‘The nearest thing to protolanguage’

The idea that pidgins can serve as a window on language evolution is not a new one: it has been entertained over the years by linguists of various theoretical persuasions. More than twenty years ago Derek Bickerton, for example, depicted the ‘language’ of pidgin speakers as one of the

Recently, he has once again expressed his belief in the capacity of pidgins to shed light on the evolution of language, asserting amongst other things that

Bickerton, moreover, tells his readers – and specifically those who had to create a rudimentary pidgin for communicating during travel in a foreign country – that

Talmy Givón is another long-standing proponent of the idea that pidgins can be a source of evidence about language evolution. Thus as early as 1979, he considered a second-language pidgin to be ‘one of the fossils of language’ that can be used for ‘reconstructing the course of language evolution’ (Givón 2009: 241). And thirty years later, he has reaffirmed this view by asserting that

This remark by Givón is also indicative of the type of windows instantiated by the pidgin window: it is an analogue window. That is, the inferential step from properties of pidgins to properties of an evolutionarily earlier stage of language represents analogical inference.

The window potential of pidgins has been probed by scholars other than Bickerton and Givón as well. They include Peter Bakker (2003), Rudolf Botha (2006a), Tecumseh Fitch (2010), Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva (2004, 2007), Ray Jackendoff (1999, 2002), Salikoko Mufwene (2007, 2008), Sonia Ragir (2002), Paul Roberge (2009, 2012) and Dan Slobin (2004). Judgements of that potential vary from cautiously positive to wholly negative.