Human beings always seem to be able to develop communication. When two or more groups speaking mutually unintelligible languages come into contact over a period of time, a form of language will usually emerge to meet the need to communicate among the groups. This language is a pidgin.
Pidgins combine elements from two or more languages which makes it easier for people who are speaking these languages to learn the pidgin. The sound patterns of a pidgin (its phonology, in technical terms) will emphasize those sounds which are common to both languages. Sounds which are unique to only one of the languages are not likely to be used in the pidgin.
Pidgins are always second languages and they are learned by adults who already have acquired a native language. As anyone who has attempted to learn another language as an adult and as those who have taught foreign languages to adults realize, the grammar must be simplified and often only two or three basic tenses are learned. Thus a pidgin will have a simplified grammar and a reduced vocabulary. If the pidgin developed as a trade language, then its vocabulary will focus on things and concepts important in the trading relationship.
Children, unlike adults, simply acquire language, effortlessly and without conscious instruction from adults. This ability to acquire language, to develop a grammar to handle the language or languages to which a child is exposed, is innate. All normal children go through this process and as the body and brain change during puberty, they then lose this ability and must learn languages like adults. Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, summarizes language acquisition this way:
“Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.”
When children are raised in an environment in which a pidgin is spoken, they acquire the language, and re-invent it so that it becomes a creole. Unlike adults, children as not constrained to simplified grammars, and the creole quickly becomes a fully developed, complex language with a large vocabulary and an ability to express any human thought. Creoles are true languages with their own grammars which are distinct from the grammars of the languages which were combined to form the pidgin.
The process by which pidgins become creoles is interesting and provides some insights into the origins of language. Now we should ask: has English ever gone through this pidgin-creole stage of development? The answer is a definite, and quite controversial, maybe.
English has some features, such as the loss of declensions, that give it the appearance of a creole. There are at least two possible times when this creolization might have occurred. The first of these involves the parent language of English: Proto-Germanic. Proto-Germanic is less complex than its parent, Proto-Indo-European. Compared with Proto-Indo European, Proto-Germanic is streamlined, which suggests it was a creole. Some linguists have suggested that Proto-Germanic looks like a language which was learned by adults who then passed it on to the children. Because they were adults when they learned it, they never fully mastered the language. That means that as children they acquired a different language, but what was this language?
There are some linguists who have proposed contact with the Phoenicians, who spoke a Semitic language. The Phoenician language, now extinct, was similar to Hebrew. The Phoenicians were a seafaring people who travelled extensively around the Mediterranean. Archaeological data shows the Phoenicians travelled north on the Atlantic coast as far as Portugal. Linguist John McWhorter, in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, writes:
“The Phoenicians were one of those peoples of ancient history who were seized with a desire to travel and colonize, and they did so with great diligence on both the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, taking advantage of their advanced sailing technology. This included major colonies in North Africa, at Carthage, as well as one as far west as Spain, in what is now called Cádiz.”
John McWhorter also writes:
“The Phoenicians had reached Portugal by the seventh century B.C., and were vanquished by the Romans about 200 B.C. This would mean that if they reached Northern Europe, it would have been around the middle of the final millennium B.C.—when we know Proto-Germanic was in place.”
But the critical question is: Was Phoenician the Semitic language that influenced the creolization of Proto-Germanic? The hypothesis that Phoenician influenced Proto-Germanic is intriguing, but is there any additional evidence? There are some hints, but not hard evidence, in the fact than many of the orphan Proto-Germanic words—words not from Proto-Indo-European—deal with sailing, fishing, and fish, just the kind of vocabulary which might come from a seafaring and trading culture such as that of the Phoenicians.
Another hint is found in the realm of religion: for the Phoenicians, the god of gods was Baal who was also referred to as Baal ‘Addir, meaning “god great.” This may be the source of the Germanic god Balder.
A second opportunity for the creolization of English would have occurred after the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had settled in England and had intermarried with the Celtic-speaking peoples who were living there. This thread in the history of the English language, however, is best explored in its own essay.