So let’s talk about meetings. When we cross into different worlds, and deal with different
cultures, amazing things can happen. All of us are changed by the people that we encounter,
and the same goes for languages. But when we need to speak with someone who doesn’t
speak the same language, that's when the real magic happens. I’m Moti Lieberman, and
this is the Ling Space.
People really get around. Maybe they have stuff they want to buy and sell, or important
places they want to visit. Maybe they’re seeking refuge from a war
or disaster, or maybe they’re a conquering army on the search for new territory.
Or maybe they just want to see what’s beyond the horizon, find some fantasy land to live
in. But the odds are, when you go somewhere new, you’re going to find other
people there. We’re almost unbelievably good at populating places, even if they’re
really cold, really hot, or really hard to find.
So what happens when you arrive somewhere and you meet a group of people who haven’t
even heard of your language, let alone speak it? If you want to stick around for a while,
you’re going to have to find some way to talk to each other.
But where do you even start, when you don’t have any words in common? It’s not like
you have magic spells to ease communications.
Well, maybe you’ll start with simple gestures, or learn a few of each other’s words
for things. But soon enough, if you have a community that
springs up without a shared language, you’ll get a way of talking that’s woven together from the
different strands that make it up. This kind of system is called a pidgin, and
we’ve been creating them in these pressure-filled conditions for centuries, at least.
The amazing thing is, no matter what languages go into a pidgin, there are some
characteristics that they all tend to have. Because it’s got to be simple, you lose
a lot of the more complicated, unusual properties of the languages that go into it. Like, think
about the phonology, the sound system. Pidgins usually get the most common and straightforward
set of sounds, the ones most likely to be acceptable in the different languages.
So for vowels, that’s a five-vowel inventory: a, i, u, e, and o.
And you want really simple syllables, so you try to avoid consonants bunching together,
or letting consonants hang out after the vowel. And, although a lot of pidgins include content
from tonal Asian or West African languages, they usually lose any of the tone the original languages
might have had. So for a word like Brakebills, you’d change
the second vowel, break up the [bɹ] and [kb] bunches, chuck the consonant at the end, and
get bareki bili. Nice! Your syntax and morphology get affected, too.
Pidgins usually have a subject-verb-object word order, even if the languages they
draw from don’t. And, you won’t mark for things like number or
gender or case, or put tense on your verbs. For example, instead of past tense and future tense,
like hunted - hunt - will hunt, instead you get something like hunt yesterday, hunt,
hunt tomorrow. Here, ‘yesterday’ doesn't actually mean
yesterday, it just means that something happened in the past.
But you don’t only shrink things down when you’re crunching together a pidgin.
A lot of the time, you add in a process called reduplication, which exists in languages around the
world, like Khmer, Maltese, and Warlpiri, but is not common in the languages that are
being combined. It's used as a plural, like in Warlpiri, where child
is kurdu, and children is kurdukurdu. Or it can be a superlative, like in Maltese, where homor
is red, and homor homor is totally red.
A pidgin isn’t anyone’s first language; it’s a system adult speakers stick together
so that they can communicate, so at most, it's a second language. I mean,
they may not even be languages at all. At least, not natural ones. In their favour,
pidgins do have a set of norms about how you should use them, and differing levels of proficiency.
But even though a whole community will usually learn to speak the pidgin, there’s
more variability from speaker and speaker or time and time than there is in a natural language.
And we just saw that pidgins aren’t complete grammars, either.
They lack a lot of the complex patterns of syntax, sound, and meaning that we
find in the world’s natural languages. So in a way, pidgins aren’t really languages in
the way we’ve been talking about them. In fact, maybe the closest parallel we can draw
is constructed languages. If you think back to our episode on constructed
languages, we concluded that most of them probably aren’t languages in the strictest
sense of the word. Even if you put a ton of effort into your
new language, unless you’re a real wizard, it's probably not going to follow all the rules and
parameters of Universal Grammar. And the same goes for pidgins.
After all, in a way, pidgins are constructed languages - there might not be a single mind
shepherding the language together, but it still does get crafted.
Most of the pidgins we know today came into being in colonial situations.
Historically, some of the most notable centers for the development of pidgins have been Pacific
trade routes and Caribbean plantations. In both cases, you get exactly the right formula
for linguistic innovation: people from multiple language groups who don’t understand each
other but need to work together. The colonizing language - usually European -
lends a lot of vocabulary to the pidgin, and the rest comes together through necessity.
But even if there have been a lot of them, pidgins tend not to last for very long. They
need a specific set of conditions to thrive, so if you take away the situation of contact,
or you get one language becoming more popular than the others, the needs
for a hybrid means of communication disappear.
But sometimes, pidgins evolve. It is really cool that people come up with these ways
to speak with each other. But even more amazing is what happens when new generations
of kids grow up where the pidgins are spoken.
We’ve already said that babies are linguistic geniuses - they come hardwired to learn language,
and whatever input they get, they use it to set up their mental grammars,
according to Universal Grammar, or UG. So what happens when babies are exposed to a
pidgin? They regularize patterns, fill out more of
the grammar, and force the pidgin to follow all the UG rules that they have.
This transformative process of a pidgin becoming something new is called creolization, and
the languages that come out the other side are known as creoles. And unlike pidgins,
creoles are full-fledged natural languages.
Let’s take the example of one of the most well-known creoles out there, Tok Pisin,
spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tok Pisin started off as a pidgin. The
name even means “talk pidgin”, or “pidgin language”.
It arose from the intermixing of different Pacific Islander communities
working on plantations in Australia and elsewhere.
The main prestige language of the plantation owners was English, so English was the raw
material that the original pidgin drew from. But you also have German, Portuguese, and
Malay, as well as all the Austronesian languages that the workers already knew.
And over the past few decades, people who learned Tok Pisin as a pidgin have been raising
families using it at home.
Given that Papua New Guinea alone has over 800 different language communities,
having a pidgin really came in handy.
So as kids have picked up Tok Pisin as their first language, it’s undergone creolization.
Now, Tok Pisin has about 120,000 native speakers, as well as 4 million second language speakers.
Because Tok Pisin has been documented before, during, and after its creolization, we can use it to
examine some of the differences between a pidgin and a creole. So one of the traits
of a pidgin is that it doesn't have embedded clauses.
In older versions of Tok Pisin, if you didn't know that somebody
had built a house, you might say this: “Mi no save. Ol i wokim dispela haus.”
Like two separate sentences: I didn’t know. They had built this house.
But today, part of the creolization of Tok Pisin involved syntactic embedding,
where you put one clause and you put it inside of another. “Mi no save olsem ol i wokim dispela haus”.
So now you have the word “olsem” acting a bit like “that” in I didn’t know that
they had built this house.
Or, if you look at the intonation patterns of pidgins, they often have a very even, flat
melody to them, without much going up and down in the pitch, or lengthening or shortening of syllables.
So in Tok Pisin, you used to say "we usually build houses like this" by expressing the "usually"
using the verb “save”. So: “Mipela save wokim haus olsem”.
But now, that verb has been reduced into the shorter form “se”, like: “Mipela se wokim
haus olsem“. This short form just tacks onto the main verb of the sentence, “wokim”,
and it doesn’t get stress on it, so you start
getting sentences that sound more fluent and melodious.
You also get things that used to be whole phrases getting boiled down into words
or morphemes. Before, to express the future, you used to use the phrase “baimbai”, from the
English "by and by". Now, it's been reduced to the word “bai”, as in “bai mi kam
long haus“, or "I will come to the house."
The discussion of creoles would not be complete without talking about Nicaraguan
Sign Language. Sign languages are a rich and complex topic, and we will be returning
to talk about them in much more detail. But for this particular case, the first thing that you need
to know is that there wasn’t really a Deaf community in Nicaragua until the latter half
of the 20th century. So when a school for deaf children was
opened in the 80s, no formal sign language was taught - just lipreading and spoken Spanish.
The thing is, that school had a bunch of people who didn't
share a signed language, and who were spending a lot of time together. And they were as
keen on communicating as you could imagine a school full of kids would be.
Each of them brought in some signs and structures that they used at home, and before long, the
students of this Nicaraguan school had developed a fluent signed pidgin between them.
But getting a pidgin going wasn’t the end of the story. Within a few years, as the older
students started teaching their system to the younger ones, their language developed into
a full-on creole, with a more complex grammar and extensive vocabulary.
The younger children passed this input through the filter of Universal Grammar, without even
trying or knowing anything about linguistics, and another pidgin blossomed into a complete
language. There are now over 3000 native signers of
Nicaraguan Sign Language, and that number just keeps rising as graduates from the school spread
the creole around the country.
So the systems that we make when two languages crash into each other are already really interesting.
We use the same kinds of strategies, simplifying our communication in the same sorts of ways,
whatever the original languages are. But when kids get their brains working on the new system,
whole new languages can appear, melded from the old ones. And that’s something magical.
So, we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week.
If you regularized my grammatical structures, you learned that pidgins are created when
different cultures with different languages meet up and need to communicate;
that pidgins are simplified versions of language, with a lot of similarities in how they get
boiled down; that when children acquire a pidgin as their
first language, they turn it into a more complex system, a creole;
and that creoles show all the hallmarks of a regular, natural, UG-compliant language.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production
assistant is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team
is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back
to our website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic. Check us out
on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling
Space, please subscribe. And, we’ll see you next Wednesday. Na wè!