My presentation today is about three special types of language.
First, we need to distinguish among a lingua franca, a pidgin, and a creole, and discuss their differences.
Let's start with lingua francas.
The origin of a lingua franca is always a previously existing language which many different people are already familiar with, and the purpose of a lingua franca is usually international commerce.
But whereas the vocabulary of a lingua franca is typically specialized toward particular enterprises like fishing or mining, the system of grammar in a lingua franca is completely standard.
In the ancient world, for example, the lingua franca of international business among countries within trading distance of the Mediterranean Sea was Greek and then Latin.
Today, there is no doubt what the lingua franca of international business, study, and entertainment is.
When Japan hosts an international conference, the meetings are conducted in English.
Pidgins arise when speakers do not share any common language.
When adults must communicate in the absence of a uniquely dominant language, they have to resort to speaking a pidgin.
Unlike the origin of a lingua franca, then, pidgins really are newly invented.
Moreover, pidgins are used for daily conversation.
Pidgins develop when we need to converse with each other but can't.
So, individuals just try to communicate the best they can, often using as much pointing and gesturing as words.
In fact, the vocabulary is simple, characterized by a lot of roundabout circumlocution, that is, ways of saying something without using the specific word.
The grammar, however, is curious.
A sentence can be oddly structured, such as, Indeed, pidgins are not real languages at all.
Pidgins are rudimentary communicative systems.
One important historical example of a pidgin, which developed from the 17th to the 18th centuries, is Chinese pidgin.
In fact, the word pidgin itself is the mispronounced Asian articulation of the word business.
A more recent pidgin is Rusynorsk, a mixture of Russian and Norwegian spoken by whalers for Arctic fishing and commerce.
OK, but what about Creole languages?
First, the speakers of a Creole language were, according to many linguists, initially only children.
This is radically unlike both lingua francas and pidgins.
But, like a pidgin, a Creole language is not a pre-established language.
Nevertheless, a Creole language is an all-encompassing language.
Indeed, the precision of both the semantics and grammar of a Creole language is virtually indistinguishable from non-Creole languages.
The vocabulary of a Creole is without limitation.
But how exactly does a pidgin develop into a Creole?
It is as if humans so expect language to have a robust vocabulary and a complex grammar that, when they don't find it, toddlers begin to instinctively construct it themselves.
They begin to automatically build a new language.
Indeed, the grammar is obviously advanced.
When this happens, the pidgin is said to have been Creolized.
Creole languages historically arose from pidgins throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
One example, Chavacano, a Creole language spoken in the Philippines, is a Spanish-based Creole.
However, modern Creole languages are exceedingly rare, though a Creole language spontaneously evolved in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
It was, however, a Creole sign language.
