States or Stages in Pidgin and Creole Language Systems

States or Stages in pidgin and creole language systems

"Pidgins" and "Creoles" are states in a language's development. Depending on the approach taken, two or three different states or stages are associated with creole language development. Roughly in the order in which they might occur, they are:

The existence of jargons as separate from pidgins is contested. Other states are peripherally associated, perhaps as superstrates, substrates, descendants and ancestors of creoles. These might include standards, koines, or even dead languages. One type of language, creoloids, shows creole features, but has no such history.

Considering "states" without the historical processes ( pidginization and creolization) that produced them leads to confusion and certain common misunderatandings of pidgin and creole language systems as somehow less developed than other languages, a trait often attributed to the speakers of such languages too, at least in older accounts and popular understandings of pidgins and creoles as "broken" languages (for more on this see the review of how the field of pidgin and creole studies developed) . Creole languages, according to some, only differ from other languages in their history. Often, that history gets confused with the language itself by those who think of pidgins and creoles, but not pidginization and creolization.