Abstract

Contrary to the received position, pidgins appear to have emerged later than creoles, or at best around the same time, definitely not earlier. I adduce various evidence to support my position, inter alia, from the earliest attestations of the words creole and pidgin, the kinds of interactions that Europeans and non-Europeans held in the relevant contact settings (which are in geographic complementary distribution to each other), and the critical role that interpreters (the unsung heroes of colonization) played in the trade colonies where pidgins eventually emerged. Even the exploitation colonization of Africa depended for the longest on interpreters cum colonial auxiliaries. The relevant history of trade colonization suggests that the indigenous rulers on the coast of Africa, South Asia, China, and the Pacific islands did not trade with European companies in pidgins but in closer approximations of the European languages spoken by the interpreters, whose critical role as “go-betweens” or “intermediaries” turned them into important power brokers all the way into the exploitation colonization of the relevant territories in the 19th century, with the exception of China. The available historical evidence suggests that pidgins lexified by European languages emerged later and, like related creoles, by basilectalization, diverging farther away from their lexifiers. Once we factor in the fact that present “expanded pidgins” (e.g., Tok Pisin and Nigerian Pidgin English) remain in geographic complementary distribution with creoles, we should give up the myth that the creoles evolved from erstwhile pidgins. Note that I don’t consider “expanded pidgins” to be creoles.