Such pidgin and creole languages have often been viewed by the general public as being broken or simplified versions of their lexifiers, but this is simply not true. With as many as 2,000 languages, this region is however linguistically heterogeneous, making it exceptionally difficult to say for certain which language or languages may have acted as the original substrata. As West Africa was the principal target of slavers between the 15 th and 19 th centuries (Holm, 2000), many substrata are believed to be from the abundant Niger-Congo language family (Williamson and Blench, 2000). The substrate languages that provided much of a pidgin and creole’s grammar are however often more difficult to determine. Colonial languages such as English, French and Portuguese are therefore the most frequent superstrata, with languages such as Arabic and Malay also having acted as lexifiers in more isolated cases (Michaelis et al., 2013). Pidgin and creole languages developed most commonly during the Atlantic slave trade between the 15 th and 19 th centuries when slaves without a common tongue were forced into situations requiring communication by their European, imperial owners. 192) – meaning that they are unique languages whose lexis and grammar was heavily influenced by other existing dialects during their period of formation.
Pidgins and creoles are ‘contact languages fuse the features of both substrate and superstrate’ (Sala, 2012, p. 01) due to the exceptional circumstances of their genesis. Such attention has been given to these languages as they are believed to offer ‘significant insights into the nature and evolution of human language’ (Plag, 1993, p.
Pidgin and creole languages such as Cameroon Pidgin English or Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea have been the focus of much linguistic research since the 1970s. A Brief Introduction to Pidgin and Creole Languages
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