Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress? (Language Contact and Bilingualism

by John McWhorter

In John McWhorter`s Defining Creole anthology of 2005, his collected articles conveyed the following His hypothesis that creole languages are definable not just in the sociohistorical sense, but in the grammatical sense. His publicationssince the 1990s have argued that all languages of the world that lack a certain three traits together are creoles (i.e. born as pidgins a few hundred years ago and fleshed out into real languages). He also argued that in light of their pidgin birth, such languages are less grammatically complex than others, as the result of their recent birth as pidgins. These two claims have been highly controversial among creolists as well as other linguists. In this volume,Linguistic Simplicityand Complexity,McWhorter gathers articles he has written since then, in the wake of responses from a wide range of creolists and linguists. These articles represent a considerable divergence in direction from his earlier work.

332 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2011

About the author

John Hamilton McWhorter (Professor McWhorter uses neither his title nor his middle initial as an author) is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.

A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas