**** Blurring of categories

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Jourdan claims that the past decade of pidgin and creole studies has brought about a "blurring of categories" between pidgins and creoles, largely as a result of extensive fieldwork from the Pacific pidgin and creole languages. She says that the "obsession" with nativization as the marker of creole languages as opposed to pidgins is not supported by data from the Pacific. Although she calls for a study of language with its locus in the praxis and agency of its speakers, she does not disaggregate the language she is discuussing as a social phenomenon from the speakers who speak it. She assumes that because a "pidgin" language is expanded and spoken by some that it plays havoc with definitions of pidgin as non-native. This ignores the fact that what is a native language to one speaker can be a second language to another, and raises important issues of historicity in the treatment of individuals and aggregates as agents and objects.

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C. Jourdan, "Pidgins and Creoles: the Blurring of Categories;" in _Annual Review of Anthropology_ 20 (1991) 187-209.