Defining Creole

This volume gathers the last ten years worth of published articles on creole languages and their origins by John H. McWhorter, a unique and often controversial scholar in the field. The articles fall into roughly three categories: defending his hypothesis that creole languages are synchronically distinguishable from older grammars, addressing the intersection between creole genesis and language change, and lastly countering the accepted argument that creoles' differences from their source languages (called lexifiers) are simply a matter of inflection. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of creole and pidgin studies, and lingustics more broadly.