1258: Creoles vs Languages May 20, 2018

What separates creoles and pidgins from whole languages with heavy influence from other languages?

Some languages are very pure in their grammar and vocabulary, such as Icelandic which stays incredibly true to its Germanic roots, and other languages take elements from all over, such as Haitian Creole, which uses French as the lexifier language (i.e. where it gets its vocabulary) but with a lot of influence from West African languages. However, what separates a language like Haitian Creole from a non-creole language like Yiddish, is that while Yiddish has a lot of influence from Hebrew and Slavic languages in its vocabulary, phonology, and morphonology (which includes affixes and things like that) but its core vocabulary is Germanic, and so is the grammar. This definition has historically raised a lot of questions about English.

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