Another example from South Africa is Afrikaans. It uses words that are clearly Dutch, but the underlying structure has more in common with the Bantu languages t

Another example from South Africa is Afrikaans. It uses words that are clearly Dutch, but the underlying structure has more in common with the Bantu languages that surround it. This example also shows, however, that the category of contact languages is rather fluid. Afrikaans is not an outrightly obvious example of one. While the grammar is fairly simple - and very little like that of Dutch - the vocabulary us almost exclusively Dutch. So it could be a creole - albeit one with the vocabulary almost exclusively from one of the contributing languages, which is extremely rare. But it could also be an offshoot of Dutch that had its grammar simplified and adapted to surrounding languages without picking up more than a handful of words from those same languages - which is also unusual. All this to say contact languages come in many forms - and, like the article says, should be studied because they teach us how language works.