ABSTRACT
When we attempt a linguistic classification of pidgins and creoles we face a very real problem. Considered from the point of view of their vocabularies, all pidgin and creole Englishes are closely related to each other and, through English, to the Indo-European family of languages (see Table 2). An examination of the syntactic evidence, however, suggests the need for caution in their classification. In certain structures, for example, French creoles and English pidgins and creoles of West Africa and the West Indies resemble each other more closely than they resemble the standard languages to which they are lexically related (see Tables 3 and 4), And such apparent conflict raises the interesting
question of whether linguists should follow the syntactic evidence and co-classify languages whose lexicons would otherwise separate them, a question which will receive further attention in chapter 3 in connection with theories relating to the genesis of pidgin and creole languages. In the Introduction it was pointed out that there are many mutually unintelligible varieties of pidgin and creole Englishes in the world, as the versions of St Mark in Table 5 emphasize. Yet, in spite of the extensive differences that separate some pidgin and creole Englishes, we can still indicate similarities, over and above the lexical relationship. We can illustrate this most effectively by subdividing the pidgin Englishes of the world into two large families, Atlantic and Pacific pidgins and creoles (see Map 2),
because, while it is true that each of the languages has its individual traits, both subgroups have clear syntactic and historic connexions. All the Atlantic varieties, for example, have correspondences with West African coastal languages, correspondences which we would not expect to find in Pacific varieties. That the two subgroups are not entirely discrete, however, is suggested by the fact that the pidgin English in Hawaii has characteristics of both. It resembles the Atlantic varieties in its ability to use bin and go to indicate past and future time: d m bin k m, d m go k m-‘they came, they will come’, whereas its use of -fela as in wanfela-‘one’ links Hawaii unequivocally with the Pacific (see Todd, 1973).
