The article also deemphasizes the use of “pidgin” for interlanguage idiolects, sometimes encountered in the literature. There will be occasional references to pidgincreoles, accompanied by a note on their expanded status. This article focuses on nonnative and nonexpanded pidgins. The intermediate stage between a pidgin and a creole is sometimes labeled expanded pidgin or pidgincreole. In exceptional cases, pidgins may become primary languages and even mother tongues, and they are then referred to as creoles. Pidgins have norms, something that jargons only have in incipient form. Jargons (also, and more transparently, known as “pre-pidgins”) precede pidgins in a stage in which the parties in contact try out various communication strategies, and are therefore very variable and unstable, in contrast to pidgins, which are relatively stable. Pidgins are often mentioned and discussed together with creole languages and jargons. They are in principle nobody’s mother tongue. They draw their lexicon from one or more languages (referred to as the “lexifier(s)”), and are typically heavily reduced in that the lexicon is small and the number of grammatical categories and rules are few.

Pidgins are languages which have come about in situations where people needed to communicate but where no common language existed.

Observed Developments from Pidgin to Creole.

Comparative Studies of Pidgins with Specific Lexifiers.

Comparative Studies of Pidgins Worldwide.

Pidgin and creole linguistics