What exactly is this?
My understanding is that it is an attempt to bridge two languages so that they can understand each other.
I have look up some Pidgin English sites on the web and can’t make head nor tales out of them. I don’t know how they get the translations they do.
Do you need training in a Pidgin tongue?
Technically, a pidgin is a language created at the boundary of two cultures/language groups to facilitate communication (usually for trade). Each pidgin will be unique, because a mixture of English and Mandarin will have both a vocabulary and a grammar radically different than a mixture of Dutch and Arawak.
Given that any pidgin will have borrowed heavily from two (at least) separate languages, one certainly needs to study it. It is unlikely that a speaker of one language will know enough of the second language to understand it fluently. Pidgins do tend to have very simplified structure and syntax, so learning one should be relatively easy, but one still needs to pick up the differences in the grammar, to say nothing of the new vocabulary from the “other guy’s” language.
A pidgin becomes a creole when a generation grows up using the pidgin as a primary or important secondary language, so that they treat it as a language rather than an invention. (Papiemento is a creole.)
So when does the creole become just another language?
So Hawaiian “Pidgin” is really a Creole?
Yah, why shouldn’t Haitian Creole be considered its own language?
I don’t remember when philologists decide that a creole is “a” language. From my perspective, a creole is a language, but one that has a clearer beginning date and a (potentially) more easily documented development.
Haitian creole may not get the respect it deserves because there are enough speakers of French (and nearly all Haitians can understand French, whatever they speak at home), to prevent Haitian being recognized as an independent language. (There are, understandably if regrettably, lots of political considerations when one sets out to get recognition for a language.)
I am not sufficiently familiar with Hawaiian pidgin to offer an opinion–even as a WAG.
Someone who actually had the opportunity to study linguistics will probably be by to make numerous corrections to my post.
Facetious: When it gets called English.
Okay, the answer to your question is simple: The boundary between a language and a creole is a fuzzy one. English, born at a crossroads of sorts, is a good example of this.
English is the product of a series of serious culture clashes. Germanic tribes migrated to the islands in the fifth century AD, speaking something that would have sounded more like German than anything else. Later, the Vikings began their campaigns, spreading Old Norse (a language very close to what is still spoken in Iceland) to the benighted isles. Such is the origin of Old English. In 1066, French-speaking Normans from, well, Normandy (that place in France D-Day later happened) conquered the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. This brought French and, through it, Latin, to the mix. Norman French became the language of the upper classes, Anglo-Saxon (aka Old English) remained the tongue of the poor, and they mixed to create Middle English, the language of the great poet Chaucer. Then, not long before Shakespeare’s time (1600s), the Great Vowel Shift occurred, something that changed how we pronounced all of our vowels and really changed our spelling. Modern English (the tongue, not the band :)) was born in time for Shakespeare to use an early version of it, commonly called Early Modern English.
That was a very compressed history of the English language. I might have gotten some details wrong, but I think the bulk is correct, as I have seen that basic story told in numerous places. Anyway, this mish-mash of tongues created a very unique European language: Huge vocabulary, no grammatical genders, and a seriously screwed-up orthography (aka spelling). The vocabulary comes from repeated borrowings from numerous languages scattered around the globe. Most of our Latin comes to us through Norman French, though, a relic of a battle lost long ago. The lack of genders comes from the fact that the biggest impediment to understanding across different dialects of Old English was how genders were handled, so we dropped them. The orthography comes from numerous places: The Great Vowel Shift; borrowings where we mangled the spelling, pronunciation, or both; or irregularities in the languages English itself evolved from.
To summarize, English was once a creole of Germanic and Old Norse, Old English and Norman French, and then it spread around the world to pick up words and ideas from the most diverse places. It’s considered a language simply because it has been around a long, long time and has many thousands of speakers.
A creole is considered a separate language by linguists (i.e., specialists in linguistics, not translators of particular languages).
Haitian Creole is considered a separate language by the people of Haiti, and it’s probably the best example of a creole language that’s recently risen to the level of a national language. It’s spoken by most of the population of Haiti, and elementary school education is usually given in Creole. By high school, though, students in Haiti are expected to have learned enough standard French to be able to speak it and read it, and all university education is in standard French. The Haitians know that, even though Creole is their national language, there aren’t any technical books written in it, so any educated Haitian has to learn standard French in addition.
On the other hand, the creole English languages of other Caribbean islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, etc.) are not used in schools at all. There are no textbooks, even at an elementary level, written in them, nor any newspapers (I think). This is despite the fact that these English-language creoles are approximately as close to standard British English as Haitian Creole is to Parisian French. Linguists do consider these English-language creoles of the Caribbean to be languages, and they have created dictionaries, texts, and grammars for their own use in the course of their field work with these languages. The schools in these countries, though, look down at these creoles as being just ignorant dialects and refuse to teach in them even at elementary levels.
The choice of whether to treat a creole language as a full-fledged language or as just a despised dialect is a political decision.
Wendell Wagner is correct, a creole is a language. As soon as a pidgin turns into a creole, it becomes a full-fledged language. The important difference between pidgin and creole is that a pidgin does not have consistent grammatical rules. No one can ever really become fluent in a pidgin because it is not a fully developed language. It is possible to become fluent in a creole, and in fact many people are. One reason why creoles rarely receive the respect of other languages is that they are almost always spoken languages without an official written form.
I suppose if a creole were very similar in vocabulary and structure to one of its parent languages then it might be considered a dialect of that language instead of a seperate language in its own right, but I am unaware of any creoles that this is true of.
This site makes the distinction that a pidgin language has no native speakers - it is merely used to communicate between two or more groups, each with their own primary language. A pidgin is considered a creole when it becomes the native language of significant number of people.
Afrikaans, which has characteristics of a creole (a highly simplified structure), is sometimes considered the “newest” major language. Development of the several of the Caribbean creole languages would have taken place over approximately the same time span (since the 1600s).
I imagine the OP is referring to the pidgin (Tok Pisin) that is the national language of Papua New Guinea. It’s not too difficult for an English speaker to understand, once one gets the hang of the simplified spelling, plus a few words derived from local languages (of which there are more than 800 on the island of New Guinea, making the need for a common language obvious.)
From The Phantom comic strip, which is very popular in PNG:
“Sapos yu kaikai planti pinat, bai yu kamap strong olsem phantom.”
Suppose [= if] you eat plenty (of) peanuts, by-you [= you will] come-up [= grow) strong all-the-same (as) Phantom.
“Fantom, yu pren tru bilong mi. Inap yu ken helpim mi nau?”
Phantom, you (are) a friend-true [true friend] (of) [literally, “belongs to”, indicating possessive] me [mine]. Is it that you can help me now?