Contact language

A contact language is a type of language which is used when people who share no native language need to communicate. Such languages are one type of lingua franca, a general term meaning a language used between groups who have no common tongue.

While contact languages are necessarily lingua francas, not all lingua francas are contact languages. Other types include trade languages (e.g. Swahili in East Africa), international languages (e.g. English in much of the world) and auxiliary languages (languages artificially designed for a purpose, such as Esperanto or Basic English).

Pidgins and creoles

Very often, pidgin and creoles are contact languages. A pidgin is a language that is created through a contact situation - typically, users employ words from one or more languages they have some knowledge of, underlain by the grammar of their own native languages together with attempts to simplify sentences. The result is a rudimentary language with fewer 'rules' than other languages - there are fewer sentence types, for instance, so expressing certain ideas may be difficult. The pidgin is fine-tuned to the immediate needs of the speakers, who may primarily use it for bartering, friendly introductions, or some other specific purpose. It therefore has no immediate need to be elaborated unless it proves useful for the speech community to develop an extended pidgin, used for more purposes and with increasingly rigid rules.

One example of extended pidgins is Fanagalo, used in some South African mines, and which is actually taught in underground classrooms to miners of different linguistic backgrounds. Another is Tok Pisin, which is widely used throughout Papua New Guinea, in print as well as in conversation.

In a minority of cases, extending a pidgin may lead to creolisation. This occurs when a pidgin becomes the first language of children, the resulting native language being a creole. This new language is inevitably more complex than the original pidgin; there is no evidence that creoles are in any way deficient. For example, not only are creoles used for a wide variety of purposes, but works written in conventional languages have been translated into creole versions.

Post-contact

The term contact language is also sometimes applied to languages which originated in a contact situation, but which are no longer used out of the necessity to communicate. For example, most creoles have emerged from such situations, but may no longer be used as lingua francas - such as in Jamaica, where the local creole is used in informal situations, and a variety closer to Standard English for speaking to outsiders.