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The consequences of teachers5 and school administrators5
ignorance of pidgin and
Creole language varieties can be enormous for children who enter school speaking them. This
chapter will discuss attitudes toward pidgins and Creoles in general, as well as structural and
functional features of
specific Creoles that twentieth-century educators are likely to encounter. Attitudes,
structures, and functions are equally significant for educational settings, interwoven as these
aspects of pidgin and
Creoles are in daily language use. The origin and development of these languages will also be discussed, along with problems associated with studying them.
Attitudes toward pidgin and Creole languages
Pidgins
and Creoles, which are essentially new language varieties created out of old cloth, allow us to observe
the birth and evolution of a language within a highly compressed time frame. Often coexisting with a more prestigious variety, they
present educators with special challenges: (1) they are typically spoken, not
written, and (2) they are often viewed with disdain by both their users and by society at large - in part because they do not yet have a
respected body of written literature.
Origins and development of pidgins and Creoles
Pidgins
and Creoles are linked in a continuum of language development.
Pidgins come into being because they are needed during times of population upheaval, when normal
mechanisms of language transmission are disrupted. No one sits down and decides to create a pidgin.
It comes into being through
the interaction of large numbers of people who speak several different languages and who have little
reason or opportunity to
learn another one of the many languages spoken in the contact
situation.
Harris
(1986) summarizes the three conditions needed for emergence of a pidgin language:
(1) lack of
effective bilingualism,
(2) need to communicate, and
(3) restricted access to the target
language.
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