Introduction

This chapter traces the development of the major ideas that have shaped the study of pidgin and Creole languages. It also gives an overview of the history of the discipline itself, but its primary objective is to provide a better understanding of the climate of ideas in which the main theoretical advances were made.

Before European expansion

Although most of the known pidgin and Creole languages arose after western Europeans began establishing overseas colonies in the fifteenth century, there is ample reason to believe that more existed in earlier times than the two that have been documented: Lingua Franca and Pidgin Arabic (see below). Indeed, language contact seems likely to be nearly as old as language itself. However, languages have not been recorded in writing until the last few millennia and mixed languages have usually been among the last to be written down. Zyhlarz (1932–3) considered the language of ancient Egypt, first recorded in hieroglyphs in the third millennium BC, to have grown out of a trade language, i.e. a pidgin that developed among several Afro-Asiatic languages which came into contact in the Nile valley. If this is the case, it was essentially a Creole language (Reinecke et al. 1975:53). In any case the languages of ancient empires from China to Sumer expanded along with their military, commercial and cultural influence and it is quite likely that this happened via pidgin-ized varieties, although no known records of such speech remain.