Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

Here we look at the four interrogative pronouns ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘when’, and ‘how’ and ask whether they are expressed as simple, monomorphemic words as in the European lexifiers, or as compound expressions consisting of a generic noun and an adnominal interrogative word.

Compound interrogatives translate literally as 'which person', 'what place', 'what hour', 'what manner' or similar. From the first through the last value, languages show an increasing amount of compound expressions, and thus an increasing degree of distance from the European lexifiers.