Pidgins

Pidgins are languages that are born after contact between at least two languages. As many pidgins developed during the period of empire and international trade, one of the language parents was frequently a European language such as French or English, and the other language parent was the language of the people with whom the Europeans were trading or whom they were colonizing. Usually one of the languages provided the majority of vocabulary items and the other provided the grammatical structure. When pidgins become learned as a mother tongue, they become known as creoles. I am not going to discuss pidgins and creoles and contact languages as such in this book in any depth .