How can creole ber considered a language?

Answer 1

Linguists consider creoles to be separate languages by definition. A creole is created when two different languages are used in an area due to problems of war, culture, Immigration, or a hundred other factors. What is important is that large groups of people who speak two distinct, separate languages need to live in the same area and interact together. The people who don't speak each other's language will do what they can to communicate. They might use words from language A or from language B in order to get their ideas across.

Pretty soon their words will start to change and a new way of speaking will emerge from this interaction. These words will make up what linguists call a pidgin. Most pidgin are, generally, not as linguisticly or grammatically as complicated as their parent languages, but they often don't stay that way. People will gradually continue to alter their pidgin to express more and more complex thoughts. Eventually, the people who created the pidgin will have children who will learn to speak the same way their parents spoke. Linguists call this "nativization". Once nativization takes place, the pidgin can now be considered a separate language and is called a "creole".

Many creoles borrow more features from one of their parent languages than another and are often classified by that parent language. Examples of English creoles include Jamaican Patois (spoken in Jamaica), Gullah (spoken on some islands off the South Carolina Coast in the USA), and Singlish (spoken in Singapore).

This process also explains why all languages fall into "language families". For example, many years ago the Romans conquered different areas of Europe. They brought their language, Latin, with them. The local people who lived in these areas had to interact with the Romans and, eventually, their local languages changed too. In time, those languages creolized and turned into Italian, Spanish, Portugeuse, French, and the various other European languages we know today called the "Romance Languages". (Because they derived from the "Roman" language)