Plantation children built a brand-new language from a chaotic pidgin

19th-century Hawaiian sugar plantations threw together workers speaking Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino and English, who communicated in a rough pidgin with almost no fixed grammar. Within a generation, their children turned it into Hawaiian Creole English, a full language with a stable grammar of its own.

— Derek Bickerton, Roots of Language — Karoma Publishers, 1981
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