13 2. Overall framework of contact phenomena or perhaps a semicreole? Her proposition consists of several criteria for classifying contact languages or, as she calls them, “speech forms arising out of language contact” (Thomason 1997b: 70). She argues that “a typology of contact languages is best constructed within an overall framework that is based on aspects of the histories of the various contact languages” (1997: 71). A discussion on the typology of pidgins and creoles commences with standard assumptions about the nature of language change and the genetic relationships among languages: […] all living languages change through time; internally-motivated language change is gradual (i.e. a language is passed on from one generation to the next with only minor changes in a two-generation period); linguistic changes are not predictable, so that partially or entirely separated dialects of the same language will inevitably undergo different changes; and language split comes about when two (or more) dialects of the same language accumulate so many different changes that they become separate languages. (Thomason 1997b: 73–74) In line with Thomason’s statement, there are only three major types of contact languages, i.e. pidgins, creoles and bilingual mixed languages (1997b: 74). Peter Bakker, on the other hand, makes a division of contact languages into pidgins, creoles and pidgincreoles (2008: 130). As has been demonstrated, there are structural similarities among all pidgins and creoles which can be accounted for only in terms of languages in contact (DeCamp 1971a: 30). However, not all products of language contact can be “[…] unambiguously classified into one type or another” (Thomason 1997b: 75). It is not always obvious where to draw the line between relatively newly emerged contact languages. This is due to the fact that in studying pidgins and creoles “we are dealing with the results of complicated historical processes” (ibidem). When contact among different groups of people is quite limited and no group has the need to learn any of the other groups’ languages, the prototypical pidgin that arises from this limited situation contact is by definition not the native language of any speech community. Its lexical and structural resources are limited. The new language is, as Thomason (1997b: 78) states, a compromise, and all hard-to-learn features such as inflectional morphology and grammar are eliminated or reduced to a level that makes communication simpler. In her description of contact languages, it is visible how one variety transforms into another and that there are different stages of the formation of one variety:
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