It was used to design an animal or a person born in the Colonies of America and producing Portuguese, Spanish or French. The word “Creole” comes from Latin “CREARE” and Portuguese “criar” and it means “to nurture”. Suzanne Romaine is still more precise describing pidgins as the result of “a process of simplification and hybridization involving reduction of linguistic resources and restriction of use to limited functions such as trade” and continues adding “… sometimes extended to refer to the early stages of any instance of second language… often influenced by their own primary language”. (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1993 vol. Only in the 20th Century it became a technical word to describe “… a contact language which draws on elements from two or more languages” (Oxford Companion of English Language) or “ a form of language as spoken in a simplified or altered form by non-native speakers, especially as means of communication between people not sharing a common language”. The word “pidgin” probably originated from the English word “business”, adapted to Chinese pronunciation and was used to define a hybrid language until the end of 19th Century. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the definition of Pidgin English “as an English specialized jargon corrupted according to another language to permit intercommunication”. A precise boundary between the two terms, Pidgin and Creole, does not exist mostly because they both represent “corruptions” of higher languages and include a wide variety of phenomena.
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