Examples from English-based pidgins and creoles


Common syntactic features of creoles

Miskito Coast Creole (Central America)

          aal di waari ron kom bai me 
          'All the wild boars came running by me'

     The sequence ron kom (Eng. run come) is an
     example of a pattern called serial verbs, found in
     many languages around the world, and very characteristic of
     creoles.

Solomon Islands Pidgin

          mi no luk-im pikipiki bulong iu
          'I didn't see your pig(s)'.  

     This shows the development of prepositions from serial
     verbs--bulong derives from English belong, but
     in Melanesian Pidgin (of which Solomon Islands is a
     variety), it has become the possessive marker, equivalent to
     English of.


Verb agreement

Guyanese Creole

          i-wiiri 'he is tired'
          i-wok 'he works'

Tok Pisin

          Raitim olgeta flait long Kavieng i-go long Mosbi
          i-gat stap long Manus na Madang. 

          'List ('write') all flights from Kavieng that go to
          Port Moresby that stop in Manus and Madang'

     In these examples we see the English unstressed pronoun
     he becoming an agreement prefix on the verb.


Grammatical features of local languages in pidgins and
creoles

Chinese Pidgin English (19th century)

          wan-pisi haws 'one house'
          wan-fela man   'one man'

     This shows the use of noun classifiers, a
     characteristic feature of Chinese and other East Asian
     languages--pisi (from English piece) is the
     classifier for inanimate nouns, fela (English
     fellow) for animates.


Solomon Islands Pidgin:

          mi no luk-im pikipiki bulong iu
          'I didn't see your pig(s)'.  

West African Pidgin English:

          After de Lawd done go look-um dis ting dey
          call-um Earth.

          After that, the Lord went and looked at this thing
          called Earth.

     These examples show the development of a special suffix to
     mark transitive verbs.  This is not a feature of English,
     but is common in many languages.  Notice that the source of
     the suffix is the English unstressed pronouns
     him/them, but in these creoles its function
     has changed.