Lingua Franca : Pidgin and Creole

By prof.Abdelhamid Fouda

A lingua franca is defined as ‘a language which is used habitually by people whose mother tongues are different in order to facilitate communication between.’ A variety of other terms can be found which describe much the same phenomenon. That is to say that a lingua franca may refer to a trade language, a contact language, an international language (Wardhaugh, 55-56).

A lingua franca is needed in many areas of the world populated by people speaking divergent languages. In such areas, where groups desire social or commercial communication, one language is often used by common agreement (Fromkin and Rodman, 1978 : 267).

The lingua francas may be spoken in the various ways. They are not only spoken differently in different places, but individual speakers varied widely in their ability to use the languages. English serves today as a lingua franca in many parts of the world: for some speakers it is a native language, for others a second language, and for still other a foreign language (Wardhaugh, 56). In the past time, Bahasa Melayu was used as a lingua franca in Indonesian archipelago. Banjarese language may be used as a lingua franca by its nonnative speakers in South Kalimantan; it may be used by Wong Jowo (Javenese people) when communicating with Oreng Madure (Madurese people) in one of the markets in Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan.

A pidgin is a language with no native speakers: it is no one’s first language but it is a contact language. That is, it is the product of a multilingual situation in which those who wish to communicate must find or improvise a simple code to enable them to do so. A pidgin is sometimes regarded as a ‘reduced’ variety of a ‘normal’ language, with simplification of the grammar and vocabulary of that language, considerable phonological variation, and an admixture of local vocabulary to meet the special needs of the contact groups (Wardhaugh, 1986 : 56).

Although a pidgin is reduced variety of a normal language, it is not devoid of grammar. The phonological system is rule-governed. The inventory of phonemes is generally small, and each phoneme may have many allophonic pronunciations (Fromkin and Rodman, 1978 : 269).

When a pidgin comes to be adopted by a community as its native tongue, and children learn it as a first language, that language is called a creole. That is to say that the pidgin has been creolized. Creoles are more fully developed than pidgins, generally having more lexical items and a broader array of grammatical distinctions. In time, they becomes languages as complete in every way as other languages. In this relation, we may say that first of all, Bahasa Melayu had been regarded as a pidgin, namely, a variety of language with no native speakers in Indonesian archipelago; it was, then, adopted as Bahasa Persatuan (unifying language) called Bahasa Indonesia. After being adopted as Indonesian community, it has been learnt by Indonesian people as native language. At present, there are native speakers of the language.

Conclusion

In a monolingual speech community, varieties of a given language may be dialects, speech levels, styles, or other varieties of the language. A monolingual speaker having only one language may use his language with some varieties of the language: dialects, styles, or speech levels.

In multilingual speech community, some languages together with their variations become parts of language varieties in the community. Therefore, we can say that varieties of language may refer to a single language and its varieties such as dialect, register, style, speech levels, etc.