At the highest level, creoles can merge with the standard variety of the language on which they were based. Most creole speakers control a number of levels and can shift up and down. Over time, creoles develop expanded vocabularies and more complex grammatical features that were not present in the pidgins from which they evolved. However, there are also numerous creoles based on other languages such as Arabic, Hindi, and Malay. Since most creole languages developed in the colonies they are typically based on English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, the languages of the superpowers of the time. In the Portuguese-speaking world, the term referred specifically to people of mixed European and non-European ancestry.

The word was coined in the 16th century and applied to people born in the colonies, to distinguish them from European-born immigrants. The term creole comes from the French creole, from Spanish criollo ‘person native to a locality’. There is no single accepted theory that explains the genesis of creole languages. The difference between pidgins and creoles is that people grow up speaking creoles as their first language, whereas nobody speaks pidgin as their first language. Subsequently, such a language can replace the settlers’ original language and become the first language of their descendants.

It allows speakers of two or more non-intelligible native languages to communicate with each other. When groups of people speaking different languages come together and intermix, a common improvised second language, called a pidgin, occasionally develops.

Pidgins creoles and mixed languages