Apotropaic Pidgins.

Sally Thomason (LH: 2017, 2022) mentioned something very interesting in a comment to a Facebook post: I found evidence in an early (17th-century) missionary account that the Delaware Pidgin was created by the Delawares deliberately, as a way of keeping outsiders at a distance — as in, We have to talk to you people, but we aren’t going to let you learn our real language. That was the first time I’d come across that motive for the development of a pidgin language; since then I’ve found it in several other pidgins on several different continents. I found that fascinating, and asked her permission to post about it; she gladly gave it, and added these details: I got really excited when I realized what the quotation I’d found meant. It’s in a 1628 letter by Reverend Jonas Michaëlius, published in J.F. Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherland: 1609-1664 (Scribner, 1909), pp. 117-134. Here’s the quotation: “…they rather design to conceal their language from us than to properly communicate…

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