In some areas, the standard chosen may be a variety that originally had no native speakers in the country. For example, in Papua New Guinea, a lot of official business is conducted in Tok Pisin. This language is now used by over a million people, but it began many years earlier as a kind of “contact” language called a pidgin. A pidgin is a variety of a language that developed for some practical purpose, such as trading, among groups of people who had a lot of contact, but who did not know each other’s languages. As such, it would have no native speakers. The origin of the term “pidgin” is thought to be from a Chinese version of the English word “business.”

A pidgin is described as an “English pidgin” if English is the lexifier language, that is, the main source of words in the pidgin. It doesn’t mean that those words will have the same pronunciation or meaning as in the source. For example, the word gras has its origins in the English word “grass,” but in Tok Pisin it also came to be used for “hair.” It is part of mausgras (“moustache”) and gras bilong fes (“beard”).

There are several English pidgins still used today. They are characterized by an absence of any complex grammatical morphology and a somewhat limited vocabulary. Inflectional suffixes such as -s (plural) and -’s (possessive) on nouns in Standard English are rare in pidgins, while structures like tu buk (“two books”) and di gyal place (“the girl’s place”) are common. Functional morphemes often take the place of inflectional morphemes found in the source language. For example, instead of changing the form of you to your, as in the English phrase your book, English-based pidgins use a form like bilong, and change the word order to produce phrases like buk bilong yu.

The syntax of pidgins can be quite unlike the languages from which terms were borrowed and modified, as can be seen in this example from an earlier stage of Tok Pisin.

There are believed to be between six and twelve million people still using pidgin languages and between ten and seventeen million using descendants from pidgins called “creoles.” When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade or contact language and becomes the first language of a social community, it is described as a creole. Tok Pisin is now a creole. Although still locally referred to as “Pidgin,” the language spoken by a large number of people in Hawai’i is also a creole, technically known as Hawai’i Creole English. A creole initially develops as the first language of children growing up in a pidgin-using community and becomes more complex as it serves more communicative purposes. Thus, unlike pidgins, creoles have large numbers of native speakers and are not restricted at all in their uses. A French creole is spoken by the majority of the population in Haiti and English creoles are used in Jamaica and Sierra Leone.

The separate vocabulary elements of a pidgin can become grammatical elements in a creole. The form baimbai yu go (“by and by you go”) in early Tok Pisin gradually shortened to bai yu go, and finally to yu bigo, with a grammatical structure not unlike that of its English translation equivalent, “you will go.”