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when speakers of mutually unintelligible languages are thrown into persistent contact.
Derek Bickerton, linguist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, believes that Creoles provide
35 evidence for an innate language program. Creoles — more than a hundred are known — generally appeared
when the slave trade and European colonialism forced great numbers of people who spoke different
languages to work together.
40 Because no one, for example, spoke Haitian Creole French before 1630, nor Hawaiian Creole English
before 1880, linguists have been able to look at not only the grammatical structure of Creoles but also their
development.
Notes: [1] maroon: to abandon in a place where no one lives with no means of getting away
[2] Creole: an American or West Indian language which is a combination of a European language and one or
more others.
Typically, a community of workers would first speak a pidgin
3)
. They would use the vocabulary of their
45
bosses with part of whatever grammar, was native to them. Pidgins are makeshift, inefficient languages
with grammatical features not common to all speakers. The workers' children, however, spoke a Creole.
The children's vocabulary didn't differ from pidgin, but they used a common grammar, which, according to
50
Bickerton, is unlike any they could have heard. Remarkably, all Creoles share similar grammar.
Creoles, then, appear to solve some of the same problems tense, for example — in the same way. In
55 Hawaiian Creole English, «walk» is past tense only; «bin walk» means «had walked»; «stay walk» is
continuing action, as in «I am walking» or «I was walking», and «I bin stay walk» means — «I had been
walking.» Very similar tense systems are used in all other Creoles, whatever their vocabularies.
LINGUISTIC NEWBORNS
60
— Languages from different times, in different countries, with different vocabularies that still have
common grammatical features? How does that bear on the origin of language? According to some linguists
it doesn't. Languages spread, of course, and Creoles may have linguistic roots in the pidgins that arose as
65
early Portuguese traders travelled through West Africa. Bickerton, however, sees Creoles as linguistic
newborns, and he believes that Creole grammar reflects Chomsky's innate program for ordering language.
As Bickerton explains it, all children grow up in an environment relentlessly speaking Japanese, French,
70
English, etc. But they draw on the same innate grammar that gives rise to Creoles. Linguists have long
known that as children learn their parents' language they make certain mistakes systematically. Dan Slobin
of the University of California at Berkeley has studied children's mistakes across at least a dozen different
75
languages. When comparing their errors to Creole grammar, says Slobin, «the resemblance is striking.» For
example, many children, like creole speakers, use a negative subject with a negative verb. «Nobody don't
80
like me» a child will say; or in Guyanese Creole, «No dog did not bite no cat.» And neither child nor creole
user asks questions by changing word order; they question by intonation alone: «You can fix this?»
Notes: [3] Pidgin: a mixture of two or more languages especially as used between people who do not
speak each other's language.
CULTURAL DEMANDS
In Bickerton's scenario, then, a caveman's language would have structurally resembled a Creole.
Succeeding generations of cavemen, like the developing child, would have suited language to environment.
85
Different cultures make different demands on language. «Biological language,» says Bickerton, «remained
right where it was, while cultural language rode off in all directions.» But when culture is uprooted — the
90
slave trade, for example — our biological rules for ordering language are still at home.
Reactions to Bickerton's hypothesis are mixed. Not only might Creoles be descended from other
languages, but some linguists doubt that the child who uses a Creole qualifies as «marooned», for he still
95 grows up hearing language. And many people question Bickerton's interpretation of those grammatical
similarities.
A few linguists do believe Bickerton is on to something. «On the whole,» says John Rickford of
100 Stanford University, whose native language is Guyanese Creole, «Bickerton might 100 have his left sock
on his right foot, but in the long run I think he's going to be dressed.» Even if there is an innate component
to language, which isn't a new idea, it doesn't solve the mystery of how such a Chomsky-type program
105 arose. The origins of language remain obscured in our evolutionary past.