The Literature of Pidgin English

PROBABLY the least-known literature in the world is the literature of South Sea pidgin English. Pacific pidgin-or beach-la-mar as it is often called to distinguish it from the original pidgin of the China coast-has a history of slightly more than 15o years. It was born on the east coast of Australia at the close of the eighteenth century. That it developed independently of Chinese pidgin is shown by the fact that there are no more than a handful of resemblances between the vocabularies of these two

Creole language · Linguistics · Pidgin · Sociology · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · History · Philosophy