ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, we looked at some of the theories of how pidgins and creoles come into existence. As we have seen, one of the presuppositions they all share is the fact that such languages emerge out of a particular type of language contact. However, once they develop into native languages, creoles (and extended pidgins) often continue to exist in a multilingual context that is also home to their original lexical source language, or lexifier. 1 For example, Tok Pisin co-exists with English as well as the indigenous languages of New Guinea. In the Caribbean (as stated in Chapter 1), Trinidad’s English-lexifier creole co-exists not only with a French-lexifier creole, Bhojpuri and Chinese (albeit each used by a minority of speakers) but also with English, the now official and ex-superstratal language of the island.
