Pidgins and creoles - or not

(Another spinoff from Saxons and Scythians)

I think I can get away with the definition of a 'pidgin' as a 'system of communication that has grown up among people who do not share a common language, but who want to talk with one another, for trading with each other...They have a limited vocabulary, a reduced grammatical structure, and a much narrower range of functions compared to the languages that gave rise to them. They are the native language of no-one.'

That's from David Crystal in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, and as far as it goes I don't think anyone objects to it. The problem is with that 'as far as it goes'.

For instance Crystal then goes on to say 'They are nontheless a main means of communication for millions of people.' Personally I cannot see any linguistic reason whatsoever to impose a limit on the number of people who speak it. In fact in spite of what he says, Crystal goes on himself to list several pidgin/creoles with less than a million speakers.

There is then a school of thought that says the designation pidgin should only be used to refer to colonial contacts with native peoples, and in particular to pidgins involving Europeans and non-Europeans. Again I can see no linguistic reason to make such a distinction. If such a disntiction is made, then one needs another word for languages that emerge in similar situations between other peoples at different periods of history. A pidgin would then have to be a subclass of such languages.

There is another that says the word 'pidgin' should be avoided because it is used by some people in a derogatory fashion to mean that pidgins are somewhat inferior. When this is coupled with the belief that 'pidgin' must refer to European/non-European contacts it of course gets uncomfortably close to racism. Again though this is not a linguistic definition: and if 'pidgin' is ruled out on such grounds it should obviously be ruled out completely, even with those languages that meet the other criteria in the modern world.

So I limit myself to the definition I quoted from Crystal, and reject the addenda that are added for totally non-linguistic reasons.

We are left with a pidgin being a simplified language that grows up when two sets of people with different languages want to do business with each other (or develop other relationships, as with inter.group courtship, to use a prim word).

And I would hold that whenever two peoples come together, either one drives out the other, or  exterminates the other, or they do business of one kind or another. Except in the first two cases, a pidgin therefore always develops in the first instance. It seems to me beyond belief that two trading communities meeting and not having a language in common would not develop a pidgin - short of one side getting rid of the other, either by expulsion, as in the US with Amerindians, or by extermination as in Prussia.

Then what happens? Sometimes nothing. The contact may just simply vanish, as when the Phoenicians stopped tradng for Cornish tin.

Or the two peoples may remain separate and the pidgin remain for a long time, as happened with Sabir, the earliest recorded pidgin which lasted for several centuries facilitating trade in the Mediterranean while the (several) peoples involved remained politically and ethnically distinct.

Or, given improvements in education, one of the peoples may learn the language of the other, as has been happening with many pidgins in the old British Empire, where proper educational systems have developed for the colonial population to learn English. It is also not dissimilar to the situation in Luxembourg where everyone learns French and German, neither of which is their mother tongue. But that takes enough economic surplus to provide for education. 

But something that can alternatively happen, though by no means always, is that the peoples assimilate, intermingle, interbreed and eventually consider themselves one people with a common language evolved from their one time pidgin, sharing elements of their original language that went into that pidgin, but now complex and functional enough to serve as a full-blown language - not simplified to meet just a simple short-term local situation.

That language is identified as a 'creole'.

Except that we hit the same problems as for 'pidgin'. It's seen as derogatory - or seen as being used by some people in a derogatory way. It's not a European/colonial mixture. There are too few speakers. Or, additionally, there is no record of the pidgin it developed from having existed.

But in a preliterate culture, why would there be such a record? Even in a semi-literate culture with an educated class literate in one or the other or both of the contact languages, why would the low-level dealings of traders and peasants, even warriors other than high aristocracy, end up recorded in writing or inscriptions and epitaphs and other formal passages? It's not for recording dynasties and the exploits of heros, it's for the day-to-day and the mundane.

Even the aristocracy and the priests are likely to avoid using pidgin: pidgins are essentially for the lower and middle classes, not for the nobility. Given the near necessity of a pidgin in a case of continuing cultural contact, the fact that it is not recorded can hardly be significant. In particular, proverbially, 'absence of evidence is not evvidence of absence'. But it turns out to be treated as significant in many cases for refusing to grant the name of 'creole' to a specific language at a certain period of time.

For the restriction on using pidgin/creole for European colonial situations, see

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mufwene/pidginCreoleLanguage.html

For sabir, the oldest recorded language generally accepted as 'pidgin', see wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

For the ethnic prejudice question and restriction by time and place see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language

Before there is any discussion, advise what is a language and what is a dialect.