Meaning

(countable) A pidgin..

Definitions by Sense

1. (countable) A pidgin.
2. (uncountable) Unintelligible speech; gibberish, jargon.

Example Sentences

She spoke the rude French of the fishing villages, where the language lives chiefly as a baragouin, mingled often with words and forms belonging to many other tongues.

Now in almost every island the negro idiom is different. So often have some of the Antilles changed owners, moreover, that in them the negro has never been able to form a true patois. He had scarcely acquired some idea of the language of his first masters, when other rulers and another tongue were thrust upon him, and this may have occurred four or five times. The result is a baragouin that defies analysis, a totally incoherent agglomeration of speech forms, a bewildering medley, fantastic, astonishing, incomprehensible, almost weird.

[Jean-Jacques] Rousseau remained contemptuously aloof and described the language of [John] Milton as a terrible baragouin, too rude for his polite ears to decipher.

In technical parlance, [Lewis] Carroll's coined language is neither laternois, the compulsive repetition of obsessional sounds which have nothing to do with a real tongue, and which one hears, for instance, is glossolalia, nor baragouin, the imitation of the sounds of another language, but charabia, the imitation of one's own language.

In order to avoid the potential for terminological confusion signaled above, I shall hereafter refer to the baragouin attributed to Caribs as Caribbean Pidgin French.

[…] European lexifier baragouins or pidgins developed for communication between indigenous peoples and Europeans. These baragouins normally initially consisted of words taken from European languages which were pronounced and used grammatically much as indigenous words had been used in the indigenous market/trade languages from which they developed. In other words, these baragouins could be said to consist of a largely European lexicon plus largely indigenous morpho-syntax and phonology.

I am sick of signals and ciphers and secret meetings and such baragouin.

But the denser ambiguity springs from the three baragouins, fantastical languages, that are interspersed among the others. Their effect is to display the arbitrariness of linguistic convention, to show that all language, when looked at from the "outside," is baragouin.

Word Forms

• baragouins

Related Words

When Should You Use Baragouin?

Use baragouin when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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