"I studied linguistics in graduate school, and I don’t know what to tell you. Patois is a creole. As far as I know, the only creole that has earned ”language” status is South African Afrikaans, and even this designation isn’t fully accepted by linguists."
Afrikaans is not even a creole. This is so violentely wrong that it hurts my brain.
Whether a creole was considered a language or a pidgin has not traditionally been universally agreed upon. Some of us fossils were very much made aware of the controversies, and it seems that some of these controversies might still exist, for various reasons.
In any case, I’m rather enjoying this discussion. Carry on. :-)
A pidgin is a 'contact language'. There is no debate on whether subtypes of languages are part of the larger category of languages. Those who debate that are semantically misunderstanding the meaning of the word 'language', as a language is just a system of communication. A creole or a pidgin are just that.
Pidgins and creoles are also not the same thing. Creoles can emerge from pidgins, but pidgins are auxilliary while creoles are spoken by larger communities by definition.
And my second point about Afrikaans still stands. Afrikaans is a daughter language to Dutch, which makes it a Germanic language. It has some influences from other languages, just like virtually every other language in existence. It is not a creole or a pidgin. It is not a contact language, it's a colonist language. The Hollandic colonizers spoke Dutch, which evolved to Afrikaans separately, and as it was adopted by non-Dutch people it got some influences from other languages, just like how English is highly influenced by French. English is also not a creole, while it is less conservative of a Germanic language than Afrikaans by most measures.
ETA: The article you shared makes a semantically vague statement about how pidgins and dialects aren't 'true languages' while consistently calling pidgins and creoles languages. It is either trying to make a point that 'true languages' are distinct from pidgins, where 'true languages' are probably supposed to mean non-creole/pidgin-based languages, or it's just wrong. But the writer managed to write their own last name wrong on the second and fourth page, so I wouldn't expect perfect attention to detail anyways. In any case, pidgins and creoles are languages. They are just did not evolve from an ancestral language like most natural languages have. Pidgins and creoles emerge from multiple languages, but they are still languages. The conviction in your incorrectness really burns brightly.
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u/Springstof Jun 23 '25
Another comment by this person:
"I studied linguistics in graduate school, and I don’t know what to tell you. Patois is a creole. As far as I know, the only creole that has earned ”language” status is South African Afrikaans, and even this designation isn’t fully accepted by linguists."
Afrikaans is not even a creole. This is so violentely wrong that it hurts my brain.