In situations of multilingualism, new languages can emerge.

First, when people meet who have no language in common, a new language may be created by them in order to facilitate communication. These can lead to the development of primitive jargons, more elaborate pidgins, or complex pidgincreoles (full-fledge languages, ostensibly developed from a pidgin) and creoles.

Second, when people themselves are bilingual or multilingual, they may create a new language combining the languages they know well, leading to mixed languages of several types, combining, for instance, nouns and verbs from different languages, or grammatical and lexical components from their two languages.

Finally, young twins may create a new language different from the one(s) spoken around them, only intelligible to themselves.

In my ABRALIN talk, I will discuss links between social-historical-anthropological events with the effects they have on the language: simplification, complexification, creolization, mixing.

Even though these languages may be socially marginal or rare in the world, they emerged in natural laboratories shed a light on what is superfluous in languages (pidgins), or necessary (creoles) and on the psycholinguistic reality of grammatical distinctions (mixed languages) as well as social necessities for the emergence of grammar (twins).