Essay About Creole

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Pidgins and creoles are new varieties or types of languages, having developed from the contact between the colonial non-standard varieties of European and non-European languages from around the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Pidgin languages typically appeared in the trade colonies that had developed in and around existing trade routes, such as the West African coast. Reduced in structures and specialized in function, initially they served as non-native ‘lingua francas’ for those speakers who chose to use their native language for normal every day communications. Some pidgins have been able to expand into regular vernaculars, particularly in urban settings, and are rightfully labeled as ‘expanded pidgins’. An example would be the Pidgin-English from Nigeria or Cameroon, both as structurally complex as creoles. …show more content…

The concept was first adapted into the Spanish vernacular, then the French, and then into the English vernacular by the beginning of the 17th century. By the middle of the 17th century, creole was used generally in relation to Africans or Europeans who born in the so-called Romance-colonies . Semantics and syntax of the word tended to vary in usage of the term from one colony to another, used invariably in reference to types of plants or animals, or traditions specific to the indigenous peoples of each respective area (for instance, in America, outside of the realm of Linguistics or Anthropology, the term creole is used to refer to types of food or music).Creole, as a concept of language, was not really applied to the meaning of ‘language variety’ until around the end of the 18th century. This new definition of the word, seems to have come about from the need of Europeans to marginalize the indigenous varieties from colonial

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