In a minority of cases, extending a pidgin may lead to creolisation. Another is Tok Pisin, which is widely used throughout Papua New Guinea, in print as well as in conversation. One example of an extended pidgin is Fanagalo, used in some South African mines, and which is actually taught in underground classrooms to miners of different linguistic backgrounds. It therefore has no immediate need to be elaborated unless it proves useful for the speech community to develop an extended pidgin, used for more purposes and with increasingly rigid rules.

The pidgin is fine-tuned to the immediate needs of the speakers, who may primarily use it for bartering, friendly introductions, or some other specific purpose. As the goal is basic communication rather than the acquisition of a new language, the result is a rudimentary language with fewer 'rules' than others - there are fewer sentence types, for instance, so expressing certain complex ideas may be difficult.

A pidgin is a language that is created through a contact situation - typically, users employ words, or wordlike units, from one or more languages they have some knowledge of, underlain by some of the grammar of their own native languages as well as novel rules that arise through the processes of language acquisition. Pidgins and creoles are contact languages.

Contact languages pidgins and creoles