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Pidgins and creoles

Main articles: Creole language and pidgin

Pidgins are significantly simplified languages with only rudimentary grammar and a restricted vocabulary. In their early stage pidgins mainly consist of nouns, verbs, and adjectives with few or no articles, prepositions, conjunctions or auxiliary verbs. Often the grammar has no fixed word order and the words have no inflection.[19]

If contact is maintained between the groups speaking the pidgin for long periods of time, the pidgins may become more complex over many generations. If the children of one generation adopt the pidgin as their native language it develops into a creole language, which becomes fixed and acquires a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. The syntax and morphology of such languages may often have local innovations not obviously derived from any of the parent languages.

Studies of creole languages around the world have suggested that they display remarkable similarities in grammar and are developed uniformly from pidgins in a single generation. These similarities are apparent even when creoles do not share any common language origins. In addition, creoles share similarities despite being developed in isolation from each other. Syntactic similarities include subject–verb–object word order. Even when creoles are derived from languages with a different word order they often develop the SVO word order. Creoles tend to have similar usage patterns for definite and indefinite articles, and similar movement rules for phrase structures even when the parent languages do not.[19]

[edit] Scenarios for language evolution

Further information: Evolutionary linguistics

All human populations possess language. This includes populations, such as the Tasmanians and the Andamanese, who may have been isolated from the Old World continents for as long as 40,000 years.

Linguistic monogenesis is the hypothesis that there was a single proto-language, sometimes called Proto-Human, from which all other vocal languages spoken by humans descend. (This does not apply to sign languages, which are known to arise independently rather frequently.)

According to the Out of Africa hypothesis, all humans alive today are descended from Mitochondrial Eve, a woman estimated to have lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. This raises the possibility that the Proto-Human language could date to approximately that period.[48] There are also claims of a population bottleneck, notably the Toba catastrophe theory, which postulates human population at one point some 70,000 years ago was as low as 15,000 or even 2,000 individuals.[49] If it did indeed transpire, such a bottleneck would be an excellent candidate for the date of Proto-Human, which also illustrates the fact that Proto-Human would not necessarily date to the first emergence of language.

The multiregional hypothesis would entail that modern language evolved independently on all the continents, a proposition considered implausible by proponents of monogenesis.[50][51]

[edit] See also