The dynamics of pidgin and creole languages reflect the processes by which contact varieties emerge, evolve and stabilise into fully-fledged linguistic systems. Pidgins originate in situations of ...

“You don’t know how happy this makes me,” I wrote a colleague after she casually sent me a link to a recent news story reporting that the U.S. Census Bureau now recognizes Hawaiian Pidgin English as a ...

A large-scale study of languages shows that the grammar of creoles - which emerged in multilingual situations of extreme social upheaval, like colonial slaveries - are composed from the grammars of ...

When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes inadvertently create a new one, combining bits of each into something everyone can use to communicate easily.