what are pidgin and standard language?

1.      What is a pidgin? Is Bahasa Indonesia now a pidgin?

A pidgin is a language which has no native speakers. Pidgins develop as a mean of communication between people who do not have a common language. So a pidgin is no one`s native language. Pidgins seem particularly likely to arise when two different groups with different languages are communicating in situation where there is also a third dominant language.

Bahasa Indonesia is not a pidgin now because BI has more than two hundred million native speakers in Indonesia.

2.      What is meant by Standard languages?

The term standard is even more slippery than vernacular because it too is used in many different ways by linguists. Here is one definition which can serve as a useful starting point.  A standard variety is generally one which is written, and which has undergone some degree of regularization or codification (in grammar and a dictionary), it is recognized as a prestigious variety or code by a community, and it is used for H functions alongside a diversity of L varieties. This is a general definition and it immediately excludes most of the world `s for or five thousand languages. Only a minority of the world`s language are written, and an even smaller minority are standardized in the sense of codified and accepted by the community as suitable for formal functions. It will be useful to look at an example to illustrate that the definition means in particular context.