Differentiating pidgin from early interlanguage — a comparison of Pidgin Nguni (Fanakalo) and interlanguage varieties of Xhosa and Zulu

Abstract

This article examines five key areas of grammar which differentiate the pidgin, Fanakalo from L2 learner varieties of its lexifiers, Zulu and to a lesser extent, Xhosa. Taking Fanakalo as the descriptive starting point, these areas are (a) the article lo; (b) the preposition lapha; (c) the free pronouns mina 'I', wena 'you' etc.; (d) the locative copula khona and (e) verb suffixes like –ile (perfective), –isa (causative) etc. The context of the discussion is whether early fossilised interlanguages can be differentiated from pidgins (Schumann, 1974; Andersen, 1981; Siegel, 2003). Whilst there appear to be immense overlaps between the two for English as target language or lexifier (Schumann, 1974), this article argues that for an agglutinating language like Zulu or Xhosa, there are clear-cut differences between pidgin and relatively early-fossilised forms of the L2. However, for more complex tense patterns, similar simplificatory strategies occur in pidgin and L2.