ABSTRACT
Although modern scholarship has amassed a considerable body of knowledge on the subject of pidgins and creoles, the further back we attempt to trace their history the more sketchy and speculative the account must be. In the past, they were seen as auxiliary languages, often regarded as debased jargons, so references to them are haphazard and random. Nevertheless, old manuscripts, especially sea journals and travellers’ records, often indicate where and how these languages were used. Even more occasionally, samples of a pidgin or creole are cited, random samples like this reference from Bryan Edwards: ‘A gentleman of Jamaica visiting a valuable Koromantyn-Negro that was sick, and perceiving that he was thoughtful and dejected, endeavoured to raise his drooping spirits. Massa, said the Negro (in a tone of self-reproach and conscious degeneracy) since m’e come to White man’s country me lub (love) life too much! (1807, vol. 2, book 4, ch. 3, p. 83). We cannot build a theory on such evidence alone; but when supported by historical documentation and compared with samples of modern West Indian creoles, it can provide insights into the origins and development of such languages, insights which are of value in helping to explain the similarities which can be shown to exist between all the pidgins and creoles related to European languages. In the Introduction and in chapter 2 it was suggested that, while pidginization may well be a natural consequence of languages in contact, the crystallizing of extended pidgins is rarer. To date, scholars, in an attempt to explain both the genesis of and the similarities between these languages, have advanced four different and to some extent competing theories, an examination of which will provide the necessary background and perspective for a more economical and comprehensive hypothesis.
