kitchen language

While there is a negative connotation attached to the phrase "kitchen language", if this description occurred in the USA, and possibly other English speaking areas though I'm not as familiar with those, the meaning of "language facility...was limited and basic" signals to me that this has a different meaning than the rather insulting one.

In the US, where many restaurant workers are of Latin American origin, people may use the term "kitchen Spanish" to refer to their knowledge of a handful of Spanish words that they learned on the job slapped onto whatever grammar they remember from their high school Spanish class. In this case, they use the term "kitchen" because they learned it in a kitchen.

I assume this process might occur anywhere there is a large immigrant community. Having worked a lot of blue-collar, service industry jobs in my life this is actually the only form of the "kitchen language" phrase I've actually heard in real life (i.e. outside of academic articles).

Edit: I decided to look for sources related to the usage of this term that I am familiar with (again, as it is used in the US). There doesn't seem to be a lot of academic sources, which doesn't surprise me as this is a very colloquial phrase. However, there is an entire episode of a podcast dedicated to the topic. The podcast describes Kitchen Spanish as "the unique pidgin spoken among Spanish-speaking and English-speaking staff in restaurant kitchens".

I wonder if the whole idea of a kitchen language does not go back to the faulty Latin that was used, either involuntarily or on purpose for comic effect, in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In languages such as German, French or Italian and to a lesser extent English, bad Latin is or was referred to as Küchenlatein, latin de cuisine or latino di cucina respectively. Kitchen latin, not as common as dog Latin, can also be found in the OED:

• kitchen-Latin, inferior Latin, dog-Latin

An example is given, taken from Carlyle:

• Misc., Boswell's Johnson (1872) IV. 129 Some Benedictine priests, to talk kitchen-latin with.

The Enciclopedia Treccani (http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/maccheronico/) sheds some light on the origin of the phrase in its entry on Macaronic Latin:

• maccherònico (meno commune maccarònico o macarònico) aggettivo [derivato di maccherone, nell’espressione latino maccheronico, equivalente a latino di cucina, usata dagli umanisti per satireggiare il cattivo latino dei cuochi di convento].
• maccherònico, derived from maccherone, in the expression latino maccheronico, equivalent to latino di cucina [kitchen Latin], used by the humanists to satirize the bad Latin of cooks in monasteries.

By analogy and extension, the phrase, as a shared reference across various European languages, could very well be used for other languages than Latin.