pidgin

Even the name, Mami Wata, which is pidgin English for 'Mother Water'.

You don't have to speak pidgin English to me, Jim. - This is Sir Humphrey Appleby, my Permanent UnderSecretary.

They're more of a, more darker complexion. They speak in a more pidgin, we call it pidgin English.

A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between people with no language in common.

Once established in the Americas, these pidgins developed into stable creoles, forms of simplified English combined with many words from a variety of African languages.

One African mermaid is called, Mami Wata, in pidgin English - amixture of English and local languages which enables people who do not share a common language to communicate.

She tried to talk to him, partly by signs, partly in pidgin French, which, for some reason, she thought would be more comprehensible to him, and she had half a dozen phrases of English.

The Chinaman seemed to think we were lost, and chattered in pidgin English concerning the abundance of " litty stick" (chaparral), while the Indian silently scanned the billowy ridges and gulches for openings.

Perhaps it began as a pidgin, a hastily developed form of communication between groups that don't share a common tongue, or maybe it was the result of English words being dropped into African grammar systems.

The name 'Mami Wata' comes from Nigerian pidgin English – a language which has developed from a mixture of two languages and is used as a way of communicating by people who do not speak each other's languages.