tures, such as irregular verb forms (Kay & Sankoff, 1974; Slobin, 1977).
Function words like determiners (the, a, an) and prepositions (in, on, across)
are commonly dropped. Function markers, such as case, are eliminated, as are
tense and plurals.^7
European slavers came from England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland.
Their human cargo came from a huge area of Western Africa, including what is
now Gambia, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zaire. These languages
mixed together to serve as the basis for the early pidgins. McCrum et al. (1986)
suggested that the pidgins began developing shortly after the slaves were cap-
tured, because the traders separated those who spoke the same language to pre-
vent collaboration that might lead to rebellion. Chained in the holds of the slave
ships, the captives had every incentive to continue using pidgin to establish a
linguistic community. It is more likely, however, that the pidgins already were
well established among the villages responsible for capturing and selling
tribesmen and tribeswomen to the European slavers. Trade in humans as well as
commodities had a long history in the region, and those who were captured may
have grown up using one or more pidgins for trade in addition to their native
languages. At the very least, they would have started using a pidgin almost im-
mediately after capture. They would not have waited until they were placed on
ships headed for the New World.
Creolization
Once in America, the slaves had to continue using pidgin English to communicate
with their owners and with one another. Matters changed, however, when the
slaves began having children. A fascinating phenomenon occurs when children are
born into a community that uses a pidgin: They spontaneously regularize the lan-
guage. They add function words, regularize verbs, and provide a grammar where
none really existed before. When the children of the pidgin-speaking slaves began
speaking, they spoke a Creole, not a pidgin. A Creole is a full language in the tech-
nical sense, with its own grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatic conventions.
Why, then, is Black English classified as a dialect of English rather than a
Creole? The answer is that the Creole spoken in North America underwent a
process ofdecreolization.True Creoles, like those spoken in the Caribbean, ex-
perienced reduced contact with the major contributory languages. Papiamento,
the Creole spoken in the Dutch Antilles, offers a good example. This language
is a mixture of Dutch, French, and English. Although Dutch has long been the
official language of the Antilles, the linguistic influences of French and Eng-
lish disappeared about 200 years ago, and the influence of Dutch has waned
DIALECTS 237
(^7) The broken English that Johnny Weissmuller used in the Tarzan movies from the 1930s and 1940s,
which still air on TV, reflects accurately the features of a pidgin.