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Creole languages are found in communities where a pidgin language earlier served as a useful lingua franca. Creoles are often the sole language of a community and so are capable of fulfilling all their speakers' linguistic needs. In being transformed into a creole, a pidgin's vocabulary is expanded and its structures made increasingly subtle, flexible, and precise.
Creoles, which involve a language shift, are often caused by the disruption of normal speech communities. The best-known examples are found in the Caribbean. Caribbean creoles evolved as a result of the slave trade, when as many as ten million Africans, speaking perhaps 500 different mother tongues, were sold into slavery. Africans working on plantations were obliged to relinquish their ancestral languages and communicate in pidgin forms of a European tongue. Children born into slave communities used the pidgin for all their communication needs and thus transformed it into a creole.
More recently, creoles related to English have developed in many other places including Cameroon, Nigeria, Hawaii, and Papua New Guinea. In such areas, speakers found that the pidgin lingua franca helped communication between different groups so much that it was increasingly spoken at home and children acquired it as a mother tongue.
The name creole comes from Spanish criollo meaning "native." In the 16th century, a "creole" was a person of European ancestry born in the New World. Over the next two centuries, it was applied to children of mixed race and then to Africans born in the Americas. By the early 1800s, "creole" could be applied to a language.
There are clear historical, geographic, and linguistic factors linking all the Creole Englishes in West Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States. There are four main creoles in the United States: (1) Gullah, or Geechee, is spoken mainly in the Sea Islands, Florida, Carolina (especially the Carline Low Country), and Georgia. It is the language used at home by perhaps a quarter of a million people in this region and several thousand more who have migrated to New York. Its names probably come from either the Gola people of Liberia or from the Ogeechee River plantations of Georgia. (2) Afro-Seminole is a Creole English spoken mainly in parts of Texas and Mexico. It is almost certainly derived from Gullah when 18th-century slaves escaped from Florida and Georgia and settled with Seminoles. (3) African American Vernacular English, or U.S. Black English, covers the entire spectrum from standard U.S. English to varieties similar to Gullah, which probably developed on plantations in the southern states from Texas to Virginia (at the time of the Civil War, over 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South). (4) Native American Pidginized English is a form of pidgin English that was probably used between some Native Americans and English speakers and there may be relics of it in the words of Native American languages that were common currency both in U.S. English and Native American languages, for example papoose and chuck (food).
Here is an example of Hawaiian Creole English: "God, you our Fadda./ You stay inside da sky./ We like all da peopo know fo shua how you stay,/ An dat you stay good and spesho,/ An we like dem give you plenny respeck. Da Jesus Book, Matthew 6:9-10" (Joseph E. Grimes et al.)
(God, you are our Father./ You are in heaven./ We want everyone to be certain how you are, and that you are good and special,/ and we want them to give you plenty of respect.)
See also pidgin.
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