![]() Accordingly, some linguists posit that a creole may remain as such or decreolize (i.e., lose its creole features) as it assimilates to its lexifier (the language from which it inherited most of its vocabulary) if both are spoken in the same polity. This interpretation is consistent with what scholars have crystallized as the “pidgin-creole life cycle,” according to which a contact situation produces a jargon, which may die or develop into a pidgin, which in turn may die, remain as such, or develop into an expanded pidgin, which likewise may die, remain as such, or develop into a creole. As is evident from the name of the first of these examples, the term pidgin has also alternated with jargon in common speech despite the scholarly stipulation that a jargon is developmentally an unstable pre-pidgin. ![]() and Canada), Delaware Pidgin (U.S.), and Hiri Motu (Papua New Guinea). ![]() Like creole, the term pidgin has been extended to language varieties that developed out of contacts between indigenous groups-for instance, Chinook Jargon (U.S. If this extension of the term pidgin is justified, then many other such contact varieties must have developed during the course of human history. Some scholars of creole languages think that Lingua Franca, the variety that developed during the Middle Ages out of the contact between Romance languages and Arabic and other Levantine languages, was a pidgin. A more plausible explanation for the distinction is the fact that in their histories pidgins have not been associated with populations that consider themselves to be ethnically Creole. However, some linguists who assume that creoles are erstwhile pidgins that were nativized and expanded by children tend to lump both kinds of vernaculars as creoles. Such vernaculars have developed systems as complex as those of related creoles and are called expanded pidgins. Some of the pidgins that have survived for several generations are also spoken as vernaculars by some of their users, including Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin, Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), and Bislama (Vanuatu), all of which are based on a predominantly English vocabulary. Nevertheless, several pidgins have survived for generations, a characteristic that indicates a fairly stable system. They have thus been characterized from time to time as “broken” languages and even as “chaotic,” or apparently without communal conventions. Among other things, they often lack inflections on verbs and nouns, true articles and other function words (such as conjunctions), and complex sentences. The communicative functions and circumstances of pidgin development account for the variable degree of normalization within their often reduced systems. Pidgins have no native speakers, as the populations that use them during occasional trade contacts maintain their own vernaculars for intragroup communication. Typical pidgins function as lingua francas, or means for intergroup communication, but not as vernaculars, which are usually defined as language varieties used for ordinary interactions that occur outside a business context. Pidgin, originally, a language that typically developed out of sporadic and limited contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans in locations other than Europe from the 16th through the early 19th century and often in association with activities such as trade, plantation agriculture, and mining.
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