Defining Creole (review)

In Defining Creole, John McWhorter examines what a creole language is and what linguistic creolization entails. The term creole, which has become quite popular in anthropological literature and in literary and cultural studies, is notoriously polysemous. While many scholars and activists seem to be talking about creolization in some form or another, it is not clear that they are all talking about the same thing. In this book, McWhorter sets out to delimit the definition of the term creole as it relates to language. He argues that creole languages are indeed distinct from other languages, and he endeavors to show us just how they are different.

This book is a compilation of various articles McWhorter has written, with some minor revision mainly to account for others' criticisms. He has combined these different pieces into sections that deal with three central themes; each section contains a brief introduction. The first chapter also serves as an introduction to the book, explaining not only the organization of the book but also the motivations behind its publication.

The first section of the book explores the debate in creole studies about what a creole language is. McWhorter's argument is that creole languages are natural languages, but that they are unique. He specifically defines creole languages as natural languages "documented to have been born in the middle of the second millennium amid displaced multiethnic populations and their descendants, with limited opportunity or motivation to acquire a dominant language fully" (11). As this definition indicates, McWhorter strives to define creole languages from a purely linguistic perspective, but a consideration of sociohistorical factors is also key to his understanding of what makes creole languages distinctive.

Readers familiar with creole studies will recognize some similarities between McWhorter's argument in this book and other efforts at determining the features that creole languages share that set them apart from other languages, such as Bickerton's Language Bioprogram hypothesis. Such efforts seemed successful at first, but as more began to examine other creole languages, such as those in the Pacific, it became apparent that typologies that held for some creole languages, especially Caribbean creoles, often could not account for differences found among other creoles. Thus, McWhorter notes that the most common view among creolists is that creole language have no common linguistic features and can instead only be defined based on the similar sociohistorical contexts in which they seem to have emerged.

McWhorter insists that creole languages do have shared linguistic features that make them unique and that it is important to determine them if the study of creole language is to contribute to the broader field of linguistics. He argues that he has determined several features that all creole languages share–or more precisely, features that all creole languages lack: the marking of grammatical inflexion with affixes, the use of tone for lexical or grammatical distinctions and the non-compositionality of derivational morphemes.

This shared lack of features, McWhorter argues, makes creole languages different from older natural languages, since these are all features that make creole languages "less complex" than older natural languages. By complexity he means the "ornamental elaboration" and "results from the operations of random accretion over time" (43) that other natural grammars have developed to a far greater extent than have the grammars of creole languages. He points out that this suggestion has been met with criticism, in large part from creole-speakers of African decent. As he explains, for some scholars, his hypothesis bears too much similarity to models of creole genesis that posit creoles as simple, degraded forms of their lexifier languages, often based on the racist assumption that the speakers of creole languages are somehow "simple" and thus unable to learn to speak European lexifier languages. But, McWhorter makes clear that this is not what he is proposing. He notes that creole languages are more complex than certain older languages in some respects and that they do not lack features which are common in all natural languages, and thus which appear to be necessary for effective and full...