Eight Language Starts Over—Creoles I

Only some new languages are truly new, having emerged when pidgin speakers came to use the pidgin as an everyday language. In these situations, people combine vocabulary from the language they are learning with grammar from this and their native languages, the result being a new hybrid rather than a dialect of the language that provides the words. These are creole languages and have emerged mostly amidst the slave trade and related activities. Jamaican patois, Haitian, and Cape Verdean are creoles, as is the Tok Pisin used in Papua New Guinea as a lingua franca among the hundreds of languages spoken there.