The Experimental Creation of a Pidgin Language

Over the past two years several research projects have been undertaken within the Applied Linguistics Program at UCLA to examine the early stages of pidginization. The idea was to create experimentally a pidgin language by having subjects memorize 250 words of a language they did not know and communicate with that lexicon for approximately 40 hours. A German Pidgin and a Farsi Pidgin were created. The experiments and subsequent analyses provided information on the origin and development of the lexicon, deictic systems, and syntax in early pidginization.