Passage2

Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following passage.

The history of the word “creole" itself dates back to the slave trade. After slaves had been gathered from many parts of Africa, they were imprisoned in West African camps, euphemistically (委婉地) called factories," for "processing before being shipped out to "markets." The managers of the factories took great care to separate slaves who spoke the same tribal language, thereby lessening the danger of revolt among slaves who could communicate with one another. And further separation on the basis of language was made by the purchasers in the New World. As a result, the only tongue the slaves had in common was a pidgin that originated in West Africa and developed in the colonies to which they were sent. These pidgins became entrenched (根深蒂固), and after a generation or two they began to expand to meet the needs of the slaves' way of life. The slaves' new language became known as creole, a French word meaning “native" which in tum was derived from Portuguese.

Nowadays "creole” refers to any language that developed from a pidgin by expansion of vocabulary and grammar and became the mother tongue for many speakers in a community. The largest center of creole languages today is undoubtedly the Caribbean area, with more than six million speakers. Several million additional people speak creoles in West Africa, South Africa, and Southeast Asia, and probably another three million people around the world use various pidgin languages. Clearly, pidgin and creole are not rare or isolated phenomena; they number more speakers today than do such languages as Dutch, Swedish, or Greek.

 What is the purpose of writing this passage?