jargon

jargon, in colonial history, an unstable rudimentary hybrid language used as a means of communication between persons having no other language in common. Although the term was long synonymous with pidgin—as can be seen by the use of jargon in the names of such pidgins as Chinook Jargon and Mobilian Jargon—in the 1980s some linguists began restricting its use to denote pre-pidgins, or early developmental forms of pidgins. Nonlinguists more commonly define jargon as the...