However, some extended pidgins which serve as the primary language of their speakers (e.g., Tok Pisin in New Guinea, Sango in the Central African Republic) are already quite complex, and seem relatively unaffected by the acquisition of native speakers (Sankoff, 1979 Samarin, 1995).

In keeping with their extended social role, creoles typically have a larger vocabulary and more complicated grammatical resources than pidgins. Pidgins and creoles are new varieties of language generated in situations of language contact. A creole, in the classical sense of Hall (1966), is a pidgin that has acquired native speakers, usually, the descendants of pidgin speakers who grow up using the pidgin as their first language. A pidgin usually combines elements of the native languages of its users and is typically simpler than those native languages insofar as it has fewer words, less morphology, and a more restricted range of phonological and syntactic options (Rickford, 1992: 224). 1 A pidgin is sharply restricted in social role, used for limited communication between speakers of two or more languages who have repeated or extended contacts with each other, for instance, through trade, enslavement, or migration. Unlike the simplified pidgins, creoles are.

Pidgins and creoles are new varieties of language generated in situations of language contact. A creole is a pidgin language that has become the native language of the children of adult pidgin speakers.

Contact languages pidgins and creoles