Force (GREF),
a para military organization under the Government of India, who
construct and maintain roads all over Nagaland and (ii) the Marwaris,
a traditional business community from Rajastan, who speak an
Indo-Aryan language. The employees of the GREF come from different
parts of India. They, particularly the uneducated and the
semi-literate amongst them, on arrival in Nagaland, are obligated to
learn Naga Pidgin for interlingual communication with their
colleagues from different parts of the country and also with the
local Nagas. The Marwaris with their merchandise have penetrated
even to the remote interior parts of Nagaland. They found the Naga
Pidgin a convenient tool fro their trade with the Nagas as well as
with the non-Nagas in Nagaland. The other governmental agencies that
helped in the spread of Naga Pidgin are : Assam Rifles, State and
Central Government Officers at all levels and the schools (for
details, see Sreedhar 1974.a 35-44). From all these it is absolutely
clear that neither colonialism nor master-slave relation has
anything to do with the origin and spread of the Naga Pidgin.
Outside India also, certain well known pidgins have developed out of
indigeous sources, without any contact with any of the European
languages. These include Swahili, now a creole to many speakers in
different African states (cf. Poleme 1963), Bahasa Indonesia (cf.
Alisjahabana 1976:32) and the various indigenous pidgins of North
America like : the Eskimo trade Jarson of Herschal island (Stefanson
1909), (Crawford 1978) and the Chinook Jargon (Ronav 1945).
Drechsel (1981 : 94) claims that the indigenous pidgins of the
North America are instances of tertiary gybridization (Whinnom 1971)
of primary native American languages. They were linguistic
compromises that grew out of multilingual situations and resulted in
reduced speech forms based predominantly on indigenous languages of
North America. He (1981 : 105) further states that ‘the dominant
linguistic influence of the indigenous languages as well as their
early and extensive use by Europeans and other recent immigrants
suggest the hypothesis that these pidgins were of pre-historic
origin. . . . . and the pre-historic existence of any indigenous
pidgins would challenge (consequently ethnocentric) notion that
pidginization of languages was limited to and characteristic of
western colonialism and perhaps pdiginization and the other process
of linguistic convergence would also accord greater theoretical
significance in historical linguistics. . . . This pidginization (in
North America). Just as these pidgins in North America defy the
monogenetic theory of the origin of pidgins, Naga Pidgin, Halbi,
Sadari, Desi etc. spoken in India, Juba-Arabic of sourthern Sudan,
Ki-Nubi of Uganda, Swahili, etc., also defy the monogenetic theory
of the origin of pidgins.
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Despite
some close parallels between the Naga Pidgin and the indigenous
pidgins of North America, they differ sharply in the most crucial
area, viz., the status and standards of the communities and
languages concerned in the two contact situations. In terms of the
language development and socio-economic status of the North American
contact situation, all the languages and communities concerned have
a near identical development and status, whereas in Nagaland, the
Assamese language and community could be designated as the
superstratum group when compared to the diverse languages of the
Nagas. Secondly all the languages involved in the North American
situation belong to a single family, whereas in Nagaland, the
Assamese is an Indo-Aryan language while the different Naga
languages form a subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman sub-family. The most
significant feature common to both is the absence of any colonial
expansion and the resultant slave trade. We may now have a look at
the notion of simplification hypothesis.
|
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(ii) Simplification:
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It was seen earlier that the
discarding of the redundant features like: concord in number-gender
between the subject of a sentence and the verb, absence of overt
markets for showing opposition in number-gender, etc. found in most
of the pidgins based on European languages were cited as instance of
simplification. If we accept these languages as examples of
simplification, we would get into difficulties in defining
languages, for instance, Chinese according to the above mentioned
criteria would be a highly simplified language as it does not have
any inflections. In India, a highly developed and literary language
like Malayalam does not show any concord in number-gender (Sreedhar
1964), e.g.,
|
| awan warum |
‘he will come’ |
| awal warum |
‘she will come’ |
| awar warum |
‘they will
come’ |
| awan warunnu |
‘he is
coming/comes’ |
| awal warunnu |
'she is
coming/comes’ |
| awar warunnu |
‘they
are coming/come’ |
| awan wannu |
‘he came’ |
| awal wannu |
‘she came’ |
| awar wannu |
‘they came’ etc. |
|
Optional
deletion of the number marked when the context indicates the
plurality is a regular feature with Gujarati, another highly
developed and literary langauage of the Indo-Aryan family. For
instance,
|
| chokri ‘girl’ |
chokrio |
‘girls’ |
| but, be chokri |
|
‘two girls’ |
|
|
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