Creoles are hybrid languages spoken in many postcolonial societies. For example, Caribbean creoles like Jamaican English "patois" and Haitian Creole French developed amidst the plantation slave trade in the 1600s. A creole is unintelligible to speakers of the very language that provides its vocabulary, because that vocabulary is used in a syntax that is partly African and partly innate. For example, in the Suriname creole Sranan, A OSO FU DEN HANSO TE is composed of English words, but only with training do we learn that it means THE HOUSE IS VERY PRETTY.

How creoles originate is hotly contested. However, one of the most influential proposals has been Derek Bickerton's, that plantation slave children created creoles spontaneously. This idea, and variations upon it, has attracted much attention to creoles and has been used to support claims about innateness of language.

However, despite its wide coverage, few creolists subscribe to the theory that creoles reflect a "language organ". Besides questions about the data this hypothesis is based on, increasing evidence suggests that Caribbean creoles were developed not on plantations by children, but by adults in West African trade settlements, and only later brought to Caribbean plantations. In this talk, I will discuss work by a small but growing number of what has been called the "third generation creolists", whose findings are increasingly pointing to the need for a major revision of creole theory.

John McWhorter is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. He did his graduate work at Stanford, and has come to Berkeley this fall after teaching for a year at Cornell. His main interests are pidgins and creoles, language change, and sociolinguistics, with a particular concentration upon Saramaccan, a creole spoken by an isolated African-American rain forest community in Suriname. His first book, TOWARDS A NEW MODEL OF CREOLE GENESIS, is due next year from Peter Lang Publishing. His other interests include performing, collecting and writing musical theatre, with a book on African-American musical theatre history in the planning stages.

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