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The History of Pidgin
The history of pidgin begins in the early 19th century in the South China city of Guangzhou. Chinese merchants interacting with English speakers on the docks in this port adopted and modified the word business in a way that, by century's end, had become pidgin. The word itself then became the descriptor of the unique communication used by people who speak different languages. Pidgins generally consist of small vocabularies (Chinese Pidgin English has only 700 words), but some have grown to become a group's native language. Examples include Sea Island Creole (spoken in
Examples of pidgin in a Sentence
Mankaprr Conteh, Rolling Stone, 14 Mar. 2025
Eventually, my family became adept at speaking a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese.
—Victoria Song, The Verge, 18 Apr. 2024
The dialogue in both sections, sprinkled like parsley with pidgin Yiddish and Hebrew prayer, has a secondhand aura that is also unconvincing.
—Jesse Green, New York Times, 16 Feb. 2023
But Amazon expects this person to be well connected with the Nigerian film industry, already boasting relationships with top creators, fluency in Nigerian pidgin and one or more indigenous languages.
—Alexander Onukwue, Quartz, 11 Apr. 2022
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Cite this Entry
“Pidgin.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pidgin. Accessed 6 Sep. 2025.
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pidgin
noun
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