The digital diffusion of pidgin/creoles

Abstract The study explores three factors in the digital spread of pidgins and creoles. The first is the writing boom on the Internet, which has led to prestige gains for pidgin/creoles. The second is the interplay of migration, culture and the media as boosters in the diffusion of pidgin/creoles. The third is the technologisation of pidgin/creoles, as measured by their presence in Large Language Models (LLMs) developed for text generation and machine translation. While pidgin/creoles are typically not among the languages that have been technologised ‘top down’ and systematically, several of them — among them Jamaican Creole and Nigerian Pidgin — have a high profile in the digital media and therefore also a significant presence in the training data of LLMs. Where pidgin/creoles have become informal world languages in this way, this poses new challenges for the development of standard orthographies and codification.