When some of us say ‘tree’ we probably mean a figure between two and four. Sure we have some issues in pronunciation, but many foreigners do. And in general we are quite successful at that. Since we missed out on this historic opportunity we Dutch have to learn to speak our foreign languages. More than half of them living in the Netherlands. Other colonial powers exported their language to huge populations where today Dutch is the mother tongue of less than 25 million people worldwide. But in doing so we didn’t focus on spreading our language. For such a small country we made quite an impact in history. In hindsight we are not proud of our colonial efforts but the Dutch were relatively successful at it. And for a fact it was the first company to issue stock. You could argue that back in the 17th century the Dutch East India Company was the first multinational corporation. Usually, contact languages show structural similarities, even though they are geographically widely separated and are based on different lexifier languages which themselves do not share the structural features that are common to pidgins and creoles.The Netherlands are an open economy in which trade is an important factor. The design features are shared by pidgins (and creoles) worldwide.

(5) Pidgins are characterized by a comparatively high degree of (This is not a design feature mentioned by Sebba (1997) but it is another characteristic feature of pidgin languages.) (1) The syntactic features of a pidgin reveal a Mark Sebba (1997) describes this reduced structural system by means of four principles or design features ascribed to pidgin grammars. Accordingly, the grammars of pidgins are characteristically less complex than the grammars of their source languages. Compared to their source languages, pidgins show a characteristic simplification of linguistic structure that concerns all aspects of grammar: lexicon, phonology, syntax, semantics, morphology.

Pidgin english examples