In both cases, people miss that nonstandard speech is not, in any scientific sense, substandard. These forms of speech are not broken. In fact, there is order, subtlety, and even majesty in these ways of talking.
When colonizing Australia, the English encountered Indigenous people speaking many languages. A makeshift pidgin emerged for use between them and the white people, using English words mixed with some from the local languages, and just enough grammatical structure — a mere sprinkle — to allow basic communication. This was not a real, distinct language.
But over time, Aboriginal groups started using it to communicate with one another. They needed it to evolve from an improvised, utilitarian tool for trade into a fuller means of self-expression. So they filled it out with more words. They added real grammar, some rules derived from their Indigenous languages and others emerging on their own, negotiated through usage, marking things like tense and number. They started to speak it faster, and passed it on to their children. This is how pidgin in Australia became Kriol, a real language. And this is the process by which other Creole languages were constructed: Papiamentu, Jamaican patois, Haitian Creole and dozens of other languages worldwide.
In the video, Kriol is used slowly, one sentence at a time, expressing rather elementary concepts, which helped give viewers the mistaken impression that it was just corrupted English. But that’s not how it, or any language, is used in everyday communication. Here is a more representative Kriol sentence: “Dijan lilboi gemen im-in gedim long-wan stik en pukum la jad hol.” This is hardly baby-talk English, given that it is so hard to even glean what the baby in question would even be saying. It means, “This little boy got a long stick and pushed it down into the hole.”
“Dijan” — roughly pronounced “DEE-jun” — is what happens when you say “this one” repeatedly across generations. It is now unrecognizable as derived from “this one” except with study. It is a word of its own just as “daisy” is a different word from what it started as, “day’s eye.” The “la jad hol” at the end of the sentence is “to that hole.” “Jad” is “that” after the same process that made “this one” into “dijan.” “La” is “to” for reasons that need not detain us, but obviously no baby says “la” for “to”! The word “gemen” signifies that this sentence is describing something from a dream, based on the old British word “gammon,” for “inauthentic.”
