Week 7: Variation and register

Pidgins, creoles and register. A language with only one way of saying something is not finished yet

5 April 2027

The street language in Blade Runner — Cityspeak — is a mixture of Japanese, German, Hungarian and Spanish, and Edward James Olmos put much of it together himself for Gaff rather than receiving it from the script. It occupies about ninety seconds of screen time and tells you more about the city than any establishing shot does, because it shows who arrived there, in what order, and who has to accommodate whom.

That is what contact does to language. Where speakers of different languages need to trade, a pidgin appears: reduced, nobody’s first language, adequate for the job. Where children grow up hearing that pidgin as their primary input, they do something remarkable with it — they supply the grammar it lacked, and within a generation it is a creole, a full language with native speakers and everything a full language has.

Your language currently has one register, so it carries no information about the society that speaks it. Real speakers do not all sound alike. The same person will shift between several noticeably different varieties in a day, depending on who they are talking to, and those shifts are not carelessness: they are systematic, and speakers notice at once when someone uses the wrong one. So: who in your world speaks your language as a second language? Who speaks the prestige variety, and what makes it prestigious other than the fact that powerful people speak it?

Outline#

• pidgin and creole, and what happens when children acquire one as a first language
• register: one speaker, several varieties, chosen by who is listening
• Olmos, Gaff, and ninety seconds of a language an actor built himself
• prestige, stigma, and whose variety your society treats as incorrect