**** Pidginization as second language learning

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Pidgins are learned as second (or later) languages. Though the processes are closely related, pidginization analytically precedes second language learning--the former cannot be arrived at by addition to the latter. Both are attempts to acquire a second language, but in pidginization the target language is contested. Most pidgins remain as second languages with specialized functions, and many die out as the circumstances which required their use change. When people acquire a second language, they never learn it quite as well as a native speaker. No matter how long they speak it, they will always be recognizable as non-native speakers, given away by some slight pronunciation difference or misplaced stress. Pidginization is the same process, but the language must be re-invented from what is available; there are no native speakers. No one member can ever be quite at ease with the tentative language that results. Some of the implications of this can be extended to culture in general.

• - Implications for possible functions of pidgins...<[LINK]t>
• - Pidginization at the level of culture .............. {<[LINK]>}

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{<[LINK]> --sources: On pidgins as second languages, see Derek Bickerton, Dynamics of a Creole System, London: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 1-172, on idiolects, 18-19; also, ________, "Creole Languages," Scientific American, 249:1, July 1983, 116-121; For cultural extensions of pidginization, see Richard C. Rath, "African Music in Seventeenth-century Jamaica: Cultural Transit and Transfer;" _William and Mary Quarterly, Oct. 1993}