Comparing Jamaican Creole And Tok Pisin

The development of two creoles of English: Jamaican creole and Tok Pisin

It is written by Siegel (2008) that ‘Pidgin and creole languages are spoken by more than 75 million people’ this number may only be an estimate, but it is one that is growing all the time as more and more languages make contact and communication is needed between the two.

Siegel (ibid.) explained that ‘Pidgins and creoles are languages that develop in situations where groups of people who do not share a common language have to communicate with each other – typically as the result of trading or large-scale population movement.’ Although he decides to group them together here, the two are different stages of language development.

A creole is a more evolved version of a pidgin that is used by a main community to communicate. The creole will have evolved from its original pidgin state through creolization. McWhorter (1995:240) wrote ‘creolization is merely a designation for a later

This type of contact language would happen between two unrelated languages and is most likely do to either trade, migration or conquest. After the jargon, there are two stages of pidgin, stabilised and expanded.

A pidgin is described by Aitchinson (2014:207) to be ‘a ‘marginal’ language, used by people who need to communicate for certain restricted purposes’. Aitchhinson (2014: 216) also describes the pidgin as ‘a foetus with the potential to become a full language’. He also adds that the pidgin is ‘not yet capable of fulfilling the entire communication needs of a human.’ McArthur (1998:161) agrees with this. He mentions that pidgins are ‘simple clumsy languages incapable of nuance, detail, abstraction and precision’

Pidgin and creole are often said to be different, due to creoles being more structured and having written language. In my two examples, these written languages are spelt almost phonetically which shows the accent associated with the creole