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by Scoundral on June 25th, 2005

Scoundral

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What is the difference between a creole and a dialect?

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  • by Aminor on June 30th, 2005

    Aminor

    A creole is a language formed from the conjunction of two others, as the creole from French and various African languages in Louisiana (where a fairly stable group of mixed-race people are known as Creoles). A dialect is a local variant of one language, commonly geographic, which may range from fairly extensive modifications of speaking patterns to a mere handful of different meanings or unique words. The interesting thing about creoles -- one of the interesting things -- is that it sometimes takes as little as a generation for a creole to be formed from a pidgin. Pidgins are languages improvised from bits and pieces at the border of two existing languages, commonly growing out of the needs of traders speaking different languages, frequently in seaports. They are adequate for their intended purpose, but as languages, remain truncated, with limited vocabularies reflecting their use and relatively crude mechanisms. However, if the situation persists long enough for children to be born into the pidgin-speaking group, they will transform it into a full-blown human language, complete with all the resources and nuances available to long-existing languages. It then is a creole, which is a full-featured human language, albeit one lacking a history -- it has not yet had its Shakespeare, its Cervantes, its Dante. This transformation is, I believe, part of the evidence for the now-accepted assertion that all children are born with the complete linguistic framework hard-wired into their minds.

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