Despite
the major role that the Naga pidgin could play in the education of
the minority linguistic groups, it was seen that in the present
state of its development, it cannot be used in education owing to
the absence of a norm acceptable to all the groups, as well as owing
to the existence of a number of variant forms both at the individual
level and at the linguistic/ethnic level. In the ordinary course,
the evolution of a norm for any natural language takes five to six
centuries whereas there is little time left for the natural
processes to work out the evolution of a norm for the pidgins and
creoles if they are to be visualized for immediate use in education
for tribal population. A planned standardization of Naga pidgin is
therefore an urgent necessity. Since standardization facilities
communication, make the establishment of an agreed orthography
possible and provides a uniform pattern for school books, this
grammar is an attempt in that direction. The framework for this
grammar was enunciated in this writer’s paper ‘Standardization
of Naga Pidgin’, the main hypothesis being that if pidgins can be
the result of inter-lingual fusion, the standardized pidgin could be
the result of intra-lingual fusion’. Subsequently it was found
that the attempts in creating standard languages through fusion of
dialects were made successfully in the case of Norwegian, Albanian
etc. Hence this attempt is in the right direction. Before closing,
we might also re-affirm the status of pidgins based on Indian
languages for that nomenclature, and also the prime role they can
play in education.
It was seen earlier that despite theoretical disagreements on
various aspects of pidgins and creoles, there is a general agreement
on three areas, viz., (i) pidgins arise only in a multilingual set
up; (ii) the presence of a dominant external language, from which
most of the vocabulary, at least in the early stages is derived and
(iii) not being the first language of any of its users. Though,
these were postulated for the pidgins based on European languages,
most of these are valid for pidgins based on Indain languages,
though Bazaari Hindi seems to be a doubtful case. The Basaari Hindi
could also be clubbed with the other Indian pidgins, if it is
considered an offspring of or as an extension of ‘Urdu’
(literally ‘camp language’) spread by the early Muslim rulers of
Delhi whose soldiers spread the camp language to different parts of
India. And in the British Indian Army, it was known as ‘Roman Urdu’
as it was written in Roman script.
The three characteristic features set up for the pidgins and
creoles based on European languages, viz., socio-political
background of the pidgins, structural features particularly the ones
pertaining to the reduction and simplifucation at the pidgin stage
and expansion and complication at the creole stage and thirdly
applicability in the case of pidgins
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creoles based on Indian languages. It was also seen earlier that
indigenous pidgins spoken in North America, Swahili, Bazaari Malay,
etc., all cited earlier, also defy the western hypotheses. And the
instance of Juba Arabic spoken in South Sudan differs from all
others, in that it arose out of contempt for the Arab speaking
northern Sudanese, albeit for meeting the communicational needs. In
view of the peculiar features found in the Indian pidgins and
creoles, Sreedhar 1983 concluded his article posing the question:
‘If they (Pidgins based on Indian languages) are not the products
of Koine formation, if they are not genetically related languages
and if they do not conform to the norms laid down for pidgins/creoles,
what are they?’
Different western creolists reacted to the question in different
manners, but I refer to two of them who held extreme views, for
instance, Samarin wrote to me stating that for long he had been
feeling that the western scholars’ view of pidgin and Creole were
too narrow and he would fully agree with the views expressed in my
paper and in contrast Prof. Bickerton in his letter dated March 1,
1983 inter alia states that : ‘. . . . in fact I would answer the
question you pose at the end of your paper by saying that whatever
such languages are, they are not the same as the language formed in
colonial dependency situation, particularly those which involved
slavery and trans-oceanic population movement. What one chooses to
call them is quite immaterial so long as the historical differences
which have profound consequences would be simply obscured if western
creolists were to "modify their norms to accommodate the Indian
phenomena. . . . I would agree that the phenomena you have uncovered
are interesting, deserve study on their own right and are not easily
dealt within the framework of the existing theory . . . . . it
should be generally recognized that you are dealing with unique
phenomena which can only be obscured and down graded if they are
lumped together with the phenomena of other types’. Bicherton is
right in stating that the two situations belong to two different
phenomena yet they are not two distinct phenomena. There are common
features in certain aspects of language contact and also in is that
the resultant linguistic structures found in the Indian situations
are not the results of Koine formation nor are they instances of
simple language mixture. These are neither ‘natural languages’
in the sense of genetically related ones. Further these are not
isolated features found in Nagaland, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and
Orissa in India but found to exist in different continents and hence
no more
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