Pidgins and creoles are contact languages that arise when speakers of mutually unintelligible languages need to communicate. They are central to sociolinguistics and have influenced SLA theory through the pidginisation hypothesis.
A pidgin is a simplified contact language with no native speakers, used for limited communicative functions (typically trade, labour, basic social interaction).
Characteristics:
Examples: Tok Pisin (before creolisation), Chinese Pidgin English, Nigerian Pidgin English
A creole is a pidgin that has been acquired as a native language by a generation of children, expanding in grammar, vocabulary, and functional range.
Characteristics:
Examples: Haitian Creole (French-lexified), Jamaican Creole (English-lexified), Tok Pisin (now creolised), Bislama
In many creole-speaking communities, a continuum exists between the creole (basilect), intermediate varieties (mesolect), and the standard language (acrolect). Speakers move along this continuum depending on context, a form of Style Shifting.
Schumann (1978) drew a parallel between pidginisation and early SLA. He argued that when a learner's social and psychological distance from the target language community is great, the resulting interlanguage resembles a pidgin: simplified morphology, reduced syntax, basic communicative function.
His longitudinal case study of Alberto, a 33-year-old Costa Rican in the US, showed minimal linguistic development over ten months. Alberto's English displayed pidgin-like features: no past tense marking, no auxiliaries, no inversion in questions. Schumann attributed this to social distance (minimal contact with English speakers) and psychological distance (low motivation to acculturate). See Acculturation.
The analogy has been criticised:
Nevertheless, the hypothesis productively linked sociolinguistic concepts to SLA theory and highlighted the role of social context in language development.