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Pidgins and Creoles
English-based languages without English spelling

By Valerie Rule    Supplemental tables and notes by Steve Bett

The spellings of English pidgin and creole languages could be fairly called ‘International English spellings’. Pidgins today have a simplicity of spelling and ease of learning that contrasts starkly with the English language in the countries where both are in public use. Pidgin-Englishes respell English words very directly. Their purpose is to communicate as efficiently as possible with the widest audience, with no need or desire to cling to a totem of tradition or to impress with scholarship. Their significance for English spelling design derives from this - they are almost like a real-life laboratory. Their modern spellings show linguistic features that appear to be advantageous for easy learning, speaking and writing (Yule, 1987). References

Pidgin forms of English developed as lingua franca when British traders from the 17th century on needed to communicate quickly with peoples of other languages. From a base of English mixed with the other tongue or tongues, a simple grammar with minimum vocabulary would develop, so that it could be picked up very quickly. Pidgins may appear long-winded in comparison with English when they have only a limited vocabulary to communicate with - e.g. PLES BILONG PUTIM OL BOK for BOOK-CASE in Tok Pisin - but as vocabulary increases, linguistic economy increases too.

Until recently, pidgins were regarded as 'bastard jargons' that had no claims to being proper languages at all. There is evidence that in some colonial places, pidgins were deliberately used as a low-status dialect that could communicate with ‘the natives’ yet keep them in their place by preventing the upward mobility they might achieve with proper English. Today nationalisms, linguistic scholarship and growing literatures have together raised the status of pidgins as well as of creoles - which are new languages that have developed from a mixture of old ones and now have a life of their own. There are around sixty surviving English-based pidgins and creole (Crystal 1987) although most of these have no written form.

The spelling of pidgins. In the past, when no English pidgin had a recognised orthographies of its own, on occasions when they appeared in print they were given 'etymological spelling', that is, based on the conventional English spelling of the original English words. These spellings would be cluttered with apostrophes, diacritics and clumsy vowel spellings as shown in the ‘English’ spelling of Roper River Creole below. The effect was to make pidgins look like English dialects that were uncouth and more than slightly idiot-comic - and cast their speakers as being similarly linguistically inferior. In recent years however, pidgin varieties of English language are thriving and respectable and developing written forms and their own literatures. The postwar movement of third world countries to use English as the medium of education has been going into reverse, through a combination of nationalism and the unfriendliness of English spelling. A major reason for the development of their own orthographies, as well as for pidgin languages failing to become closer to English, has been that conventional English spelling is so difficult that speakers with differing speech patterns have even more trouble with it than do native speakers of standard English. The new pidgin spelling systems are characteristically so simple that not only can their local speakers learn to write and read in them easily, but literate English speakers have no trouble in reading them.

Common principles in modern spellings of English-based pidgins are illustrated from Niugini Tok Pisin, Australian Roper River Creole, and Krio from Sierra Leone.

Melanesian-English Tok Pisin, a lingua franca of Papua Niugini and neighboring islands, is spoken by over a million people who have over 700 languages of their own. Tok Pisin and Motu, the Port Moresby trade language, have rapidly overtaken English as the major languages for government, education and the media, although schools still struggle with English. About 85% of the root words of Tok Pisin come from English, and it is easy to see how sounds have been translated, so that English readers can usually make some sense of it in print.⁶ As yet there are no hard-and-fast conventions in either spoken or written language, although dictionaries will soon be a stabilising influence. It would be more in the interests of progress in a country such as Papua New Guinea, if standard English were the lingua franca for the tribes with their hundreds of different languages because of its international, educational and completely supra-tribal value. English is also a more economical and precise language - for example, a bilingual public notice in a newspaper took 48 words in English to say what took 83 words in Tok Pisin. Pidgin required nearly twice the words. However, written Tok Pisin is very much easier to read than English, because the spelling is simple and concise, including the spelling of English-origin words. Indeed, if written English could be given an introductory spelling in Niugini publications, according to Tok Pisin conventions, then nationals might more easily to learn both written and spoken English. For example: 'Nau em i taim bilong Papua Niugini i ma gohet long wok egrikalsa i go bung im yia 1991 na bai i go yet’ translates into English - here given with retention of pidgin spellings for words common to both English and pidgin - as: ‘Nau yu are moving with Papua Niugini in Agrikalsa intu yia1991 and beyond.’ The following transliteration has been given minor reversions to English phonology such as English /f/ for pidgin /p/. ‘COFI REHABILITESEN AWENES KAMPAN Kofi rust - Samtings to do. Fencing - Klin kofi gaden gut - Shading - Kut and prune - Draining. Sapos yu mak dis things, yu will stop the sik cofi rust and your cofi plants wil kari moa seris.

Tok Pisin vocabulary of government is almost entirely derived from English, e.g.: DIPARTMEN PRAIMERI INDASTRI, NESENEL BROTKASTING KOMISI, AUSTRALIAN ASOSIET PRESKOMYUNITI PROJEKPROVINSAL SEKETERI NIUS SEVISWAIA SEVES GAVMANDIA EDITAPALAMEN PRAIM MINISTABISNIS KAMPANISPESEL OPERATAWISBOT OPERATAEKSEKYUTIV OPISA BAGARUP, an expressive and ubiquitous word derived originally from English, could well be taken back into English in this improved form.

Roper River Creole is a mix of around two dozen Ngukurr-Bamyili dialects spoken in the Roper River area of the Northern Territory of Australia, but is almost entirely derived from English. There have been pidgin dialects in Australia ever since the 'barbarous mixture of English with the Port Jackson dialect' that David Collins wrote home about in 1796, because there were so many dozens of native languages that pidgin English became the common language for inter-tribal communication. 7 Of the ten major pidgins, creoles and forms of aboriginal English around Australia today, only the Roper River Creole has a recognised orthography, developed 1973-76 for education, first by white Australians and then increasingly with Creole speakers involved. Ethnic identity was seen as more valuable than wider communication, so it was deliberately decided to make the Creole look like a language of its own, and to reject spellings designed to look like English. There is still latitude for writers to spell the way they speak, regardless of dialect. The degree of distance from English spelling of words tends to show a writer's distance from English-speaking centres - e.g. English SLEEP becomes SLIP - SILIP - JILIP - JILIB and English SNAKE becomes SNEIK - SINEIK - SINEK - JINEK. (See Sandefur, 1979.) The major orthographic decisions are worth noting.

All the significant phonemes of the language can be adequately represented in the roman alphabet but the spelling under-differentiates, and is diaphonic rather than precisely phonemic. That is, complete representation of all the speech sounds is not regarded as necessary. The complexity of vowels, usually the hardest part of spelling and auditory discrimination, is reduced to a minimum. In fact, bilinguals tend to perceive Creole as having more significant phonemes than do monolingual Creole speakers.

Morphemes are recognised in that words within compound words must be spelt consistently. Sandefur gives an example to compare Creole orthography with an 'English spelling' version. In the story, Wen Keingurru bin gidim teil (from Enimulen, edited by D. M. Jentian, 1977) childless Mr and Mrs Bandicoot go to ask the Kangaroo for two children because he has plenty.

The creole spelling is the more concise and direct. The reduced spelling phonemic writing sytem, New Follick, (far right column) contains many of the same features and can be used to spell standard English in a consistent manner. Nu Folik contains more vowels than the pidjin but is almost as space efficient.

Krio, the West African Pidgin English of Sierra Leone is at the far side of another continent, but it shows similar principles of economy and simplicity in its version of English spelling. For example, the spelling <c> is used for the sound /ch/, single vowel letters replace digraphs, and strings of consonants are avoided if possible, so that even what was originally /dj/ will be separated by vowels , e.g. bagasi. Some spelling pronunciation appears in words like BISKUIT, whose origins can be surmised from product labels.

A Krio lullaby:

‘Slip gud o, bebi-gial! opin y'ai lilibit en luk me wan minit bifo yu slip. Gudnait! Slip gud.’
                                                                                                                         ( English Today, 1985 )

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Literacy in English and pidgin

A common finding from Downing’s studies in Papua New Guinea (1987) was that children made more progress when their initial literacy instruction was in their mother-tongue, than if it was in a second language. They could learn to read quickly in Tok Pisin. When these children started learning English, one or two years later than those taught to read first in English, they soon achieved equal scores and were faster and more confident. Downing did not add this, but I think it would be found that they were facilitated in becoming literate not only because they began reading in their mother tongue, but because most New Guinea languages including Tok Pisin have easily masterable spellings.

A local joke was that when the former Australian administration of Papua New Guinea ruled that teachers must not share the village language of the children they taught, to try to ensure that English would be taught and learnt, the educational authorities soon realised that ‘we do this to make children learn English, but they learn pidgin.’

Evaluations of the Roper River Creole orthography in 1977 indicated that aboriginal learners progressed well, and fluent English readers could also read in Creole without assistance. Less fluent English readers did need some formal help since the two vowel systems are distinct. This was expected to be the only real difficulty of transfer when literate aboriginals are also learning to be read in English - apart from the major intrinsic difficulty in English spelling itself.

As literacy in creoles develops, so does standardisation and also, probably, a degree of spelling pronunciation, so that local dialects become more uniform and converge to the dominant version in print. Creoles may become more like English, particularly as their languages take in vocabulary of the modern world, but their spellings will still represent an English spelling reform, apart from the pronunciation shifts in consonants and vowels.

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Lessons may be learnt from the 'user-friendly' features of English pidgin spellings:

• Consonant clusters and digraphs are simplified and reduced, with a preference for CVCV or CVC structure.

• Slurred vowels are represented rather than omitted in the spelling - but their spelling is consistent, the common forms being <i> or <e>. [/i:/ i, /ei/ e, /ai/ ai ]  they=de,  the=la or luh,  me=mi,  high=hai

• Vowels can be inserted to prevent tricky strings of consonant, e.g. BOKIS for BOX.

• Comprehensive simple vowels cover a variety of shades of phoneme, without troubling to distinguish between them e.g. ARURUT for ARROWROOT (c.f. BANANA in English spelling). Such(diaphonic) broad-band representations of the sounds in a language that may overlap phonemes for practical purposes can be especially useful when a spelling system represents more than one dialect, and was a principle used in Pitman’s Initial Teaching Alphabet, to cover all English dialects.
  
• No doubled consonants.
  
• Consistent representation of morphemes in compound words, so that the spelling of units of meaning did not change with inflections or affixes
  
• No superfluous letters, since there is no hangover from any tradition.

The spellings of pidgins could be regarded as exemplars for English spelling improvement that deleted surplus letters.

Examples of writing systems that follows these guides: English-Creole (Austrialian),  Cut Spelling,  New Follick

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Notes

Yule, Valerie (1987)

• a
• b
• c
• d
• e
• f
• g

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References:

Baron, Naomi S. (1981) Speech, Writing, and the Sign: a functional view of linguistic representation. Indiana University Press. Portions of this book appeared in Semiotica, Ars Semiotica, and the Journal of Creole Studies.

Definition:
The term pidgin is commonly used as a catchall to refer to a vast range of languages linked by two criteria:

1. They contain elements from more than one language
2. They are judged not to be as complete or sophisticated as any of the donors

A pidgin is distinct from a "trade jargon"   Here is a list of distinguishing features:

• Stability - A pidgin is a single, stable language in which speakers are linguistically saturated
• Source- Lexical items derive predominantly from the language of the dominant population
• e.g. motoka (automobile)
• bateri (battery)
• fauntenpen (fountain pen)
• skrudraiva (screw driver)
• mas(h)in bilong mekim lektrik (dynamo) exception to direct borrowing
• tupela han wanpela fut (fifteen)
• i no save harim tok (deaf)
• ples bilong putim ol bok (bookcase)
• Syntax- Identifying the source is largely irrelevant because most of the syntax is unique to the pidgin
• Complexity- little inflection, strict word order
• does not mark gender or number
• highly simplified

Redundancy - redundancy is high because of the circumlocution in the syntax

Ideas from other language related lists (sci.lang in particular).

Is English a creole?

The change from Anglo-Saxon to Modern English (loss of gender and of case inflection, phonological change, acquisition of a huge stock of French and Latin vocabulary) is certainly dramatic, and has led some sci.lang posters, and even some linguists (e.g. Domingue, Bailey & Maroldt, Milroy) to the provocative postulation that English suffered pidginization or creolization at the time of the Norman Conquest (1066) or at the time of the Norse invasions (from 865), or both.

This hypothesis, as Sarah Grey Thomason and Terence Kaufman have shown in Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (1988), rests on an incomplete understanding of creolization and a shaky grasp on the history of English.

There is a wide range of language contact situations, from casual contact to deep structural interference; English is by no means the most striking of these cases. It looks like a creole only if one ignores this range of phenomena and calls any case of moderate structural interference a case of creolization.

For many of the changes in question, the chronology does not work out. For instance, the reduction of unstressed vowels to /@/, (schwa) largely responsible for the loss of Old English nominal declensions, had taken place before the Conquest, and affected all of England, including areas never settled by the Norse.

And English did absorb an immense amount of French and Latin vocabulary, but most of this occurred well after the Conquest-- past 1450, two centuries after the nobility ceased to be French-speaking.  French speakers never amounted to more than about 3% of the 1.5 m plus native Anglo speaking population.

Other points to note:

1) most of the simplifications and foreign borrowings seen in English occurred as well in other Germanic languages, notably Dutch, Low German, and the Scandinavian languages;

2) a particularly striking borrowing from Norse, the pronoun 'they', was probably adopted to avoid what otherwise would have been a merger of 'he/him' with 'they/them';

3) the total number of French-speaking invaders was not more than 50,000, compared to an English-speaking population of over 1.5m-- nowhere near the proportions that would threaten the normal inheritance of English.

4) the number of Anglo Saxon words in English is less than 12%. Most are found in the first 100 most frequently used words which are 85% Anglo-Saxon or Germanic. The function words are Anglo-Saxon and Norse.

5) Percent of French words or French spellings -

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