Pidgin and Creole Englishes at York College

This site is an index of the student projects created, maintained, and updated by students at York College, CUNY, in Jamaica, Queens, NY in Pidgin and Creole English courses.

A history of Pidgin and Creole Englishes as an academic subject at York

The course was first taught as a selected topic of the Senior Seminar ENG 470: Seminar in Writing, Rhetoric and Language, in 2018. The original page from that course can be found here:

ENG 470 at York

In that course, students collaborated to create pages for three main English-lexified Caribbean creole varieties spoken at York College and in the surrounding community:

In 2023, the course was taught again as an upper-level special topics course, ENG 379: Special Topics in Writing, Rhetoric and Language. In addition to updating and expanding the original three sites, students created several new sites for English-lexified creole varieties:

Most recently, a permanent course offering, ENG 378: Pidgin and Creole Englishes, has been approved by the Curriculum Committee and Faculty Senate for inclusion in the Language emphasis of the redesigned English major at York, which is hoped to take effect in Fall 2025. The course description will be:

This course examines the diversity of English-lexified pidgin and creole language varieties from a global perspective. Using a sociolinguistic and historical linguistic framework, the course investigates the linguistic properties and social contexts of these language varieties from their colonial origins to their role in literature and everyday modern expression.