BBC Pidgin Web Site

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[Constitution Day]

I have followed this site on Facebook for a while now. It is hilarious!

[Vermont Lt]

As my life is based on movies I’ve seen, I think they were speaking Pidgin in “South Pacific.”

[Verginius Rufus]

A local form of Pidgin English (called Tok Pisin) is widely used in Papua New Guinea (which has a huge number of indigenous and mutually-unintelligible languages).

[x]

How do you profess to communicate with a “ language” with words made up as you go and no rules?

I think the idea is that it has rules, just not the same rules as standard English. The vocabulary is a mixture of English words and words from various African languages, and the grammar may be a similar mix.

Maybe depending on where speakers live the African words vary somewhat. The situation may have been similar in English when you had Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman French words all used by the speakers of what would become English.

Pidgin broadcasts aren't necessarily a bad thing. Putting it on a webpage probably is, since if you've got a computer and are literate, you probably understand and can read another more established language.

There are different "pidgin" languages around the world. They grow up where speakers of two or more languages come together and try to communicate. In Hawaii it was Hawaiian, English, Japanese, Cantonese, and maybe Korean, Tagalog, and Portuguese. It's not the same language as the West African Pidgin.

Linguists love pidgins and creole languages because you can actually see new languages and new language rules forming in the present day.

[Lonely Bull]

I think the idea is that it has rules, just not the same rules as standard English.

If it had no rules, how could it be spoken, understood, written, and read by millions of people? (I've seen praises of English as a relatively simple and adaptable language that draws vocabulary from different languages around the world.)