Between 15 England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain established numerous labor-intensive, agricultural economies, many of them involving sugar plantations and slave labor, on isolated littorals and underpopulated tropical islands throughout the world. More typically, in most pidgins the bulk of the vocabulary is drawn from a colonial power’s language. Russenorsk was a “50-50” language with about half of the words coming from each of the languages to male-up the pidgin. Starting in the 1800s, Russian traders would spend summer months in Norway trading timber for fish. Some pidgins and creoles, however, originated in voluntary trade contexts, Russenorsk being an example of a transitory language tool for passing exchanges. The historical conditions that favored the development of pidgin and creole languages are well known, having to do with the worldwide expansion in European maritime power and trade. Over time the term lost its generic meaning and became the proper name of many distinct ethnic groups and their languages, which developed locally from immigrant communities The etymology of creole is easier, coming from French créole, criollo in Spanish, or Portuguese crioulo, mainly used to distinguish the members of an ethnic group who were born and raised locally from those who immigrated as adults. Chinese Pidgin English was the vehicular language of 19th century traders in South China. The most widely accepted etymology for pidgin is a probable mispronunciation of the Chinese 赔钱 (péiqián), to lose money doing business. Not pidgins, whose features include, among others, uncomplicated clauses, no consonant clusters, basic vowels, no tones, and no verb inflections. Many languages have nuanced vocabulary and grammars that permit sophisticated thought. Pidgins as contact languages are inventions. Pidgins are in essence stripped down versions of a language that is made suitable for temporary, utilitarian use. Pidgin and creole languages offer lots of internal variation and change rapidly. Pidgins and creoles are fascinating to me, probably because they lend themselves to an analysis of the birth and evolution of a language within a highly compressed time frame.
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