English pidgins: form and function

This paper highlights similarities and variation in both the form and function of English pidgins the world over. Their ethnographic functions are shown to vary from that of the lingua franca in Africa and Asia to that of local vernaculars in the New World. Although these pidgins usually have an in‐group, and sometimes politically integrative, function, very few of them have ever succeeded in being elevated to the high status of varieties used in, for example, the government, or higher courts of law, let alone higher education. Regarding form, it is noteworthy that, although English pidgins share a number of formal features (which may be attributed either to their common seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century lexifier or to a universal, Bickertonian language bioprogram), they differ from one another in a number of other respects which may be attributed to substrate linguistic influence or chance selection of superstate features. Traditional invocations of ‘decreolization’ to account for intra‐ and intercommunal variation are argued against because they are based on the unproven assumption that the basilect as such has ever existed. The available information both on the social stratification of the slave population on the plantations of the New World and on differences in the British‐African demographic ratios in the colonies is adduced to support the position that current speech continua date from the formative stages of the pidgins.