Pidgins and Creoles

…In West Africa, English takes two forms: the language received in England, more or less modified, and English-based pidgins and creoles. The American linguist, Robert Hall, makes a distinction between "pidgins" used by members of different speech groups to communicate with each other, and the "creoles" which arise "when a pidgin becomes the native language of a speech community." By this definition creoles are languages; whether pidgins are is a matter for debate. Once, linguists used to despise pidgins, and creoles as debased. Now they take them seriously, realising that all languages are to some extent creolised (English very obviously).

The historical evolution of these pidgins and creoles remains uncertain. It has been suggested that they all derive from sabir, the lingua franca of the medieval Mediterranean, which was spread to Africa by the Portuguese. But Spencer thinks that several distinct pidgins {Portuguese, French and English) grew up separately in West

Africa. English he points out, was being spoken there by Englishmen (and a variety of English by their interpreters) as early as the 16^th century. By the 17th century many Englishmen were settled there. But it would be wrong to assume that, because they were trading in slaves, they spoke merely a "trade pidgin". Buying slaves can only have taken up a small part of slave trader's day. Most of his time must have been spent in company and intimacy with his African wives, friends and associates. What he spoke will have contained far more than just trade terms.

Out of this "West Coast English" (call it pidgin or creole) grew the most widespread of the West Africa creoles - Sierra Leone Krio - enriched by many other components, including creoles of North America and the West Indies, and African language, principally Yoruba. Eldred Jones, himself a native Krio speaker, and head of the English department at the University of Sierra Leone, gives a brief comprehensive survey of this magnificently flexible language, rich in expressive idioms and neologisms, which even a professor of English Literature, can love, and prefer in conversation to English. Long derided and scorned, Krio has survived triumphantly for over a century. Today it is more spoken than ever before - indeed, it has become the lingua franca of …

(From: John Spencer: The English in West Africa, Longman Publishers)