Language · 2

What is the linguistic term for a form of language that develops as a primary native tongue from an earlier pidgin?

Answer

Creole

When a pidgin — a simplified contact language — becomes the native language of a new generation of speakers, it expands grammatically and lexically into a creole. Creoles have full linguistic complexity and are distinct from the simpler pidgins from which they emerged.

💡 Did you know?

Haitian Creole, spoken by over 10 million people, developed in just a few generations from French and West African languages — one of the fastest known births of a fully native language in recorded history.

Other options people guess

  • Dialect
  • Patois
  • Lingua franca

Topics

  • linguistics
  • creole
  • language-development
  • pidgin

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