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There are (generally unofficial) names for when two languages are combined (i.e. Spanglish).
I only know three: Engeldeutsch (English+German), Spanglish (Spanish+English), and Changlish (Chinese+English).
Can you think of any others?
(NOTE: They don't have to be be Language X combined with English; it can be any combination you want.)
(PS: I don't know if Engeldeutsch is a commonly used term. It's what my German teacher uses.)
The OED has general terms "pidgin" and "creole" with this referenced clarification:
1962 Listener 22 Nov. 868/3 A number of people working on Creoles met in Jamaica in 1959, and agreed to adopt Robert Hall's distinction between Creoles and Pidgins: a Pidgin is a first-generation lingua franca..spoken by everybody as a second language; when in subsequent generations it becomes the first language of a community, it is a Creole.
The discription of "pidgin" includes several different kinds but not specific proper names like those listed above.
Emmett
I think -- and I emphasize "think", so not "know" -- that "pidgin" is the rudimentary combination of languages, and it makes a strange amalgam. "Creole" is an accepted language that was once "pidgin" (again, I may be wrong), but that is why the French-English combination from the Acadians became what is now "Cajun". However, "Cajun" is still pretty much English, but with a stronger French influence and a strong, guttural (compared to other Southern patterns) Southern lilt. The lengua franca of Jamaica is a pretty good example of a "creole".
Yiddish might be considered a "creole" (I'm not sure, but the argument follows). After all, it is a combination of Hebrew, German, and Polish, no? If that is the case, it is certainly not a "pidgin", as Yiddish is a long-spoken tongue.
I'm not sure what would be a "pidgin" nowadays -- maybe "Spanglish"? Any others?
"Portunhol" (portugués + espanhol) is a term often heard in Brazil in two different contexts. It refers both to a form of code switching used along the southern border with Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, and also to the bastardized form of communication used by visiting tourists from the U.S. who are trying to communicate in Portuguese on the basis of a prior familiarization with Spanish.
I think that portmanteaux for language blends are practically infinite in number and can be spontaneously created when the need arises.
Historically, what other pidgins have proliferated and endured to the degree yiddish has? Also are there other pidgins confined primarily to adherents to a body religious practice in the way yiddish and Ladino are so closely identified with elements of jewish practice? Ladino has been in codified liturgical use for centuries, but yiddish seems to have been ambiguous until well into the 19th century. Is the Haitian pidgin of French the only language of voodoo? Also, aren't there pidgins of Spanish, Tagalog, and Arabic in use in the Pacific Rim?
Thanks.
E.
No one's mentioned Swahili yet, which seems to qualify; it has a Bantu structure with a lot of Bantu roots, but has liberally borrowed words from Arabic, English and other languages that showed up in eastern Africa. For the last century and a half, at least, it's been the major lingua franca along the northeast coast.
(I normally preface things I'm only mostly sure of with qualifications such as "I think", "or so I've been told" and so forth. But such hedging would have doubled the length of the above paragraph, so I'll just let it stand as-is; please assume throughout that I'm speaking under correction.)
And I'm told that Quechua has much the linguistic strength in South America that Swahili has in Africa, the only difference being that Quechua is the maternal language of a dominant Indian nation rather than an amalgam of many languages. But I'd be surprised if it didn't have a lot of roots borrowed from Spanish, Portuguese, English and perhaps Toltec and the like. The Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=que) lists 44 subvariants with over 10 million speakers, a significant proportion of them monoglot.
Long Island Lockjaw. Did I just hear that on your show? Did the accent travel? My earliest ancestors resided at New Amsterdam, then New York, Long Island English through colonial New Jersey, c. 1644-1816, four and five generations, then across the continent in three. In the mid 1970s interMountain States and Arizona I was frequently mistaken for western Canadian. ? The Anglos couldn't hear their own drawl that became more pronounced the farther south & east i traveled from SLC.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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