This book presents some of my positions over the past decade regarding the development of creole vernaculars in relation to language evolution in general. The latter notion is used here to cover long-term changes observable in the structures and pragmatics of a language, as well as the not-sounusual cases where a language speciates into daughter varieties identified at times as new dialects and at others as new languages. It also covers questions of language endangerment and death.

Together, these writings reflect the growth of my scholarship on, among other things, subjects conventionally identified as “creole genesis,” secondlanguage acquisition, and genetic linguistics. They are responses to some colleagues' invitations that I propose a cogent alternative to hypotheses which I have disputed. Those responses boil down to the position that creoles are epistemologically special only by an accident of the way we have been doing linguistics, not because they have developed by any evolutionary processes that have not occurred in the developments of other languages, nor because their geneses are embedded in sociohistorical ecologies that are drastically different in kind from those in which noncreole languages have evolved, nor even because they represent any global structural type of linguistic systems. They are as natural as noncreole languages. As a matter of fact, the better we understand them, the more we should be prompted to re-examine a number of things we thought we understood well about Language.