Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

To help the reader’s orientation, we have classified our languages into English-based, Dutch-based,

Portuguese-based, and so on. This classification is not entirely uncontroversial. On the one hand,

contact languages are characterized by strong influence from multiple languages, so saying, for

instance, that Haitian Creole is French-based is problematic, as it glosses over the very important

contribution of the African languages, especially to the grammar of the language. For this reason,

many authors have used expressions like “French-lexified”, “Dutch-lexified” for such languages,

which only refer to the role of the European languages as primary lexicon-providers. We agree that

such terms are more precise, but they are also more cumbersome, so we have mostly used the older

(and still much more widespread) manner of talking about groups of creoles and pidgins. We think

that it is sufficiently well-known that “English-based” (etc.) is not meant to imply anything other

than that the bulk of the language’s lexicon is derived from English.

On the other hand, the notion of being based on a language is problematic in the case of languages

with several lexifiers, especially Gurindji Kriol and Michif. These are shown as having two

lexifiers (or lexifier "other"). There are also a few other cases where it is not fully clear what

the primary lexifier is. Saramaccan’s vocabulary has a very large Portuguese component, but for

simplicity we classify it as English-based here. Papiamentu is often thought to be originally

(Afro-)Portuguese-based, but as it has long been influenced much more by Spanish, we classify it

as Spanish-based.