baragouin

Noun

baragouin (countable and uncountable, plural baragouins)

1. (countable) A pidgin.
   • 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.1888 April, Lafcadio Hearn, “Chita: A Memory of Last Island”, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume LXXVI, number CCCCLV, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, publishers, 327 to 335 Pearl Street...
   • 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...1888 September, Lafcadio Hearn, “A Midsummer Trip to the West Indies. … Third Paper.”, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume LXXVII, number CCCCLX, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, publishers...
   1. (historical, specifically, uncountable) A pidgin spoken by French and First Nations people in the 17th century in the region of North America now called Montreal.
      • [T]he French he uttered was such a baragouin as would not be comprehended if it were put down on paper; […]1847, G[eorge] W[illiam] Featherstonhaugh, chapter XXI, in A Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor; with an Account of the Lead and Copper Deposits in Wisconsin; of the Gold Region in the Cherokee County...
      • French and Cree have long been native languages to the Metis, and therefore are fully adapted to their traditional cultures. This situation is in marked contrast with the transitory code known as baragouin, a pidgin used by French and Indian groups in the Montreal region in the 17th century[…].1985, Patrick C. Douaud, Ethnolinguistic Profile of the Canadian Métis (National Museum of Man, Mercury Series, Paper (Canadian Ethnology Service); no. 99), [Ottawa, Ont.]: National Museums of...
2. (uncountable) Unintelligible speech; gibberish, jargon.
   • I am sick of signals and ciphers and secret meetings and such baragouin.1909, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], Roads of Destiny, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC; republished [Garden City, N.Y.]: Published by Doubleday, Page & Company for...
   • 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.1979, Alice Fiola Berry, Rabelais, Homo Logos (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures; 208), Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages...