Pidgin, Creole

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Language units large and small

Marked forms of words - Inflection, Derivation, Declension, Conjugation · Diminutive, Augmentative

Groups and categories and properties of words - Syntactic and lexical categories · Grammatical cases · Correlatives · Expletives · Adjuncts

Words and meaning - Morphology · Lexicology · Semiotics · Onomasiology · Figures of speech, expressions, phraseology, etc. · Word similarity · Ambiguity · Modality ·

Segment function, interaction, reference - Clitics · Apposition· Parataxis, Hypotaxis· Attributive· Binding · Coordinations · Word and concept reference

Sentence structure and style - Agreement · Ellipsis· Hedging

Phonology - Articulation · Formants· Prosody · Sound change · Intonation, stress, focus · Diphones · Intervocalic · Glottal stop · Vowel_diagrams · Elision · Ablaut_and_umlaut · Phonics


Analyses, models, software - Minimal pairs · Concordances · Linguistics software · Some_relatively_basic_text_processing · Word embeddings · Semantic similarity

Unsorted - Contextualism · · Text summarization · Accent, Dialect, Language · Pidgin, Creole · Natural language typology · Writing_systems · Typography, orthography · Digraphs, ligatures, dipthongs · More linguistic terms and descriptions ·


This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)

A pidgin is a local language that evolves when different language speakers in an area learn to communicate, often drawing from varied vocabularies and possibly grammar. Often simplified, created by practical convention, and often more fluid than particularly stable, and learned as a sort of second language. That said, they are often quite identifiable as being more than its parts.


A creole is a combination of languages into a new stable language (often local). Perhaps the largest difference to a pidgin is that a creole can be a first language.


Yes, those are descriptions that can overlap in practice.

If you want an (arbitrary) distinction, you could say that things pidgins when they are still being created, and become creoles when it is is taught to children.


The terms can also be used to refer to unintentional mistakes (see also Shibboleths), to a decent set of intentional neologisms (see e.g. Yinglish), to interspersing of words and other such practices that usually develop after migration.


It arguably also includes semi-standardized jargon-ish languages like Seaspeak, Airspeak (the NATO phonetic alphabet, and arguably the formulaic requests and responses), and Tunnelspeak.




See also

Something and English:

Also: