| Concept | Pidgin | Source |
|---|
L lexifier form S substrate form A acrolectal (decreolised) ? author unsure of the source form. Source forms in broad IPA; tones and length dropped.
A pidgin is a makeshift contact language that grows up between groups with no language in common: most of its words come from one language (the lexifier, usually the socially dominant one) while its sounds and some of its syntax are shaped by the speakers' own languages (the substrate), and its morphology is stripped back to analytic particles; when children acquire it natively and it expands into a full language, it is called a creole.
This page collides two of eight hand-written profiles (English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Hausa, Malay, Mandarin): each concept takes the lexifier's word with probability equal to the slider, otherwise the substrate's, and the result is pushed through the substrate's phoneme inventory and syllable template (nearest-segment substitution, cluster epenthesis or deletion, coda simplification, paragoge), while word order, adposition type, negation, plural marking and tense-mood-aspect particles are settled by weighted vote with the usual creole bias toward SVO and grammaticalised lexifier words like been, by and by, finish.
It does not model tone, stress, semantics, register, social history or the real-world lexical mixing that gives creoles words from three or four languages, its source vocabularies are the author's own broad transcriptions (entries marked ? are the ones the author was unsure of), and a real linguist should read the output as a caricature of tendencies, not a prediction. Everything runs in your browser; the settings live in the URL hash so a language can be shared by link.