Beach-la-Mar (South Pacific Pidgin English), Mauritius Creole, Chinook Jargon — in Chapter XII, “Pidgin and Congeners,” Jespersen looks at these languages with a fairness that is, for his era, genuinely striking.
The “corruption” doesn’t come from one side alone
Pidgin languages have often been treated as simply “the result of local people failing to speak English well.” Jespersen pushes back on this directly. “Those deviations from correct English,” he writes plainly, “are due just as much to the English as to the Easterners.” He’s not just softening the standard explanation — he’s rejecting, outright, the idea that the blame belongs to only one side.
As evidence, he offers an example. A European addresses a local servant: “Can missus see?” Jespersen observes:
it being a popular superstition amongst the Europeans that to enable a native to understand English he must be addressed as if he were deaf, and in the most infantile language.
He then draws a further parallel to “baby talk” in childrearing — the same assumption that leads a mother to deliberately speak in broken language to an infant, he argues, was at work in these colonial language contacts too. It wasn’t that local people’s English was broken; it was that the Europeans themselves were speaking baby talk. Pidgin’s simplified grammar, in Jespersen’s account, is the accumulated result of both.
A candid tribute to Mauritius Creole
In the following section, Jespersen carefully works through the grammar of French-derived Mauritius Creole and comes away visibly impressed by its systematicity. Having explained how its auxiliary verbs combine to mark tense, he concludes:
the language has really succeeded in building up a very fine and rich verbal system with the simplest possible means and with perfect regularity.
Refusing to treat “simple” and “impoverished” as the same thing — this is exactly the same move seen in another article in this feature, on “progress or decay.” Having fewer means at your disposal doesn’t automatically make a system poorer.
Where the reservation belongs
That said, it would be going too far to call Jespersen’s position unconditionally “modern.” He himself ultimately classifies Beach-la-Mar and Pidgin as, in the end, “English learnt imperfectly.” Today’s creole studies generally treat pidgin and creole languages not as an “imperfect version” of the language they draw their vocabulary from (English, in this case), but as languages complete in their own right, with their own independent grammatical systems. Jespersen resisted half of his era’s prejudice — the assumption that “the fault lies only with local speakers.” The other half — the very framework of “deviation from a standard language” — is one he hadn’t yet stepped outside of.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| The popular assumption | Pidgin’s roughness is due to local speakers’ incomplete grasp of English |
| Jespersen’s counter | Europeans’ own “baby talk” was just as much a cause |
| His assessment of Mauritius Creole | Praised as building a regular, rich verbal system from simple means |
| Where the limit remained | He never fully left behind the framing of pidgin as “imperfect English” |
In a nutshell — writing in 1922, Jespersen plainly rejected the popular view that blamed pidgin’s roughness on local speakers alone. But stepping outside the framework of “deviation from a standard language” entirely would take several more decades.