Evidence
Keith Whinnom pinpointed the idea that a proto-pidgin "spread via normal linguistic diffusion" and claimed that there are many similarities between Spanish contact vernaculars and languages of this type used in the Philippines and a Portuguese Creole in India. These similarities are to be found in the fields of syntax and certain parts of vocabulary.
While many creoles around the world have lexicons based on languages other than Portuguese (e.g. English, French, Spanish, Dutch), it was hypothesized that such creoles were derived from this lingua franca by means of relexification, i.e. the process in which a pidgin or creole incorporates a significant amount of its lexicon from another language while keeping the grammar intact. There is some evidence that relexification is a real process. Pieter Muysken and Bakker & Mous (1994) show that there are languages which derive their grammar and lexicon from two different languages respectively, which could be easily explained with the relexification hypothesis. Also, Saramaccan seems to be a pidgin frozen in the middle of relexification from Portuguese to English. However, in cases of such mixed languages, as Bakker & Mous (1994) call them, there is never a one-to-one relationship between the grammar or lexicon of the mixed language and the grammar or lexicon of the language they attribute it to.
Todd (1990) attempted to postulate the relatedness of pidgins and creoles, with a lingua franca known as Sabir or Mediterranean Lingua Franca as the starting point, which was then relexified by the Portuguese and then subsequently by various other European powers.
Read more about this topic: Monogenetic Theory Of Pidgins
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