Pidgin English

A linguistic consequence of empire has been the growth of pidgins throughout those parts of the world colonized by the British. Pidgins are rudimentary communication systems that grow up spontaneously in the contexts of colonialism or business between groups who do not share a common language. They are not fully developed languages, but the makeshift simplified nucleus of a contact language in which most of the vocabulary is, expectedly, drawn from the dominant group. Research into pidgins has burgeoned recently and shown them to be very diverse and flexible. In her study Modern Englishes: Pidgins and Creoles (1984), Loreto Todd distinguished no less than thirty-one varieties of English pidgins and creoles, principally located in West Africa, the West Indies, and the Pacific. The curious name pidgin derives from a Chinese corruption of English business . In the first recorded reference, Captain Basil Hall noted in his Account of a Voyage to Corea (1826): “I afterwards learned that ‘pigeon,’ in that strange jargon spoken in Canton by way of English, means ‘business’” (vi, 288). (“Pigeon” is thus an incorrect correction of “pidgin,” but did become established for decades.) Originally the term was limited to the China and the Straits settlements.

Since pidgins are essentially oral, male-centered in origin, and direct in their transmission, notions of taboo and decency are largely absent. The point was made when Captain Hall visited the Sandwich Islands in 1820, and an islander greeted him with an odd series of salutations: “Very glad to see you! Damn your eyes! Me like English very much. Devilish hot, sir! Goddam!” (1831, 89). The man was merely repeating the emphatic points of communication left by Captain James Cook’s expedition in 1778.

In a number of pidgins, terms regarded as swearwords or indecent in “Standard English” are used as inoffensive general terms. The most prevalent in Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin (Talk Pidgin) is baga , from bugger , meaning simply and generally “a man.” This has generated lesbaga (“lazy bugger”) and the intransitive verb form bagarap (“bugger up”), defined broadly as “to break, become impaired, have an accident happen to, become exhausted or injured, disintegrate,” while the form bagarapim covers the transitive senses of “to destroy, break etc., rape, render useless.” In the Nupela [New] Testament God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is rendered by the same term. In the Liklik Katolik Baibel , Lazarus is characterized as a rabish man , derived from “rubbish,” but meaning in Neo Melanesian “without wealth or standing in the community” (Hall 1966, 92). Other central terms are bulsitim (from “bullshit”) meaning “to deceive or cheat,” and sit (“shit”) meaning “residue,” as in sit bilong faia (“shit from the fire” for “ashes”). As (from “arse”) is even more highly generalized, meaning “buttocks, bottom, stump, underlying cause, place of origin, underside, rear.” Curiously baksait means only “back” or “rear,” but not “buttocks.” Robert A. Hall Jr. notes that English-speaking missionaries, naturally concerned about these taboo connotations, overcorrected as to has and sit to chit (1966, 91-92).

The centrality of these derogatory terms indicates, Loreto Todd argues, that “the local people were disparaged by their overseers” (1984, 253). Other scholars, such as Robert A. Hall Jr., surmise that although “many of these words were taken over unsuspectingly by natives who heard coarse-mouthed sailors and traders use them in every-day speech; others may possibly have been foisted on the natives by Europeans who thought that they would have a bit of fun thereby” (1966, 91-92).

The general point is that these pidgin speakers acquired their speech in contexts where the formal separation of registers is not observed: taboo, slang, polite, and formal words all jostle together. Thus in Cameroon Pidgin, the basic vocabulary of the body consists of anus , which is technical, bele (“belly”) and bobi (“bubby,” “breast”), which are informal, and pis and shit , which are vulgar. The form piccanin and variants, derived from Portuguese pequenino , meaning “very little” has become widely used in pidgins to mean “small.” Pickaninny is defined in Grose (1785) as “a young child, an infant” and marked as a " Negro term." In this sense it is generally now regarded as offensive in South Africa and the United States.