2.

difference between pidgin and creole

Pidgins and creoles are both the result of what happens when you blend two or more languages,
but they’re not the same. Put simply, a pidgin is the first-generation version of a language that
forms between native speakers of different languages — a makeshift communication bridge, if you
will. A creole is a pidgin with native speakers, or one that’s been passed down to a second
generation of speakers who will formalize it and fortify the bridge into a robust structure with a fully
developed grammar and syntax.

Generally speaking, pidgins form in the context of a multicultural population. Historically, this has
often happened in areas where multiple groups were trading with each other, or when groups of
slaves from various nations were assimilated into a single population and developed a language.

Pidgins often borrow words from their source languages and feature a simplified grammar. It’s a
bare-bones language designed to enable minimum-viable communication.

By the time a pidgin becomes a creole, the language has developed enough of its own
characteristics to have a distinct grammar of its own. Beyond the well-known French/West African
creole spoken in Haiti, there’s also Hawaiian Creole English, which is a mix of Hawaiian, English,
Chinese, Spanish and other languages. Malay also has at least 14 recognized creole offshoots
thanks to Dutch and Portuguese colonial impact. Gullah is an English-based creole spoken in the
southern United States, and then there’s the French-based Louisiana Creole. There’s also
Chavacano, a Spanish-based creole spoken in the Philippines. The list goes on.

There’s some disagreement among linguists over whether pidgins immediately become creoles, or
whether this process can require more than one generation. Some argue that neurologically, there
are always a ton of commonalities in the way humans learn native tongues, which means first-
generation speakers of creole languages will inevitably “fill in the blanks” of any language aspects
missing from the pidgin version. However, there’s often a ton of vocabulary, syntax and
pronunciation changes that occur during the first 20 to 30 years of creole formation. In either case,
some pidgins are still in use today, such as Nigerian Pidgin and Cameroonian Pidgin English, but
they’re often referred to creoles as well as pidgins. Confused yet?

There’s also some disagreement over whether creoles always arise from pidgins, otherwise known
as the “life cycle” theory, which was introduced by Robert Hall in 1962. Other theories have
surfaced since, like the notion that creoles can develop in much more intimate contexts than trade,
such as between slaves and plantation owners. Some linguists contest the notion that Haitian and
Louisiana Creole arose from a pidgin stage, for example.

Additionally, it’s important to note that pidgins don’t always become creoles. If a second
generation of speakers picks up aspects of the pidgin as a second language, it’s still generally
considered to be a pidgin. Additionally, if the society doesn’t provide an environment where the
language can continue developing in relative isolation, the pidgin will often disappear, along with
the need for it.

In either case, the distinction is not always very cut-and-dried.

“In actual usage, distinctions are also difficult, such as with Tok Pisin (in its name and also as it is
usually considered a pidgin) now being the native language of some in Papua New Guinea,”
writes linguistics PhD candidate Daniel Ross on Quora. “So is it a creole yet? Well, in a sense. But
it is also still a major non-native language for many, probably for more. So perfect
boundaries/distinctions are not possible, but the ideas are fairly clear, and I would think it would be
harder to separate other kinds of mixed languages from creoles than creoles from pidgins.”
As with languages and dialects, the difference between pidgin and creole is not exactly airtight.
Language is a vast continuum, and it’s ever in flux. How’s that for bar banter?

A Creole is a fully-developed language. A Pidgin is not.

A pidgin arises when speakers of two different languages encounter one another and have a need for
limited communications. The pidgin incorporates words from both source languages and has a
simplified grammatical structure, just enough to allow communication for some limited purpose. For
example, a pidgin might support just enough communication to allow Polynesians to trade with
Captain Cook. So you could identify trade goods, express interesting trading, identify terms of the
trade, but you could not discuss the full range of ideas you could in either native language.

A pidgin is never any person's native language; it evolves among adults who are native speakers of
different languages.

In contrast, a Creole is a fully-functional language of its own. It has a complete grammar and the full
expressive power that affords, often quite different from the grammar of its source languages. A Creole
language develops spontaneously among children, not adults,who live in a multi-lingual community.
Young brains seem to have the built-in capacity to invent new grammatical constructs spontaneously.
Unlike a pidgin, a Creole is a native language to its speakers who acquired it as children.

Middle English--it is argued by some scholars--was a Creole language that evolved when Old English
speaking women married Norman French speaking foreign aristocrats.

Pidgins are defined as a type of spoken communication with two or more languages. It has
fundamental grammar and vocabulary. It is also meant to facilitate people who do not speak a
common language. Lastly, it is not spoken as a native language. An example is the “Lingua Franca”
which was first created among traders. This is called business language. They are created because
traders come from different places and have different tongues; therefore a common language is
formed.
Creoles, on the other hand, refer to any pidgin language that becomes the first language in a
speech community. A creole is “created” when the utterer of a pidgin language become gains a
strong hold over utterers of another. This can be in the form of social or political hold over.
Therefore, the pidgin language used in speech between these two groups may become the first
language of the minority community. One such example is “Gullah (derived from English), spoken
in the Sea Islands of the southeastern U.S.” – http://www.reference.com/browse/creole

Differences between Pidgins and Creoles:

1) Pidgin is a linguistic communication that comprised of components of two or more other

languages and is used for communication among people. It can also be called business language.
It is not a first language. Whereas, creole is a language that was at first a pidgin but has
“transformed” and become a first language.

2) Structural difference: Creole languages have the “Subject Verb Object” word order whereas
Pidgin can have any possible order. Also, reduplication is a common and general process in Creole
languages but its very not very often found in Pidgins.

3) One important difference between Pidgins and Creoles is that pidgins do not have first
language speakers while creoles do. However, this is not easy to make out because there are more
and more extended pidgins beginning to acquire native speakers. Extended pidgins refer to when
a pidgin becomes a creole. The cultural “side” of a pidgin usually defines this. This means that
more pidgins are becoming first languages.

4) Another difference is that creoles may originate through abnormal transmissions but as children
acquire them, they must, therefore, comply with the ‘blueprint’ of language that can also be
referred to as how the language is going to constructed and formed. Blueprint here is comparable
to how we relate to a blueprint of a house. However, for pidgins, as they are a result of a second
language, although they have to be learnable by adults, they do not have to be acceptable by
children. This means that pidgins do not have to comply with the ‘blueprint’ of language. Pidgins
before they become accomplished languages in a community, are always second languages and
usually after teenage.

3. difference of l1 l2 l3

L1 or First Language

What Does L1 mean?

An L1 is your first language, your native language, or your mother tongue.

You are a native speaker of that language.
Every developmentally healthy human being has a first language. Often (but not always) this is
the language that was learned during childhood—before puberty—and is the language that is
most used and most comfortable for a given person.

First languages are generally maintained for life, with little overt effort on the part of the
speaker. This is because first languages are often woven into the personal and sociocultural
identities of the native speaker, and he or she uses the language to think and to interact with
family and other members of their cultural or ethnic group.

How Are L1s Learned?

L1s are learned through a process known as first language acquisition, or FLA.
This is a complex biological process which is still not yet entirely understood by the scientific
community.

Though the intricacies of first language acquisition are beyond the scope of this article, the most
commonly agreed-upon aspects of FLA are as follows:

 First Language Acquisition is the process of gaining the capacity to use human language,
where previously no such capacities existed.
 L1s are acquired automatically, without conscious effort.
 L1s are learned before puberty, typically during infancy.
 An acquired L1 is known at native proficiency. According to J. Joseph Lee’s Article The
Native Speaker, An Achievable Model?, published in the Asian EFL journal, native speaker
 have proficiency represented by an “internalized knowledge” of several areas of language,
including:
 Appropriate use of idiomatic expressions
 Correctness of language form
 Natural pronunciation
 Cultural context including “response cries”, swear words, and interjections
 Above average sized vocabulary, collocations and other phraseological items
 Metaphors
 Frozen syntax, such as binomials or bi-verbials
 Nonverbal cultural features
Despite the fact that one’s “native language” are referred to as his or her “first language”, it is
possible to have several “first languages”, so long as they are learned prior to puberty. For
example, children who grow up in households where two languages are spoken (typically in the
case of parents of different linguistic backgrounds) may acquire each of those languages
natively. These people are referred to as bilingual.

L2 or Second Language

What Does L2 mean?

An L2 is a second language, a foreign language, a target language, or a foreign tongue.

If you have an L2, you are a non-native speaker of that language.
Unlike L1s, not everyone has an L2. If you have learned or are learning a new language, that
language is your L2.

How Are L2s Learned?

L2s are learned through a process known as second language acquisition, or SLA.
Like first language acquisition, second language acquisition is a complex field of linguistics.
Though many of its theories and facets are constantly under debate, the general commonalities
of SLA are:

 Second language acquisition is the process of acquiring language capacity after another
language (or languages) have already been learned natively.
 Learning an L2 requires conscious effort.
 L2s are not learned during infancy, and most often after puberty.
 Theoretically, an acquired L2 can only be known at non-native proficiencies. Exactly how
proficient a language learner can become in a second language can range widely, but the
general scientific consensus is that an L2 cannot be mastered to the same level as an
L1. Highly advanced L2 learners are often called near-native speakers.
 Though capacity in both L1s and L2s can deteriorate from lack of use (through a process
called attrition), L2 capacity is considered to decrease faster from misuse than their L1
counterparts.
As with the term L1 above, the use of the number two in “L2” or “second language” does not
necessarily refer to the exact numerical order in which a language is acquired, but only that the
language was learned non-natively. In nearly all cases, L2 can be used to refer to any number
of languages learned after puberty.
Together, L1 and L2 are the major language categories by acquisition. In the large majority of
situations, L1 will refer to native languages, while L2 will refer to non-native or target
languages, regardless of the numbers of each.

L3 or Third Language

What Does L3 Mean?

An L3 is a third language, or a second foreign or non-native language.

According to researcher Jasone Cenoz, a third language is “a language that is different from the
first and the second and is acquired after them.” (Cenoz 2013, p. 3)
Considering a given L3 only has to be different from an L1 and the first chronologically learned
L2, any L3 can also be referred to as Ln, with n representing the numerical order in which that
language is acquired (i.e. L4, L5, L6, etc.)
Note that terms like L3, L4, L5, and beyond are rarely used, as these languages are most often
referred to as additional L2s.

How Are L3s Learned?

L3s are learned through a process known as Third Language Acquisition, or TLA.
TLA is a young field of research that can be considered a subdomain of SLA. The field itself
aims to examine the differences between acquiring a first foreign language and any subsequent
foreign languages thereafter.

TLA researcher Jason Cenoz differentiates third language acquisition from second language
acquisition in the following way:

“TLA shares many of the characteristics of SLA, but there are also important differences
because third language learners already have at least two languages in their linguistic
repertoire. Third language learners can use this broader linguistic repertoire when learning a
third language. For example, they can relate new structures, new vocabulary or new ways of
expressing communicative functions to the two languages they already know, not just to one of
them, as in the case of monolinguals.” (Cenoz 2013, p. 4)
According to TLA research, the knowledge of an L3 has a positive effect on the acquisition of
an L2 “in most cases”, for many of the reasons cited above (Cenoz 2013, p.9)

Conclusion
No two languages are learned in exactly the same way. The way you learned your first language
is fundamentally different from the way you learn any additional language after that.
Furthermore, each new language after your first non-native language adds a different reference
point within your linguistic repertoire, benefiting and bolstering the acquisition of future
languages.

No matter how far you go in your language learning, keep in mind that if you’re reading this
article, you’re good enough at language learning to already have a perfectly-acquired L1 under
your belt. That means that, with a bit of effort, you have everything it takes to acquire an L2, an
L3, and so on. The exact number is up to you.

You just need to make it happen.