Pidgin (software) Puns

Hey there! As the title suggests, I'm a PhD student (trying to graduate soon...), who researches methods for extending language technology beyond the "big"/popular languages like English and Mandarin. By "language technology", I mean any software that makes it easier for people to use language while interacting with technology (phones, computers, voice-command smart devices, etc). Examples of this include things like Google Translate, Google Search Engine, grammar-checkers, Apple's Siri, Speech-to-text for writing texts by voice, and so on.

Anyway, I'm here because I really want to learn: Would speakers of Hawaiin Pidgin have a want or need for language technology that supports Hawaiin Pidgin? If yes, what technologies would be useful to speakers? If no, why not?

(Also to be clear, if you speak a different Creole language besides Hawaiin Pidgin, I’d still really love to hear your answers to this question! I just specify Hawaiin Pidgin here because it seems like it will be the most commonly spoken Creole language on this sub)

Your answers on this thread will really help my PhD research. And if anyone here is interested in this discussion, I'd also love to get your opinions more formally, in a 5-minute survey here . I would be eternally grateful! Let me know if you're able/willing. I want to make sure locals living in Hawaii are represented in my research :-).

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have! I know this is an ... extremely random question. I've already talked to some experts from the community at UH:Manoa, but I'm trying to gather thoughts from every day people who speak Hawaiin Pidgin (and any other creole languages!!) as well.

Thanks for reading all that!

Hello everyone! I'm trying to hear from folks in Africa who speak a creole or pidgin language. Your continent has a lot of these languages spoken across many countries! I am a PhD student trying to graduate this year, and I'm trying to find out: Do speakers of various creole/pidgin languages have a desire or need for language technology to support these languages? If yes, what sorts of technologies do you wish existed? If not, why not?

By "language technology", I mean any piece of software that helps you use language to interact with technology (phone, tablet, laptop, etc.) .Common examples of language technologies include things like: Google Search Engine (typing words to find websites), Google Translate, spell-checkers and grammar-checkers for writing e-mails, text autocompletion for texting, and any sort of voice-automated technology where you talk to a computer.

As for "creole language", this is just an umbrella term for languages like: Mauritian Creole, Seychelles Sesewa, Sierre Leone's Krio, Nigerian Pidgin, Ghana Pidgin, Cameroonian Pidgin, and many others. But also languages like Sango, Lingala, and Kikongo-kituba are classified as "creoles" as well.

(As a side note, I have already spoken to African experts in this field, and got a lot of great insights from them. Right now I'm trying to collect thoughts and opinions of every day African people!)

Feel free to ask me any questions! I will be very, very grateful for your responses. If this topic interested you, you could really help me out by answering a 5-minute survey. I'm going to check with the mods if its alright to add the link here.

Thank you so much for reading! :-)

I was wondering about creole languages, like Pidgin and Patois, and whether they fall under the same language family as their "parent" language.

Let's face it, Software engineer jobs are plentiful but most of them are looking for an engineer proficient in a specific language. How do I not get pidgin holed as an "x language" engineer? I currently work with C# but I have no problems with Java, C++, C, PHP, etc. The problem I am facing is that besides C#, I have no "real world" experience with the aforementioned languages.

This is about a small worldbuilding project with friends where, along with history, culture, etc, language is one thing I want to work on. The continent on which I focus is large and diverse, and I want to create a lingua franca that will be used across most of it. The language will originate as signed trade speak used in market towns, and spreads across the continent, being adopted by governments as a way to communicate with different language subjects and being taught to deaf children. Can I develop a pidgin into a full language with this basic narrative? Are there any ways which pidgins commonly add new words and develop grammar? I'm new at this and don't expect to get it right at once, but I want to know before I start where to go, or if this is a doomed project.

TLDR: How do I develop the lexicon and grammar of a pidgin naturalisticly?

Can someone break this down for me. Was reading up on language history (was curious which came first between Irish and Scots Gaelic and it spiraled from there) and came across a theory that Middle English was so different from Old English because it's technically a contact language. Can anyone break down if this is true? Or has this theory been put to rest?

I’m Nigerian and due to their similarities, I’ve always wondered if West African Pidgin and the African diaspora creole languages of the New World are genetically related.

I am aware that West African pidgin arose from the contact between European and West African slave traders and spread inwards between ethnic groups as a lingua franca. In fact, Baptist missionaries in Cameroon in the mid-19th century needed to learn Pidgin in order to communicate with the natives.

So how right would I be in thinking that at least a significant portion of slaves being transported to the New World already spoke Pidgin, as opposed to each Creole variety arising independently.

Some examples I could think of were:

-“You all”/ Una (Nigerian Pidgin)/ Unu (Jamaican Patois)

-“Child”/Pikin (Nigerian and Jamaican)

• Present tense marker/ Dey (Nigerian)/ De (Jamaican)

-Past tense marker/Don (Nigerian)/Done (AAVE), usually found in “(I) done been…”

-“Steal”/ Tif (Nigerian Pidgin)/ Tiif (Jamaican)

I'm doing a work on creole languages now and I keep hearing about creoles that did not necessarily originate from pidgins, but little explanation of how that process would work or any examples of such languages. Does anyone have any idea?

How far, r/NigerianFluency!

I am a PhD student working on expanding language technology to include creole languages, including Nigerian Pidgin! (By language technology, I mean stuff like "Google translate" or "iPhone's Siri").

But before I start making technologies that nobody asked for, I am trying to figure out what speakers of Nigerian Pidgin (and other creole languages also) actually want and need?! To find out, I have written a very brief survey. It should only take ~5 minutes of your time, and it would be immensely helpful to receive your responses!

English survey: https://forms.gle/Tz5mpD7QxTK9z79r6

French survey: https://forms.gle/ByqnYzA5X1fXthw76

If you have any questions/comments for me, feel free to respond, and I’ll get back to you Asap.

(At the moderators -- if this survey-style post isn't OK, please let me know. I can delete the post, and re-format it to be a more traditional-style reddit thread, if absolutely necessary.)

Thank you o! <3

(Also, if you have any friends in other African, creole-speaking places like Ghana, Sierra Leone, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Mauritius, Réunion, please pass along this survey! Otherwise, if you know other places to post this on Reddit, I’d really appreciate the pointer)

Repost per mod’s request to not use h word. (My bad, completely understand!)

**Feel like I have to add this at the top. I’m all for guys who wanna actually learn and are respectful about pidgin and Hawaii. However, these people I’m talking about in my post don’t even realize how they’re coming off by making like, they think this is the way to act which I can’t even blame them for. I meant no means of disrespect, was just curious how everyone else handles and was originally looking for a solution on a way to let em know. Thanks!

Just curious and thought I’d ask reddit how you guys handle it when guys not from here come up speaking really bad pidgin to you. I’ve been having plenty of obviously new guys from the mainland as customers coming into my work lately coming in and butchering stuff like “braddah”, “shoots”, and talking about how “local” and different they are from other guys that are moving here whilst trying to get Kamaʻāina discounts. I’m literally at a loss for words when it happens and can’t help but cringe or just let out an awkward laugh. I wish they could realize how they’re coming off and know that it’s not necessarily helping their cause like they think it is.

But my job requires that I have to talk and actually converse with these clowns and it really just throws me off guard, even sometimes preventing me from doing my work properly because I can’t help but stare blankly at them when they complain about other new people moving here or talk about how local they are. It’s almost offensive as they’re complaining about the house market when they literally just bought a house here cause lots of actual locals will never have enough money to even think about owning. I’ve even had someone complain about their second house they bought being too small and in a bad area when they’re legit living Kaimuki. People I know who live in the fricken low income housing don’t complain as much about where they live as these people who make like

What does everyone else do? Do you guys even say anything? I literally don’t know what to do when it happens, I think I also could just be overthinking it. I feel like telling them that they’re making a fool of themselves and coming off in a entitled way, but I don’t know how to say it in a way that isn’t so offensive but gets the message across so they at least know how they’re being perceived cause they don’t even realize

Added note* not a customer I deal with, but I had a co-worker not from here who’d bring an

Discuss some of the basic differences that characterize pidgins and creoles, based on your understanding of what is meant by the following quote: “Pidginisation is second language learning with restricted input, while creolisation was first language learning with restricted input.”.

Are there any studies exploring whether certain types of Englishes for example spoken in Solomon Islands are limited in expressing complex ideas?

I recently moved to Akure for my NYSC and they're so many Benin people around and I frequently hear them say: "No be say dem shoot bird mama fly" in many different contexts and I'm still so confused as to what it means.

That, and the word "mozz". Mozz is a common pidgin term that seems to be exclusive to that region of Nigeria AND I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT IT MEANS BUT I HEAR IT A LOT IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS.

Ewropali (tongo to is un famil):

• englisa: pidgin (pijin)
• espanisa: pidgin (pidhin)
• fransesa: pidgin (pidjin)
• rusisa: пиджин (pijin)
• doycisa: Pidgin (pijin?)

Awstronesili (tongo to is un famil):

• indonesisa: pijin
• pilipinasa: pidgin (pijin?)

Alo (moyun to is un famil):

• putunhwa: 皮钦语 (pijinyu), 混杂语言 (hunza yuyan)
• hindisa: पिजिन (pijina)
• arabisa: هجين (hajin) ["hybrid"]
• niponsa: ピジン言語 (pijin gengo)
• telugusa: పిడ్జిన్ (pidjin)
• turkisa: tarzanca (tarzanja), pidgin (pijin?)
• hangusa: 피진 (pijin)
• vyetnamsa: pidgin (?)
• parsisa: پیجین (PYJYN)
• swahilisa: pijini

jeni: pijin (11 famil)

This is both a specific question in regards to my personal conlang development, but I'm broadening it since this could end up being relatable between y'all.

How would you guys go about creating a pidgin language between two groups of people whose languages don't really share a lot in common in terms of grammar and phonetics? Or more specifically, how does one create a pidgin between two languages of disparate origins with no common similarities?

To give my example, there are two languages with the following properties:

Language A (the superstrate language) is an SOV, heavily agglutinative language with a series of four atypical noun derivations (one of them is considered a "true" derivation by name). There's no gender or gender agreement, there's not really a true "verb" (ie. all nouns can become verbs or adjectives) and there's a highly important directional affix that greatly affects the meaning of a verbal construction. There is no "to be" verb, only a copula marker.

Language B (the substrate language) is a Celtic-inspired VSO inflected language with generally more isolating word constructions and inflected prepositions. Verbs, nouns and adjectives are all distinct from each other with some common rules to determine which is which (almost all verbs end in -uer/-uel/-or/-ol, almost all adjectives begin with a voiced/palatalized consonant). There are two "to be" verbs, one copulaic for nouns and the other copulaic for adjectives. There's a series of grammatical consonant changes - definitive nouns nasalize, nouns after prepositions lenite, negative verbs nasalize, past tense verbs lenite/diphthongize. There is no true question word, only question constructions (ie. "is there a reason that" means "why") and all

While I'm still in the process of figuring out how these two languages would combine, I'd imagine it would go down something like this:

• Start with a strict word order of SOV, then eventually evolve a nominative/accusative case marking on nouns as verbal placement becomes flexible. Verb-beginning sentences may become something like an imperative, interrogative, etc. (which is what Language A does)
• Verbal constructions begin as isolating, with various auxiliary verbs to help bridge the gap lost by the important directional affix in Language A. Verbs will have no affixation / inflection for tense, but will gain an auxiliary for past/future that will merge as a semi-inflected verb.
• Noun derivation from Language A simplifies into a base mean