these pidgins and creoles are also capable of sustaining a written literature. The further fact that they have successfully transmitted folk wisdom indicates that they might also be employed in formal education. To gauge their value and potential in these spheres it is important to examine how they have already been used and to ask how and whether this usage may be continued, expanded or discarded.
