In praise of pidgin

When a group starts on monitoring and evaluation together, the first thing it often makes is a glossary. What do we mean by outcome? What counts as a result? Who is a participant? It feels careful. Yet it usually works the other way round. A shared language is what collaboration leaves behind, not what it needs to begin.

The work brings a foundation, a delivery partner, participants and sometimes a council to one table. They come from different worlds, each with its own words. A funder talks about indicators and reporting. A field worker talks about families, conversations and trust. A resident talks about the street.

How do such partners find each other when they do not speak the same language? Linguists have an answer. It is called pidgin.

What a pidgin is

A pidgin is a language of necessity. It appears when two groups without a common tongue still have to get something done, such as trade or work. You can recognise a pidgin by four things.

• Nobody’s mother tongue · it exists only for contact between the groups.
• Small and practical · few words, simple grammar, only what the task needs.
• Tied to one domain · you can do business in it, but you cannot argue, comfort or philosophise.
• Borrowed words · the vocabulary usually comes from the stronger side, the sound and structure often from the other. So there is always a balance of power inside it.

Some examples. Russenorsk was the trading language of Russian and Norwegian fishermen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It vanished when the trade stopped. Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea began as a pidgin and is now an official national language. Sranan Tongo and Papiamentu are creoles with a similar history.

A pidgin can go three ways. It dies out when contact ends. It settles into a fixed auxiliary language for one domain. Or it creolises: a new generation grows up with it, and it becomes rich and complete. Then it is no longer a go-between, but a language of its own.

What the research says

The idea that language grows out of collaboration is not new. Seven studies each show it in their own way.

• Peter Galison · worlds do not start with a shared language, but with exchange. Repeated trading grows a pidgin first, and only later a creole. Language is the sediment of collaboration.Source: Peter Galison, University of Chicago Press, Not yet checked
• Donnellon, Gray and Bougon · groups can act together while giving that action different meanings. Shared action is enough. Shared meaning is not required.Source: Anne Donnellon, Barbara Gray en Michel G. Bougon, Administrative Science Quarterly 31(1), Checked
• Karl Weick · meaning comes afterwards. First you act, then you understand what you did.Source: Karl E. Weick, Sage, Not yet checked
• Star and Griesemer · boundary objects make it possible to work together without agreeing. The object carries the connection, so the words do not have to yet.Source: Susan Leigh Star en James R. Griesemer, Social Studies of Science 19(3), Checked
• Beth Bechky · understanding between occupations grows in the work itself. Name the differences in each other’s work, find common ground, and you change how the other side sees it.Source: Beth A. Bechky, Organization Science 14(3), Checked
• Paul Carlile · shared words only solve the first boundary. A difference in meaning needs translation. A difference in interest needs something to change.Source: Paul R. Carlile, Organization Science 15(5), Checked
• Etienne Wenger · meaning comes from taking part and writing things down, together. What you write down without taking part carries no meaning of its own.Source: Etienne Wenger, in Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice (Springer), Checked

Galison saw this among physicists and engineers who built radar and computer simulations together. They had no shared theory. They did have a shared working language about the thing they were making. That language was local, incomplete and effective.Source: Peter Galison, University of Chicago Press, Not yet checked

What this means for monitoring and evaluation

Take a theory of change, a set of indicators or a dashboard. In monitoring and evaluation these are boundary objects. The board of a foundation reads accountability in them. A delivery partner reads a work plan. A resident mostly looks at whether the neighbourhood is getting better. That is fine, as long as the action holds together.

Around such an object, a pidgin grows by itself. A steering group might say ‘the baseline’ and mean the conversation in March. Or it might say ‘the green box’ and mean the goal that is on track. An outsider understands little of it. For those taking part, it is exactly enough.

Such a pidgin is a sign of progress, not a flaw. It shows that real exchange is happening. Polish it out of a neat final report and you throw away part of the learning.

The risk of starting with language

Demand that the partners speak one language first, and in practice the most powerful party chooses the words. In monitoring and evaluation that is often the funder, or policy. It is assimilation that looks like connection.

So notice whose words they are. Do they all come from policy language, or from the grant report template? Then the balance is unequal, even if the partners use the words correctly. Connecting does not mean making everything the same. You can translate without losing your own voice.

How to build bridges

• Start with something you do together · a joint action or a shared object, not a glossary. Draw a theory of change together, or take a first measurement together.
• Accept pidgin · half-words and borrowed words belong to the start. They are not mistakes to correct.
• Harvest language afterwards · write down the words that emerged by themselves. Keep a glossary that grows, not one fixed in advance.
• Let meanings sit side by side · as long as the action holds, the partners need not mean the same thing.
• See your own creole as success · when the partners speak the mixed language themselves, the collaboration has found its own language.

The person in between

Every partnership has people who understand both sides. I call them people in between. Think of a programme manager who talks to a foundation’s board and to people in the neighbourhood. Or an evaluator who turns figures into stories, and stories back into figures.

People in between speak the language of both sides. That makes them the makers of the pidgin. It is a craft, and it deserves attention. So learn the pidgin on purpose, and write down how it grows.

The best a person in between can achieve is to be needed less. When the partners speak the mixed language themselves, the translator can step back. The person in between disappears. That is not a loss. It is proof that the bridge is standing.