(Another quirk none of the experts know how to explain.) (To this day, linguists are baffled at how exactly this happens, and why in some cases a pidgin language evolves into creole, when in other cases one of the native languages wins out.) However, creole languages are agreed to be natural, and interestingly, they are grammatically more similar with each other than with their parent languages. When a pidgin language actually supplants the speakers’ native languages, becoming the primary language of the next generation, that is when it becomes creole. It lasted nearly three centuries, at which point it became more beneficial for the Chinese to learn how to speak English. On the other hand, there are instances of pidgin languages lingering, such as Chinese Pidgin English (Chinglish), which was a prevalent form of communication between traders and bureaucrats in 17 th century Canton. For example, a variety of Pidgin Russian was spoken in Manchuria until the end of World War II, when the Russian settlers packed up and left. Historically, this has occurred in the context of colonization, and pidgin languages often vanish as soon as the colonizers go home. When two (or more) groups of people speaking different languages are thrown together and told to make due, they start speaking a hybrid of their native languages called “pidgin,” which is generally the blending of the vocabulary of one language with the grammar of another. So what is creole? From reading books about the south, I grew up assuming it was a skewed, southern dialect of French, but in actuality it’s much more detailed than that. In fact, the Creole culture we associate with that Caribbean area is a reference to the creole language spoken in those regions for centuries. When the word “creole” comes to mind, most people automatically think of the Louisiana-style cuisine: gumbo, beans and rice, jambalaya, crawfish étouffée, and so on (after visiting New Orleans, that’s what I immediately think of, anyway).
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