Creole (language)

Creole (language), language that began as a pidgin but has become the native language of a community. Creoles and pidgins develop as a means of communication between members of two mutually unintelligible language communities. Both creoles and pidgins have simple grammatical structures and limited vocabularies, although the grammar of a creole is more complex than that of a pidgin. Moreover, the rules of creole grammar remain uniform from speaker to speaker, whereas pidgin grammar varies among speakers. Pidgins have no native speakers; when a pidgin does acquire native speakers through years of use it is called a creole.

Creole languages exist throughout the world, although they develop primarily in isolated areas, especially islands, in which colonial governments have established economies based on immigrant or slave labor. The creole that develops merges elements of the colonial language, especially vocabulary, with elements of the language or languages of the laborers, typically grammatical structure. The primary creoles spoken in North America and the Caribbean include English-based Gullah, French-based Louisiana Creole, English-based Jamaican Creole, and French-based Haitian Creole. All of these creoles draw upon African languages.

Linguists have noted similarities in grammatical structure among all creole languages. Common features include the use of repeated adjectives and adverbs to indicate intensity and the use of particles to change verb tense. Scholars suggest differing hypotheses to account for this uniformity across diverse creole languages. One theory states that all creole languages descend from the same 15th-century Portuguese pidgin, used by Portuguese explorers throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. When this pidgin came in contact with the languages of later colonizers, the basic grammar remained while the vocabulary incorporated new words from such languages as French and English. However, this hypothesis does not explain why some pidgins and creoles that developed with little or no contact with European languages still share grammatical features. Other scholars suggest that the shared grammatical features come from basic linguistic preferences for certain word order and for simplified, uninflected forms of verbs and other parts of speech.

One feature that distinguishes a creole language from English is the use of the anterior tense, which resembles the past perfect tense in English. The anterior tense uses bin or wen instead of the suffix -ed, so that walked in English becomes bin walk in creole. Some common linguistic characteristics of the various creole languages include questions and statements being identified by intonation alone, and patterns in verb conjugation. For example, Krio, the English-based creole of Sierra Leone, and Guianese Créole, the French-based creole of Guiana, follow similar patterns of adding verb particles to change tense. In Krio the word chop for “eat” becomes a chop to indicate “I ate”and a de chop for “I am eating.” In Guianese Créole the word mãze for “eat” becomes mo mãze to mean “I ate” and mo ka mãze to indicate “I am eating.”

A creole language often changes as its speakers become linguistically assimilated into the dominant society. This transformation is known as decreolization. In the case of Gullah, a creole language spoken along the southeastern coast of the United States, decreolization involves a gradual decrease of African linguistic components and an increase in English components.