The indigenous non-European languages are the substrate which is the less dominant language in a contact situation. The European colonizers had socio-political power and their language, as the dominant language in contact situations, constitutes the superstrate. The terms are connected to the extent of socio-political power ascribed to the groups of speakers in a language contact situation. Languages involved in the formation of pidgins and creoles are also referred to as superstrate and substrate.In the context of European colonialist expansion these languages were the languages of the European colonizers and the non-European indigenous language(s) of those being ‘colonized’ around the Atlantic and in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, e.g.A Pidgin is a language variety that arises from contact between two or more languages with complementary distribution.Here are the important defining features of a pidgin language:
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