But Gooden says it shows signs of reduplication, a feature common in creole and pidgin languages wherein existing words in a language are used to create new words. Turkish, for example, is a fully formed language that evolved about 1,000 years ago from an amalgamation of existing Turkic languages, Arabic and Persian languages as well as Greek and Armenian. Through time, some that began as contact languages evolved into more formalised ones, explains linguist Shelome Gooden of the University of Pittsburgh, who as a child spoke English at school but Jamaican Creole – a mix of English and West African languages – at home. Some are transitory others have persisted for hundreds of years.

The many languages missing from the internetįrom pidgins – forms of simplified speech – used for commerce to the more mature creoles that have developed from them, contact languages exist all over the world.

Linguists and anthropologists who traditionally have focused on the fate of more formal languages are paying increased attention: studying them with greater intensity and working with indigenous groups, international agencies, independent non-profits, academics and others to preserve them. Only 200 or so remain – scores of which are at risk of extinction. Today, many of these contact languages are lost. But others were born of tragedy and violence – like Haitian Creole, Gullah Geechee, Jamaican Creole and many others that arose from the Atlantic slave trade, when West African peoples combined several tongues with English, creating everyday languages often used among slaves.

Some are peaceful, such as when groups meet for trade and need a lingua franca: Nigerian Pidgin English, for example, allows speakers of over 500 tongues to communicate. The origin stories of these linguistic mash-ups vary. Linguists call such impromptu tongues “contact languages” – and they can extend well beyond the pidgin and creole that many of us have heard of. When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes inadvertently create a new one, combining bits of each into something everyone can use to communicate easily.

Hawaiian speaking pidgin