Judging by the pet lizards I have known, not very.<br/><br/>Oh, there are tons of pidgins (besides Tok Pisin) and creole languages (besides Créole) out there! Hundreds, I am fairly sure.<br/><br/>Sorry, my almost-hobby. If I wasn't going to be a history professor I wanted to study languages. But I am quite happy being a history professor, even if I didn't ever really learn enough of any particular language to read history texts in other languages.<br/><br/>(Yeah, that's why I stuck Linguistics on the scaly little squirt and actually put rank into it. But throughout most of history scholars have been multilingual in any case, even if all they knew was their own local tongue and "book Latin." Throughout much of the "Age of Enlightenment," it was common for European scholars to be able to speak and read in Latin, Greek, French, German and English...That was almost a standard. Later, spoken Latin and Greek gave way to being able to read and write in it, and now we have reached a point where past a certain level most disciplines have their own<em>Lingua Franca</em>(English for many fields, German for philosophy, and (surprise!) French for Egyptology. I am assured by a friend getting her doctorate in Egyptology (which is very difficult) that if you don't speak and read French, you pretty much can't do much in the field at all, because all the major papers and upcoming research journals are written in French, and 90% of what goes down at conferences and seminars is also in French.)