Fellow QUT Creative Industries doctoral candidate Paul Holland reflects on the challenge of finding a common language to communicate to people in other areas of the creative industries – a challenge that still frustrates more than stimulates me in academia – where there is a kind of anti-pidgin at work (can someone tell me “the” meaning of discourse, affect, or even methodology, please?). But, being a CI professional type, and not a crusty curmudgeon, Paul is more positive, and carries the linguistic metaphor further:

History tells us that when cultures meet (for peaceful purposes at least) they try and find a method for dialogue. […] This produces a lingua franca or first contact language. During extended contact these few breakthrough words and phrases can become a rudimentary trade language – a pidgin – that provides a common ground for commerce of all types.

[…]

Whatever the form that may be developed out of a collaboration between (say) games developers, fashion designers and theatre directors, it may be framed in terms that do not yet exist as the collaborators find ways to describe their current practice to each other and then attempt to define this new thing they’ve built.

CI pidgins should be one of the more fascinating developments of this potential combination of disciplines, as will the creoles which I expect the next generation of CI professionals to speak.