VICENTE, Veruska Salvador. English-based pidgins and creoles: from social to cognitive hypotheses of acquisition. Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem – ReVEL . Vol. 5, n. 9, agosto de 2007. ISSN 1678- 8931 [www.revel.inf.br]. ENGLISH -BASED PIDGINS AND CREOLES : FROM SOCIAL TO COGNITIVE HYPOTHESES OF ACQUISITION Veruska Salvador Vicente 1
[email protected] ABSTRACT : This paper will join readings holding that external social factors have huge influence in language development and that there is some innate capability common to all human beings related to language acquisition and development. A particular case which shows the relationship between these two aspects is the study of pidgins and creoles. This subject is part of Language Contact studies, which is one of the branches of the Sociolinguistics field, and provides a bridge between studies in Anthropology and Psychology. KEYWORDS : sociolinguistics; contact language; pidgins and creoles; language acquisition. INTRODUCTION A pidgin is an emergency language, created to facilitate communication between groups of different languages and cultures when they get in contact and establish some relationship. It is commonly related to situations of trade and/or colonization. When children are born within a pidgin-speaker community and have this language as a mother tongue, then we have a creole language conception. Studies on pidgin and creole languages date from before the nineteenth century; however, as an academic discipline it was not established until the 1950s and early 1960s. The late establishment of pidgins and creoles as a legitimate field of study is due to the fact that many linguists used to consider it as an auxiliary language, used only in situations of emergency (Holm, 1988: 3) and they did not take this subject seriously.