Creole language. Road sign in Guadeloupe Creole meaning Slow down. Children are playing here. The literal translation is "Lift your foot. There are small people playing here". A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin, i.e. a simplified version of a language. The precise number of creoles is not known, particularly as these are poorly attested, but about one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500, predominantly based on European languages, due to the Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade,[1] though there are creoles based on other languages, including Arabic, Chinese, and Malay.
The vocabulary of a creole language is largely supplied by the parent languages, particularly that of the most dominant group in the social context of the creole's construction, though there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts. Overview[edit] History[edit] Origin[edit] Geographic distribution[edit] Social and political status[edit] Pidgin. Not all simplified or "broken" forms of a language are pidgins.
Each pidgin has its own norms of usage which must be learned for proficiency in the pidgin.[4] Etymology[edit] The origin of the word pidgin is uncertain. Pidgin first appeared in print in 1850. The most widely accepted etymology is from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business.[5] Another etymology that has been proposed is English pigeon, a bird sometimes used for carrying brief written messages, especially in times prior to modern telecommunications.[6] Terminology[edit] The word pidgin, formerly also spelled pigion,[5] originally used to refer to Chinese Pidgin English, was later generalized to refer to any pidgin.[7] Pidgin may also be used as the specific name for local pidgins or creoles, in places where they are spoken.
The term jargon has also been used to refer to pidgins, and is found in the names of some pidgins, such as Chinook Jargon. Common traits among pidgin languages[edit] Pidgin development[edit] The Language Instinct. The Language Instinct is a 1994 book by Steven Pinker, written for a general audience. Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. He deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim that all human language shows evidence of a universal grammar, but dissents from Chomsky's skepticism that evolutionary theory can explain the human language instinct.
Thesis[edit] Pinker criticizes a number of common ideas about language, for example that children must be taught to use it, that most people's grammar is poor, that the quality of language is steadily declining, that language has a heavy influence on a person's possible range of thoughts (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), and that nonhuman animals have been taught language (see Great Ape language). By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human invention in the sense that metalworking and even writing are.
Reception[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] Steven Pinker - Books - The Language Instinct. Everyone has questions about language. Some are from everyday experience: Why do immigrants struggle with a new language, only to have their fluent children ridicule their grammatical errors? Why can't computers converse with us? Why is the hockey team in Toronto called the Maple Leafs, not the Maple Leaves? Some are from popular science: Have scientists really reconstructed the first language spoken on earth? Are there genes for grammar? Can chimpanzees learn sign language? And some are from our deepest ponderings about the human condition: Does our language control our thoughts? Today laypeople can chitchat about black holes and dinosaur extinctions, but their curiosity about their own speech has been left unsatisfied—until now.
But The Language Instinct is no encyclopedia. Entertaining, insightful, provocative, The Language Instinct will change the way you talk about talking and think about thinking. Language family. List of language families. This List of language families includes also language isolates, unclassified languages and other types of languages. Major language families[edit] By number of native speakers[edit] Pie chart of world languages by percentage of speakers This is a list of the top ten families that are fairly often recognized as phylogenetic units, in terms of numbers of native speakers as a proportion of world population, listed with their core geographic area Phyla with historically wide geographical distributions but comparatively few contemporary speakers include Eskimo–Aleut, Na-Dené, Algic, Quechuan and Nilo-Saharan.
By number of languages[edit] Ethnologue lists the following as the largest language families in terms of number of languages. Glottolog lists the following as the largest families: Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect. Language families[edit] In the following, each numbered item is a known or suspected language family. Africa and Southwest Asia[edit]