This article is a part of our new series Dialectical, which explores the region's languages, their connections, and shared histories.
Home to 544 living languages belonging to six language families – Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Andamanese, Kra-Dai and some isolates – Southasia has always been the hotbed of language contact and convergence. This extensive contact between genetically unrelated languages has given rise to a linguistic area where languages share many unique linguistic features such as retroflex sounds, word order and echo words to various syntactic devices. In discussions around language contact and convergence in Southasia, however, pidgins, creoles and mixed languages are often neglected. The disdain towards them is visible in their names which are often prefixed by words such as bastard, broken, lazy or pig. Until recently, they were seldom recognised as languages and were often treated as corrupt versions of some dominant languages.
Origins
Pidgins and creoles are contact languages that develop over a period of time from the need for communication among people who speak mutually unintelligible languages. The word pidgin is attested to be from the Chinese Pidgin-English pronunciation of the word 'business'. Chinese Pidgin English was an 18th-century trade language that developed in coastal China among English speaking traders and their Cantonese speaking workers. The word creole is related to Latin creare (create, breed) borrowed into English through French or Spanish. It originally referred to a person of European descent born especially in the West Indies or Latin America. In linguistics, creoles differ from pidgins in that they become the mother tongue of an entire speech community and are spoken at home, too. Pidgins, meanwhile, remain a secondary language to be used in specific situations. Both can act as a lingua franca, ie, a contact language outside of home.