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A pidgin is a simple language that arises from contacts between people with different mother tongues, in situations where relatively uncomplicated ideas are being exchanged. The speech is generally slow and supported by mime and gesture; the vocabulary is basic and taken mostly from the language of the most important group of speakers; and the grammar has much in common with that typically used by native speakers talking to non-native speakers, or by mothers talking to young children.
A simplified pidgin can develop rapidly: if it proves useful, it becomes more complex, and hence flexible. If it becomes a mother tongue, it is expanded to fulfill all its speakers' needs. Such mother tongues are known as creoles. Developed pidgins are most likely to be found in multilingual communities, where they are invaluable as lingua francas. They can be found in Papua New Guinea, for example, where there are over 700 languages for an estimated population of five million, and in West Africa, where as many as one-fifth of the world's languages occur.
Pidgins have probably existed for millennia. Evidence suggests that pidginized versions of Latin evolved into the Romance languages, and there was certainly a medieval lingua franca in use during the Crusades. Pidgins with vocabularies from European languages developed extensively in the wake of European expansionism from the 15th century onward.
Each pidgin, like each language, is unique but they share some characteristics: word order is fixed; there is little or no inflection; negation usually involves a "no" word in front of the verb; nouns and verbs are regular; the small vocabulary is used creatively; and speakers use local idioms, metaphors, and proverbs.
Here is an example of Kamtok, a Cameroon Pidgin English from west central Africa:
Den i bin lef dat ples, an i bin kam fo i on kontri, an i pipu bin folo i. An i bin di tich di pipu fo insai di Jew dem God haus... (Mark 6: 1-2)
(Then he left that place, and he came into his own country and his people followed him. And he was teaching the people inside the synagogue...). See also creole.
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