# Why do some areas form creoles/pidgins and other don't? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 27, 2008, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929 "2008-03-27T16:48:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929/21 "2008-03-29T21:44:35Z")
clairobscur writes: \> I also remember having noted several years ago a thread about a document \> printed by the US government in some english-based creole, which caused a \> ruckus, a minor scandal and accusations of racism being thrown around, while \> french-based creoles, have a recognized written form, have been used in \> litterature, and have been an object of pride at least since the 50s-60s, when \> intellectuals with an african or caraibean heritage, like the Martiniquais Aimé ? Césaire, began to claim back their cultural heritage. You’re thnking of this incident: [http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Doc-Blacks/+Doc-Blacks-Intelligence&Competence/ThePamphletTranslationImbroglio&Negroese.html](http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Doc-Blacks/+Doc-Blacks-Intelligence&Competence/ThePamphletTranslationImbroglio&Negroese.html) In Jamaica and other English-speaking islands of the Caribbean they don’t like to admit just how far their patois is from Standard British English. In Haiti they are proud of Haitian Creole and are happy to call it a separate language. That’s why I’m dubious about the claim that Haitian Creole is that much further from Parisian French than the Caribbean English patois is from Standard British English. ---
**Author:** ![Martha\_Medea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/43a26b/32.png) [@Martha\_Medea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martha_Medea)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929/22 "2008-03-29T23:15:56Z")
[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner] In Jamaica and other English-speaking islands of the Caribbean they don’t like to admit just how far their patois is from Standard British English. In Haiti they are proud of Haitian Creole and are happy to call it a separate language. That’s why I’m dubious about the claim that Haitian Creole is that much further from Parisian French than the Caribbean English patois is from Standard British English. [/QUOTE] That may be the case, although some advertising and public educational messages in Jamaica are written in a phonetic rendition of patois. I always took this to be because people would identify with patois more than with formal English, as opposed to not being able to understand standard English - which is definitely the case with Kreyol/French in Haiti. I just happen to be working on a report from a public health education project in Jamaica that uses the following slogans: _WASH YUH AN’ DEM! YUH NUH WAN RUNNIN’ BELLY! REMEMBER! IT NOH NICE TO SEE DE RUBBISH INNA DEH STREET! BEFORE YUH PREPARE YUH BICKLE, WASH YUH AN’ DEM!_ Now, my English is far better than my French, but I find that instantly comprehensible. Would a French speaker have the same reaction to Kreyol (which is easier to understand when written, BTW)? Kreyol has some different words, and a different grammatical structure. Jamaican patois has some different words (bickle= food) and the emphatic “dem” pronoun(?) at the end of a statement, but the main difference to me seems to be the pronunciation. Judge for yourself by comparing - here are a couple of Kreyol sayings\*: \*Pal franse pa di lespri pou sa. Si travay te bon bagay, moun rich la pran-l lontan. \* I am pretty sure that there is a much wider gap, but my question would be (having a bit more experience of Haitians and their knowledge of French and Kreyol) - are there people in the Anglophone Caribbean countries who only speak patois, and are not able to communicate in English? Because this is certainly the case in Haiti with the vast majority of Haitians who speak Kreyol but cannot function at all in French (I have first hand experience of this). \*Translation: Speaking French doesn’t mean you are smart. 😉 If work were a good thing the rich would have grabbed it a long time ago. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2008, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929/23 "2008-03-30T00:15:31Z")
[QUOTE=Martha Medea] I just happen to be working on a report from a public health education project in Jamaica that uses the following slogans: _WASH YUH AN’ DEM! YUH NUH WAN RUNNIN’ BELLY! REMEMBER! IT NOH NICE TO SEE DE RUBBISH INNA DEH STREET! BEFORE YUH PREPARE YUH BICKLE, WASH YUH AN’ DEM!_ Judge for yourself by comparing - here are a couple of Kreyol sayings\*: \*Pal franse pa di lespri pou sa. Si travay te bon bagay, moun rich la pran-l lontan. \* I am pretty sure that there is a much wider gap [/QUOTE] If your examples are representative, there’s indeed a much wider gap. It was easy to understand the Jamaican slogan, while I had to look closely at the Haitian saying and to try several ways of pronouncing the words to guess what the first sentence was roughly about (not the exact meaning) and the meaning of the last words (rich la pran l lontan) of the second one (I had no clue what the rest of the sentence meant). ---
**Author:** ![Martha\_Medea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/43a26b/32.png) [@Martha\_Medea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martha_Medea)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2008, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929/24 "2008-03-30T01:38:50Z")
I don’t know how representative this was, because Kreyol’s official status in Haiti means that there is a lot of text to draw from, whereas as far as I can tell, Jamaican patois in its written form only tends to appear in simple and brief slogans. _Si travay te bon bagay, moun rich la pran-l lontan._ The first two words are easy: if work _te bon bagay_ - is a good thing. _Bagay_ (from baggage) is used to mean ‘thing’. _Bon Bagay_ is a very common phrase in Haiti. _Moun_ = people rich is easy enough… _la pran-l ontan_ ~ _prends longtemps_ ~ taken a long time ago In the Jamaican text the only word that gave me a problem was _bickle_, but I guessed that comes from victuals - pronounced vittles - the Caribbean pronunciation would be _bickle_. (as in little, which is pronounced _lickle_). I tried to find something simpler from Haiti - this might be easier to interpret: _KÒ FANM PA MACHANDIZ, KONPAYI ‘PRESTIGE’ PA GEN PRESTIJ NOU P AP BWÈ BYÈ PRESTIGE POU N PWOTESTE KONT FASON KONPAYI AN AP ITILIZE KÒ FANM VOYE MESAJ SA A BAY TOUT MOUN OU KONNEN_ It’s from a women’s group campaigning against a beer company’s use of sexist images in its advertising. Women are not merchandise, the Prestige company has not got prestige We won’t drink Prestige beer We need to protest against the way the company uses women Send this message to everyone you know Or this well known text in its Kreyol translation - can you guess what it is? _Tout moun fèt lib, egal ego pou diyite kou wè dwa. Nou gen la rezon ak la konsyans epi nou fèt pou nou aji youn ak lot ak yon lespri fwatènite._ ---
**Author:** ![liberty3701](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3d9bf3/32.png) [@liberty3701](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/liberty3701)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2008, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929/25 "2008-03-30T02:17:50Z")
For a creole to form, as people have noted above, it has to be children’s first language. As a pidgin, it does not have full expressive power; since pidgins are used mostly for commercial purposes, a lot of stuff like how to say you love someone or how to talk about what you did last summer is not a part of it. But, when a pidgin is used by children as a language, it needs that full capacity. The beauty of language and acquisition is that children can do this. There’s a theory that’s name I can’t remember, but it states for a pidgin or creole to form, you need at least two substrate languages. Substrate languages, which in the case of most Caribbean and African creoles I know are African languages, form the grammar of the creole. The superstrate languages form the lexicon and are the target languages (i.e., the more prestigious language), and these are usually the European languages. Anyway, if there are two different groups who are trying to communicate with each other and with the colonizers, this forms the perfect environment for a creole. For instance, in the Caribbean, people from so many different linguistic groups from Africa are brought together as slaves. In order to do what you gotta do (do your work so you can get food, talk with other people so you don’t go crazy, etc.), a common ground has to be found, and that common ground is the pidgin. When people get together and have a kid, but have no common language besides the pidgin, the kid learns the pidgin, and voila, a creole is born. So, yeah, this was kind of rambly, but I think one possible reason some places didn’t from pidgins or creoles was because there weren’t two substrate languages. In Africa, from my understanding, it is common for people from different groups to have a lingua franca, so while they may be from two different linguistic groups, they can communicate, so the pidgin is not needed between the people whose languages would have formed the substratum. Their children are not going to hear pidgin growing up as a first language, and what pidgins their might have been at first to deal with colonizers died out because of widespread adoption of the colonizers’ languages or something else. Also of interest might be the [creole continuum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilect#Stratification). Did that make sense? I’m not a creolist, but I’ve studied them a little. I don’t want the above to be thought of as the be-all, end-all answer; more like an informed opinion. If you’re really curious and want to know about Africa in particular, I would suggest looking up the work of [John Singler](http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/people/faculty/singler/) or even emailing him. [Renee Blake](http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/people/faculty/blake/), [John Rickford](http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/), [Salikoko Mufwene](http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mufwene/), and [Don Winford](http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~dwinford/) have done a lot of work on Caribbean creoles and creoles in general. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2008, 8:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929/26 "2008-03-30T08:29:07Z")
Stop the presses! I’m told by some people in the south that there actually is a form of pidgin French, but I’m not convinced they arn’t talking about their local languages with a few French words thrown in… I think another factor has to be colonial styles- we are talking about people with the same cultural and ethnic backgrounds, so variations among the people themselves can’t be the deciding factor. The English, AFAIK, had a more hands-on style with more back and forth trade. The French dealt mostly with the elites and governed through local elites, which means they didn’t have their own dinstinctively French trading system. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-some-areas-form-creoles-pidgins-and-other-dont/442929.md?page=1)