The historical context of Creole languages

There are two ways in which new languages may arise: one gradual, one catastrophic. The former, probably the better known of the two, involves the progressive divergence of related dialects, a process which most frequently arises when two or more populations of speakers become isolated from one another. Such situations came about, for example, with dialects of Latin after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and with dialects of Polynesian after the diaspora that populated the islands of the Eastern and Southern Pacific. After a number of centuries, processes of lexical and morphological change and decay and the emergence of syntactic and phonological innovations may render such dialects mutually unintelligible; these processes may, of course, be intensified and speeded up by language contact with unrelated groups. At some hard-to-determine point, we may conclude that the dialects are dialects no longer, but distinct languages.

In the present chapter I shall have nothing to say about language formation of this kind, which appears to obey no particular laws and to be largely at the mercy of historical accident. Instead, I shall concentrate on the catastrophic way, one in which new languages are produced ab ovo within the space of, at most, one or two generations. This process is of interest not merely in its own right, but for the light that it can shed on the nature of language in general.