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Comment by hervature | Hacker News Reader

> "20 people speaking 20 different languages create a new common merged language"

If you can provide an example of such a diverse set of languages becoming a new language, that would be interesting.

Creole has nothing to do with the number of languages. Creole is what you get when two groups of people with no bilingual speakers are forced to interact and develop a new language. Normally, it starts as a pidgin to facilitate trade but then develops into a full fledged language. The main difference with Spanglish being that the speakers often know both languages to a modest degree but probably would not be considered native by other native speakers. Also, there are almost 1M Dominicans alone in NYC. 20k makes it sound like some cute phenomena happening in Little Havana in Miami.

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> Creole has nothing to do with the number of languages.

I agree, I was misremembering. After a quick refresher I agree that spanglish fits the Creole definition much better than I initially considered.

> there are almost 1M Dominicans alone in NYC

Not all 1M people interact with each other, I was talking about the overlapping sets of social circles areound people, not the total count.

I hate to use Wikipedia as an authority but:

Spanglish is not a creole or dialect of Spanish because, though people claim they are native Spanglish speakers, Spanglish itself is not a language on its own, but speakers speak English or Spanish with a heavy influence from the other language. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanglish)

I agree, but here I was talking about the creation of the language, my opinion was that a language started like spanglish could not be a creole.

As the term "creole" is used in linguistics, it means a language that: a) started as a contact language, and b) has become the mother tongue of a group. So, I think you might be right, because Spanglish originated as a speech among English-Spanish bilinguals rather than as a contact language between English and Spanish communities. If Spanglish became the mother tongue of a group who couldn't speak Spanish or English, then, well...I'm not sure.

I had no intentions to opine on b) but according to alehlopeh a few levels up [0] it might be true

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383907

> If you can provide an example of such a diverse set of languages becoming a new language, that would be interesting.

It's certainly not 20 languages, but Singlish (Singapore creole) has a number of influences.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin

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