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 often more generally known as lingua francas.

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 Creole

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. Examples of this include Fanagalo, a pidgin used in some South African mines, which is actually taught in underground classrooms to miners of different linguistic backgrounds; and Tok Pisin, which is widely used throughout Papua New Guinea, in print as well as in conversation. Where such a pidgin becomes the first language of children, the resulting native language is called a creole, and is inevitably more complex than the original pidgin.

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 a lingua franca - such as in Jamaica, where the local creole is used in informal situations, and a variety closer to Standard English for speaking to outsiders.

References

• Samarin WJ (1968) Lingua francas of the world. In Fishman JA (ed.) Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague: Mouton. pp.660-672.
• Sebba M (1997) Contact Language: Pidgins and Creoles. London: Macmillan.
• Wardhaugh R (2006) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 6th edition.