I don’t think anyone would be shocked to hear that linguists generally study languages, but there is a corner of the discipline that studies something slightly different: pidgins. That’s the word that linguists use to describe the mashup that can result from the collision of two or more languages, emerging amid circumstances such as overseas trade or even enslavement. These are not actual languages; they have small vocabularies and very little of what we could call grammar. They serve largely to allow people to make basic statements, ask simple questions and give commands. One example is Chinese Pidgin English, which was spoken on the coast of China from the 18th century to the mid-20th century. Thought by some to have granted us the expression “long time no see,” it had a vocabulary of a few hundred words and only shards of what we would call grammatical rules.
Some pidgins flower into complex and nuanced languages, as happened with Jamaican patois, Papiamentu, Cape Verdean and the Creole I am most familiar with, Saramaccan of Surinam, each one of which has grammar and vocabulary extensive enough to fill books.
Linguists who study this phenomenon tend to focus on how pidgins evolve into language, but language can go in the other direction, too — unraveling, you might say, into something simpler. I’ve been reminded of that as the nation tries to process President Biden’s jumbled syntax during his debate with Donald Trump and in his subsequent interview with George Stephanopoulos.
Biden has never been the most starchy of orators, but many observers, myself included, were struck by how far his sentences had strayed from the complexities and subtleties he once controlled effortlessly. It is alarming to see someone who is asking to be elected president of the United States — someone who already serves as president of the United States — communicate in such an ineffective manner. But what is actually going on there, linguistically? One way to understand what is happening is to think of it as unraveling.
For all of the attention that the shaggy text flow he slips into at times gets, such as when he seemed to say that he was the first Black vice president, it’s not pidgin-like, and needn’t be alarming. Such a lack of elocution — which Donald Trump is also quite given to — is mainly a symptom of casualness, not pathology. We tend to underestimate the extent to which context, facial expression and intonation clarify the words we speak, including when we are addressing two or three topics at a time within the same stretch of speech.
Other aspects of his speech are more suggestive of unraveling. In his interview last week with George Stephanopoulos, Biden repeatedly used verbless chunks in the place of sentences, with utterances such as “No indication of any serious condition,” “Nobody’s fault, mine” and “Large crowds, overwhelming response, no slipping.” This is hardly unknown in casual speech, but Biden leaned on it a lot given the gravity of the interview. The linguist Ljiljana Progovac has described such inert word sequences as “living fossils” of earlier stages in the development of human language, before people combined those chunks into the flowing, complex sentences we are familiar with.
