Many scholars believe that the word pidgin was first used for Chinese pidgin English (in which pidgin is the word for “business”) and was later generalized to mean any language of this type.
- DeCamp (1977), Pag. 6

[…] a pidgin is relatively easy to learn and so can spread rapidly through an area when a need for interlingual communication arises. The establishment of a new industrial plant or a foreign military base or the development of a new trade route can result in thousands of new pidgin speakers within only weeks.
- DeCamp (1977), Pag. 7

[…] a pidgin quite naturally takes its vocabulary from the various languages involved in the cultural contact, with the dominant group contributing the most.
- DeCamp (1977), Pag. 8