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(1) Socio-political
background:
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The
classical pidgin situation involves the contact of two socially and
ethnically segregated communities arising out of either slave trade
or conquest of new lands. Of the two, one claiming to be the
super stratum speaking a single language is socio-economically
superior and/or alien whereas the others claiming to be the
substratum speaking a number of mutually unintelligible languages
belong to a low socio-economic status group and/ or conquered people
including slaves.
At least at the initial stage of the contact, the members of the
so-called-sub-strata communities would be mostly illiterates or
semiliterate in their respective mother tongues. The contact
between the super and sub-strata communities results in a new social
order which in its creates the need for a common language resulting
in the birth of a pidgin.
As the contact situation of the super and sub-strata is marginal,
it prevents/denies an opportunity to acquire the super stratum
language with any degree of accuracy or proficiency by the
sub-strata. Thus the pidgins were claimed to be the products of
colonial expansion and slave trade (cf. Reinecke 1938/64, Sankoff
1979 etc.) Different theories on the origin of pidgins like the baby
talk hypothesis, monogenetic theory, etc. are not discussed here.
For a detailed discussion of these please see Todd (1974 : 28-29).
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(2) Structural
features:
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The most predominant opinion
amongst the western scholars in respect of pidgins is that a pidgin
is an instance of simplification or reduction of the language of the
super stratum. There seems to be a near unanimity amongst the western
scholars on this point than on any other point. The instances of
simplification cited are : discarding by the pidgin of the redundant
features like concord in number-gender of the noun functioning as
the subject with the verb in the sentence, not making
morphologically the opposition in number-gender, deletion of copula,
etc. found to exist in the dominant source language.
The simplification theory actually goes back to the ‘baby talk’
hypothesis set up for the origin of the pidgins by charles Layland
(1876) and Bloomfield (1933). Bloomfield (1933 : 472-3) claimed that
‘speakers of a lower language may make so little progress in
learning the dominant speech that the masters in communicating with
them resort to ‘baby talk’. This baby talk is the master’s
imitation of the subjects’ incorrect speech and the subjects, in
turn, deprived of the correct model, can do no better than to
acquire the simplified baby talk version of the upper language’.
The very idea of the acquisition of languages through analogizing is
imcopatible with the findings of a number of researches on language
acquisition by children,as it
was found that children fail to mimic the adult sentences even when
they are provided with the correct model. It is also found that
certain maturational process is required before the young children
acquire the adult model correctly. Though the baby talk origin of
the pidgins has been disowned by most of the creolists, almost
everyone accepts the simplification feature of the pidgins, a
by-product of the baby talk hypothesis. Some scholars like Hull,
Macdon etc. question this feature in respect of even the European
based pidgins.
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The origin of Juba Arabic, a pidgin based on Arabic and spoken in
Southern Sudan defies both the socio-political background assumption
and the baby talk hypothesis set up for pidgins. For instance, Nhial
(1975) states that ‘many Southerners expressed their disapproval
of the political, economical and social injustice which they thought
that northern Sudanese were practicing against them by refusing to
learn or speak Arabic’. Since the Southerners could not do without
Arabic, they were compelled to learn some Arabic adequate enough to
make understand the northern administrators and merchants who
controlled the economy. And the result is the Juba Arabic. Nhial
further states that ‘the emotions were so high against the Arabs,
i.e., the northern Sudanese, that a southern Sudanese who spoke
Arabic fluently was considered to be someone who had made a sellout
or a stooge’.
As opposed to the feature of simplification in structure claimed
for a pidgin, a transition from a pidgin to a creole is said to
involve structural changes in three areas, viz., (a) a change in
scale leading to an expansion and complication of the linguistic
make up, (b) a change in scope leading to expansion in use in
different domains, and (iii) a change in status as a norm (cf.
Fleishman 1978, Hymes 1971, etc.).
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(3) Life cycles:
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Robert Hall Jr., the doyen amongst them, distinguish pidgin
languages from the ‘natural languages’ on the basis of
plus-minus feature of life cycle, thus attributing a biological
feature to the pidgin language (Hall, 1962 and 1966 : 126). That is
just as an adult insect passes through different life cycles like:
adult to egg to larva to pupa and back to adult to continue another
chain of life cycle. The pidgin languages are also assigned certain
life cycles like: contact amongst ‘natural languages’ leading to
pidginization to pre-pidgin continuum to crystallized pidgin to
creolization to creole to decreolization to post-creole continua,
finally merging into the ‘natural language’ concerned. As
opposed to this cycle of pidgin languages, the natural languages
might become extinct when the last speaker dies, as in the case of
Armenian and/or when a 100 per cent
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