Creole Characteristics

 According to David Cristal’s “Ensyclopedia of the English Language”, all English based creoles share many common futures despite the geographical distances, political and cultural differences of the countries where the creoles are spoken. These similarities are especially observed in the grammar of the languages. The fact might be explained by the “creole hypothesis”, according to which all the creoles have developed out of the creole used by the first black slaves in America and the Carribbean. Originally this language was very different from English but later, as generations were in contact with white English population, it obtained many linguistic features from the standard variety.

I think, here it is worth mentioning the differences between a creole and a pidgin. A pidgin is a means of communication among people who do not share a common language but have to contact with each other, usually for commercial purposes. Such language has a reduced grammatical structure and a limited vocabulary. Pidgins are only used in circumstances where there is no other way of understanding each other.

When in multilingual community an increasing number of people began to use a pidgin as the main means of  communication, and then it is passed down to generations, it becomes a creole. So, we can see that a creole and a pidgin are two different stages of the same phenomenon.

            As it has already been mentioned above, various creoles share some common characteristics. For example, there is no agreement between the subject and the predicate in the present tense in sentences in almost all creaoles: She sing a song. The auxiliary to be is not used: She a nice person. A verb can be brought in front of the sentence for emphasis: A talk Mary talk make she trouble. There is no case distinctions for pronouns: She see he come.