Erina

Similar varieties have also been developed by youth gangs, whether delinquent of non delinquent, most notably by some Chicano groups known variously as pachucos, tirilones, etc, who speak caló (see section 9.3).
Maurer (1955 : 4) defines argot as “specialized language used by organized professional groups operating outside the law, these groups normally constitute criminal subcultures, and the language is usually secret or semisecret.” Argot is used only by professionals for the discussion of their business. Normally they speak it only ion the presence of accepted underworld persons, hence, it is not used primarily for purposes of secrecy. They especially avoid its use in the presence of victims or potential victims. Some persons may speak an argot with wit and originality. Other may speak several argots fluently if they have had experience in more than one racket. Some criminals, on the other hand, shun argot completely. Terms from argot frequently find their way into the general language. There is, for example, legitimate gamblers, all players, and to the public at large (Maurer 1950 : 118 – 119).
Some subcultures, without an economically specialized institutional basis, like those of the underworld have adopted argot-like speech patterns. Such linguistic styles are typically unstable, for example, languages of the jazz world, of drug addicts, or of youth cultures existing on the borderline of professional crime. Such youth languages borrow from criminal argots, jazz language, and black slang, and are used for a wider range of functions than those of professional argots (Luckmann 1975:38-39). Languages of concealment may use either phonological transformations, such as Pig Latin, or else use a word that rhymes with the one they would conceal. They also invent new words or borrow words from languages with which others are not familiar. To a limited extent, certain argots and children’s languages fall into this category.
Slang arises not from ignorance of the standard language but rather from the desire or a group such as a gang or occupational group to have speech form that will distinguish it from outsiders. Some slang words like argot may enter general speech and, in some cases, survive there and even become incorporated into the standard language. Most slang, however, is ephemeral, changing as outsiders begin to catch on. It is difficult to give examples of current slang for the words may be obsolete even by the time this book is published.
In the view of Jespersen (1925 : 150), “Slang is an outcome of mankind’s love of play, “Spieltrieb’: it is the playful production of something new, where, properly speaking, nothing new was required. In the light of pure reason the old word is good enough, it is only our feelings that cannot stand it any longer. Slang is a linguistic luxury, it is a sport and like any other sport, something that belongs essentially to the young. It is (or was, at any rate) a greater favorite with young is outworn and drab.” Persons, however, learning the slang as part of a second language may fail to distinguish between standard and slang forms and use the latter inappropriately. That is, foreigners may fail to acquire the necessary sociolinguistics rules for the use of the various speech styles.

6.4. Lingua francas
The term lingua franca refers to any language used to communicate across linguistic barriers. UNESCO (1953 : 40) has defined lingua franca as “A language which is used habitually by people whose mother tongues are different in order to facilitate communication between them.
Lingua francas can be either natural, pidginizeed, or planned. The most important natural lingua francas in the history of Western Civilization have been the Greek koine, Latin, and French. The koine owed its spread to the military conquests of Alexander the Great but outlasted the empire and helped to spread Christianity. There would probably have been no audience for the new religion had not the koine been previously available as a contact language (Samarin1968:661-663). Koines are always mutually intelligible with at least some forms of the standard language. Aramic and Later Arabic, became lingua francas of the Near East, and Hindi became a lingua franca following the Muslim conquest of India in the 12th century.
While lingua francas are characterized in terms of function, pidgins can be characterized not only in terms of their limited functions but also in terms of their origin, structure and social context. A pidgin is a contact vernacular which originated out of the contact or two unrelated languages, usually one European and one non European and developed adjacent to a marine expanse, often by seamen.
A pidgin is ordinarily a simplified version of one of the language, usually European, modified in the direction of the other. Usually grammatical distinctions are ignored which are unrelated to important semantic distinctions. The language thus developed, at least in its initial stages, is used for communication in a very limited number of situations , such as buying and selling goods or communication between foreman and worker. It is used to transmit referential rather than social meaning and lacks stylistic variation. The vocabulary thus is also very limited, and the pidgin becomes very easy for both parties to the transaction to learn and use. The social status of the pidgin leads to a decreased functional load which in turn leads to its simplified structure (Smith 1972:47).
Despite their contact origins some pidgins are not spoken by those who control the related standard language but rather by natives in subordinate position who do not share a common language. For example, Chinese pidgin English is not spoken between speakers of English and Chinese but rather among Chinese who speak mutually unintelligible dialects, as Tok Pisin is used between members of different New Guinea tribes.
To give the reader idea of the nature of a pidgin, a text of the Lord’s Prayer in Pidgin English (New Guinea), as printed in the 1963 edition of the Four Gospels, is presented along with an interlinear literal translation (cited by Capel 1969)
In West Germany, there are hundreds of thousands of temporary workers (euphemistically called Gastarbeiter, r “guest workers”) from Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, and Turkey who have developed a German pidgin for communicating with their German employers and neighbors. It apparently is sufficient for the needs of the factories where most of the Gastarbeiter are employed, but they are effectively isolated from the rest of German society. Their children are handicapped in attending German schools, although some bilingual programs have been established.
There are many other instances of pidgins or near-pidgins. For example, Weil (1977) identifies a variety of Hebrew she calls “sub-Hebrew” spoken by immigrants to Israel from India (The Bene Israel), which is characterized by a reduced diversity of syntactic construction, reduced attention to gender, tense and number, a reduced number of lexical alternatives, and increased emphasis on nonverbal language. Thus, they may say / kolnoa?/ (“Cinema”) to mean “Would you like to come to the cinema with me?” or /yerakot/ (“vegetables”) to refer to different specific kinds of vegetables. Or a speaker may go to a grocery store, and if he doesn’t know the name in Hebrew of the item he wants, he may simply say /ze/ (‘this”), pointing to the desired item. The purpose of sub-Hebrew is to facilitate communication with other speech communities, as the Bene Israel generally speak Marathi and / or English.
When a pidgin becomes a medium of communication among non-Western speakers who speak mutually unintelligible languages (for example, persons from different tribes in New Guinea), it often happens that such persons marry each other and thus may utilize the pidgin as the language of the home. Their children will then speak the pidgin as their first language. If this occurs on a fairly large scale and there is a group of people who speak the pidgin as their first of only language, its functions will become expanded. Its vocabulary and new grammatical devises will be developed to convey all the semantic nuances necessary for the full life of a community. This latter development is called creolization and results in a creole. In fact, Pidgin English has become this in Melanesia, where it is now generally called Neo-Melanesian or Tok Pisin. Newspapers and books are published in Tok Pisin, and the business of the New Guinea legislature and other governmental bodies is conducted in this creole.
Hall (1972) has pointed out that pidgins and creoles have in some cases been standardized by the production of written grammars and dictionaries under the auspices of colonial regimes and missionary organizations. Newspapers, government communiqués, Bible translations, etc., are then issued in standardized written form (cf. the Pidgin English text above). In such cases the problems of standardization involve the same types of considerations as the standardization of other languages, such as, for example, standardized orthography.
While contact cultures maintain their own integrity in the case of pidgins, creoles represent the outcome of acculturation. Although most of the vocabulary of a creole is shared with its “parent”, the phonology and syntax are ordinarily so different that the two are mutually unintelligible. Smith contrasts pidginization and creolization by nothing that the former involves simplification of form, restriction in function, and admixture of vocabulary to a base language, whereas the latter involves elaboration of form, expansion of function, and stabilization and incorporation of the lexicon into the referential framework of the new system incorporation of the lexicon into the referential framework of the new system (Smith 1973a : 290 – 291).

A significant question concerns the conditions under which a pidgin does or does not become creolized. Generally, a creole will not emerge if the sociolinguistic situation which produced the pidgin in the first place remains unchanged. The pidgin must become the first, native language of its speakers at the same time that they are denied the opportunity of acquiring the corresponding standard language. This will occur as a result of largely unbridgeable social and racial gaps between elite and masses of colonizers and colonized