According to the theory of monogenesis in its most radical form, all
pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...
s and
creole language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...
s of the world can be ultimately traced back to one linguistic variety. This idea was first formulated by
Hugo Schuchardt Hugo Ernst Mario Schuchardt (4 February 1842, Gotha (town), Gotha (Thuringia) – 21 April 1927, Graz (Styria)) was an eminent Germany, German linguistics, linguist, best known for his work in the Romance languages, the Basque language, and in mixed ...
in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by and . It assumes that some type of pidgin language, dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese, based on
Portuguese was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts established by the Portuguese on the West African coast. This variety was the starting point of all the pidgin and creole languages. This would explain to some extent why Portuguese
lexical item
In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words ( catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are ''cat'', ''traffic light'', ''take care of'', ''by the way' ...
s can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous
grammatical
In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular variety (linguistics), speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the go ...
similarities shared by such languages.
Evidence
Keith Whinnom pinpointed the idea that a proto-pidgin "spread via normal
linguistic diffusion" and claimed that there are many similarities between
Spanish contact vernaculars and languages of this type used in the Philippines and
a Portuguese Creole in India. These similarities are to be found
in the fields of syntax and certain parts of vocabulary.
While many creoles around the world have lexicons based on languages other than Portuguese (e.g.
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
,
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
,
Spanish,
Dutch), it was hypothesized that such creoles were derived from this lingua franca by means of
relexification In linguistics, relexification is a mechanism of language change by which one language changes much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, with the lexicon of another language, without drastically changing the relexified language's gramm ...
, i.e. the process in which a pidgin or creole incorporates a significant amount of its lexicon from another language while keeping the grammar intact. There is some evidence that relexification is a real process. Pieter Muysken and show that there are languages which derive their grammar and lexicon from two different languages respectively, which could be easily explained with the relexification hypothesis. Also,
Saramaccan seems to be a pidgin frozen in the middle of relexification from Portuguese to English. However, in cases of such
mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. It differs from a creole language, creole or pidgin, pidgin language in that ...
s, as call them, there is never a one-to-one relationship between the grammar or lexicon of the mixed language and the grammar or lexicon of the language they attribute it to.
attempted to postulate the relatedness of pidgins and creoles, with a lingua franca known as ''Sabir'' or
Mediterranean Lingua Franca
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a pidgin language that was used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.
Etymology
''Lingua franca'' meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, a ...
as the starting point, which was then relexified by the Portuguese and then subsequently by various other European powers.
Problems
However, monogenesis and relexification have a number of problems. First, as Todd admits, pidgins, by "shedding linguistic redundancies" such as syntactic complexity, have removed the features that allow linguists to identify relatedness. Relexification assumes that, in learning a second language, people can learn vocabulary and grammar separately and will learn the latter but replace the former.
In addition, pidgin languages are inherently unstructured, so relexification does not account for how the syntactic structure of a creole could emerge from the languages that lack such structure.
also points out that relexification postulates too many improbabilities and that it is unlikely that a language "could be disseminated round the entire tropical zone, to peoples of widely differing language background, and still preserve a virtually complete identity in its grammatical structure wherever it took root, despite considerable changes in its phonology and virtually complete changes in its lexicon."
See also
*
Language bioprogram theory
*
Mediterranean Lingua Franca
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a pidgin language that was used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.
Etymology
''Lingua franca'' meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, a ...
, aka the "Sabir language"
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
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*{{citation
, last=Whinnom
, first=Keith
, year=1965
, title=The origin of the European-based creoles and pidgins
, journal=Orbis
, volume=14
, pages=509–527
Pidgins and creoles