Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages

by Derek Bickerton

Why Do Isolated Creole Languages Tend to Have Similar Grammatical Structures?

Bastard Tongues is an exciting, firsthand story of scientific discovery in an area of research close to the heart of what it means to be human--what language is, how it works, and how it passes from generation to generation, even where historical accidents have made normal transmission almost impossible. The story focuses on languages so low in the pecking order that many people don't regard them as languages at all--Creole languages spoken by descendants of slaves and indentured laborers in plantation colonies all over the world. The story is told by Derek Bickerton, who has spent more than thirty years researching these languages on four continents and developing a controversial theory that explains why they are so similar to one another. A published novelist, Bickerton (once described as "part scholar, part swashbuckling man of action") does not present his findings in the usual dry academic manner. Instead, you become a companion on his journey of discovery. You learn things as he learned them, share his disappointments and triumphs, explore the exotic locales where he worked, and meet the colorful characters he encountered along the way. The result is a unique blend of memoir, travelogue, history, and linguistics primer, appealing to anyone who has ever wondered how languages grow or what it's like to search the world for new knowledge.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Travel, Memoir

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 4, 2008

About the author

Derek Bickerton was a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a feature of the human species. He was the originator and main proponent of the language bioprogram hypothesis according to which the similarity of creoles is due to their being formed from a prior pidgin by children who all share a universal human innate grammar capacity.
Bickerton also wrote several novels. He was the father of contemporary artist Ashley Bickerton.

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this ill-conceived effort, part memoir, part a smattering of dumbed-down linguistics, Derek Bickerton has succeeded in writing a book that is likely to interest nobody, except perhaps members of his own family. I can't imagine who he, or his editors, thought would find it readable, let alone interesting.

The autobiographical stuff is an undisciplined hodgepodge, whose disjointed nature is not improved by the self-congratulatory tone that is always close to the surface. Even more tedious is his infatuation with his self-constructed rebel persona, leading him to include innumerable, not particular edifying, anecdotes of his victories over assorted academic bureaucrats. And of course his field research is invariably conducted in the seediest of local dives, home to colorful badass natives who naturally gravitate to chat with his own renegade self. A little of this kind of self-congratulatory reminiscing goes a very long way.

But what really torpedoes the book is his inclusion of a smattering of linguistic theory in almost every chapter. One imagines the author believes that he has provided enough explanation for this material to illuminate the book's overarching argument (that the development of Creoles displays enough common features, regardless of location and contact language, to provide strong evidence to support the idea that language development is innate, hard-wired, and strongly age-related). In fact, the sporadic, unconnected examples included in the book do not amount to a coherent whole, and so end up detracting from, rather than bolstering his primary argument.

I doubt this book will appeal to anyone with a background in linguistics; neither does it have much to offer the general reader. The lack of discipline that Bickerton shows in this book eliminated any desire I might have had to follow up on his ideas in his professional publications.

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the opposite of a dry, scholarly tome on linguistics, but is nevertheless very informative regarding developments in the field over the past few decades. The author weaves a discussion of linguistic discoveries and controversies into a lively memoir of his globe-trotting career studying creole languages. He relates many anecdotes and examples drawn from his fieldwork in Guyana, Hawaii, the Seychelles, and other places. According to him, this fieldwork consisted mostly of hanging out in bars and tape recording people shooting the breeze. The author's idiosyncratic and colorful voice adds to the realism of his account as well as the entertainment value; he doesn't skip over academic politics and doesn't pretend to be anything other than highly opinionated. But he also makes it clear that all this wandering and bar hopping had an important scientific purpose. Dr. Bickerton's research helped establish the similarity of the grammatical structure of creoles throughout the world, which is considered one of the strongest proofs of a "universal grammar" innate in all human beings.

[Jimmy Ele · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reads more like the diary of a linguist. Derek Bickerton takes us on a journey through his career as a linguist, researcher, and professor. The low rating of 2 stars "It Was Ok" is because I expected more from this book. I expected to read about some sort of unifying language principle that is inherent in all languages. Did I get that? No. Instead we get a linguist's journey through many hole in the wall bars in post colonial countries/states. From Hawaii to Guyana, expect the author to detail many of his experiences with the locals on his journey to find a unifying language principle. Also, when he does get to explaining some of the similar nuances between Creoles from different parts of the earth, he gets technical and speaks to the reader as if we are all PHD linguists. No, no, no, this is not how you write a book for the linguistic layman. At the end he leaves us with a linguistic revelation that is already known if you have read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature".

[Jillian · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book suffers from WHITE DUDE KNOWS BEST SYNDROME (yet he likes to rail on other people who act the same way, like the Dutch socialist government who built the housing the Surinamese immigrants lived in outside of Amsterdam). I didn't finish the last chapter because he asks, of using one-year-old orphans in a language experiment that would also affect their emotional and social growth, "Is there a genuine objection here? What about informed consent? Well, who gives informed consent for infants in orphanages? They sure don't give it themselves and there are no parents to give it for them." So, basically, babies, from poor countries, with no parents -- not real people!

[Katie M · Rating 2 out of 5]

A highly unlikeable narrator makes an otherwise good book almost unreadable. I dragged through the second half of the book when he became utterly intolerable- academia is the devil, and he, the fearless, Indiana Jones-esque linguist, dares to defy convention and show them all a thing or two! Also, liberals are the worst, and if only someone would ask a person with no training in linguistics, then the field might advance.

An interesting look at Creoles and Pidgens, a notoriously under-researched part of linguistics, but try to ignore the author's near-constant preening about how much of a brilliant rogue he is.

[Marissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

This author might have had me going, until, in the last pages he suggested that he should be allowed to conduct experiments on one-year olds as long as they were poor orphans from South America, the risk of the experiment being that a child develops no language skills in their younger years (his theory is they would indeed develop their own independent language, and somehow, easily be able to take up another language when they're done - but he could be wrong). His reasoning - "And what kind of future could a South American orphan look forward to, otherwise?" So hey, let me experiment on one year olds, otherwise they'll just go get raped in the streets?!?!? I could easily counter with "But what if one of your one-year olds was destined to meet his daddy-warbucks" because I'm not altogether convinced that his experiment would produce a child, who, at the age of four or five, wouldn't be so emotionally scarred that they could easily just go and "Pick up" another language. The whole book had a kind of arrogant tone, but the last three pages kind of put me over the edge.

[Smellsofbikes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. Bickerton talks about the basic structure of language, as shown by creole languages, which, he thinks, reflect the underlying grammar structure of the brain. His writing style is confrontational and controversial, making the book feel like a combination of Steven Pinker and Redmond O'Hanlon, and his research style is equally controversial, including a proposal to try to create an ab initio creole by putting a fair number of two-year-olds from various backgrounds together with caretakers that use only a synthetic noun-heavy system of communication, and seeing what happens in a one-year period. It has a lot of basic grammar and linguistics theory, and a good chunk of the author's personality comes through, making me think he'd be a lot of fun at a party but maybe not someone I'd want to work with. But if you have any interest in linguistics, read this book.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's interesting to read something from an author who isn't afraid to tell you he was totally wrong. It helps, I suppose, that he was able to reverse his wrongness to come up with a better theory. Bastard Tongues is a fascinating description/investigation of the formation of Creoles and pidgins. A cross between a travelogue and a dissertation, the text occasionally misses the perfect balance of information and humor, with one or two instances of thinly-veiled "I told you so"s, but overall ties together in a neat, educational package (with humor to spare: the cutlass story had me laughing for quite a while).

[Daniel M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A *very* fun read.

A romp through Bickerton’s life as a creole linguist, with tales of visiting really backwater villages in remote places—villages where they speak a “deep creole” or pidgin language. Bickerton is a real field research linguist who’s trying to understand how/why creoles develop out of pidgins. The book is full of his personal history of how he semi-accidentally backs into being an academic, his somewhat unorthodox research methods, and his history of ideas about creoles.

The book is great fun because it intertwines his stories (both field stories and academic infighting in the conferences and pages of journals) with a great deal of linguistic background knowledge that’s needed to understand what he’s fighting about. In the process, he teaches more linguistics along-the-way than I’ve learned in many linguistics classes.

The stories are fun to read, and suggest many more stories that weren’t told, but you might hear if you knew Derek. (p. 29) “My experiences provided objective evidence for something I’d subjectively known for years. Most of the Spanish I speak was learned from drunks in bars. In fact, drunks are the world’s most underrated language teaching resource. The stereotypic drunk speaker slurs his speech to the point of unintelligibility, but in real life this happens only in the final, immediate-pre-collapse phase of drunkenness. Prior to that, drunks speak slowly and with exaggerate care, because they don’t wont other people to know. Moreover, since they’re already too drunk to remember what they just said, they repeat themselves over and over and don’t mind if you do the same. If you’re gregarious and a drinker, it’s by far the easiest way to learn a new language.”

This is a book full of tales and life pretty engagingly lived. Stories of fights in the jungle, fights on the dais; there’s an overview of the history of sugar plantations and the role they play in mixing languages together from around the world.

And there’s a good deal of linguistics mixed in as well, so you come away from the book both entertained AND educated. That’s a trick more of us could do well to learn and adopt into our teaching styles.
It’s a fascinating read.

He also makes a few provocative points. P. 165 argues that sugar mill machinery was massive and the latest in machine technology, which prompted much of the development of the Industrial Revolution. Might be true, but it would have been nice to have a few references to other works that support ideas this big.

Key ideas in the book:

- pidgins are contact languages that form in-place (and not formed elsewhere then moved)

- creoles emerge from the language of the children of pidgin speakers in a single generation (the first locally born generation for whom pidgin was the only viable speech for intergroup communication)

- first generation creoles contain language structures that are not present in any of the inputs its creators received while growing up

- many creoles share linguistic structures even though they have no shared languages (e.g., French or English or Khoe) in common

- this is evidence of an underlying bioprogram at work in language creation (This last point is still open for debate by many scholars.)

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

When seventeenth-century Europeans founded sugar colonies in the Caribbean, they first cleared the land and built houses and roads. At that point, the number of black slaves was comparable to the number of whites, so the former got a chance to learn something like the language of the latter. Afterwards, the planters started cultivating the land, and for this they needed to bring a much larger number of slaves, who could outnumber the whites as much as 30 to 1. The latter group of slaves had no language in common, and they usually only got a chance to speak with the first group of slaves, and not with the whites, so they communicated in a much-broken-down form of English (or Dutch, or Spanish, or French). As every parent of a small child knows, in each generation children recreate the language of their parents, but here there was not much to recreate, so they created something anew. This is how the creole languages came into being: Haitian Creole, with 12 million speakers, Jamaican Patois, with 4 million speakers, and many more languages with hundreds of thousand or tens of thousands of speakers, mostly in the Caribbean but also in West Africa and the Hawaiian Islands. There are several interesting things about these languages. One is that depending on the speaker's social class and speech register, the speech can vary from something very close to the European language to something very far from it; the author recorded speech farthest from the standard European language from members of the "unrighteous working class." Another is that there are remarkable similarities in the grammar of all these languages: in the tense-modality-aspect system, in the article system, and in other morphological and syntactic features. Bickerton thinks that these are the "default" features of any grammar of a human language, which children create if they do not catch something else from their parents' speech. He dismisses the hypotheses that these features come from the substrata of the African languages spoken by the first slaves, because West African languages do not have them. He also dismisses the hypothesis that there was an original Afro-Portuguese contact language spoken around slave forts on the West African coast, from which all the creoles derive. There was in fact a Mediterranean sailors' language called Sabir; in Molière The Bourgeois Gentleman it is spoken by a fake Turk; but there is no evidence of a slave fort language. Even if the Afro-Portuguese language existed, the slaves did not stay in the forts long enough to pick it up, and even if they had, why would only its grammar be preserved in the creoles but not the vocabulary or the phonology?

I wonder if any linguist has ever compared the speech continuum between creoles and European languages (for example, between Haitian Creole and French) and that between the low register and the high register of Modern Hebrew. It is my understanding that their grammar is very different ("Nobody does [something]" is "af ekhad lo ose" in the former and "ish eyno ose" in the latter, is that right?).

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 5 out of 5]

My reading of Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton coincided with getting hired by the Census. It ended up being a mental preparation for the wide range of languages I might face in the field. Now nearly a year later, my review writing lines up with my husband packing for a business trip to New Orleans, a place where Creole is spoken.

Derek Bickerton's book is that perfect blend of memoir and research I crave in my nonfiction reading. I mark this book among my favorites, along with Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin and The Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson.

He begins his book with his arrival to Ngemelis Island where his first big linguistics research position. But before he jumps into what makes Ngemelis Island linguistically interesting he steps back in time to how he got interested in linguistics. Normally I would roll my eyes at an a flashback so early but in this case, the flashback belongs there. Ask any academic how they got to their chosen field of expertise and there is always a story. Bickerton's is one of the more fantastic ones.

Bickerton's story goes back to South Africa and a chance to change directions. If he was willing to study linguistics, he could transfer to Cambridge and live with a small stipend. It's the sort of story I could completely relate to and it put me in the mood to love the book.

The book is a region by region study of creoles and pijins and creoles. Bickerton looks for grammatical links between different languages for some larger human connection. Is grammar in born or a result of complex interactions? Are we reinventing the same patterns over and over again because we're programmed to? Or are we following the same pattern learned and passed down over the ages?

Bickerton has his opinions on those questions. He discusses the pros and cons of his theories in a fascinating, clearly outlined chapters interspersed with his own experiences as his linguistic career has progressed. If you are at all interested in language, you must read Bastard Tongues.

[Ensiform · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, a field linguist specializing in the development of Creoles, combines a memoir in broad strokes with an overview of his main hypothesis about Creoles. This latter boils down to an endorsement of what he calls the language bioprogram, based on Chomsky’s idea that children have an innate template that enables them to acquire (not “learn”) language. Bickerton rejects the super- and substrata theories (that Creoles are essentially dumbed down European languages, or relexified African languages, respectively) and ridicules the diffusion theory (that Creoles all came from the Caribbean, which really does seem ludicrous). He argues that the meager evidence at hand shows that colonialization perforce leads to a pidgin, which over a generation or two is transformed by children, who take its scraps and apply them via their bioprograms to a new but complex grammar, into a full Creole.

Bickerton writes in an appealing, everyday-Joe style, dismissing the snootiness of academia and speaking plainly when he disagrees with an idea. He comes off as both reasonable and amusing, though not exactly easy-going. He’s put in the legwork over the years to support his arguments, and tells anecdotes, some funny and some harrowing, of his time in Guyana and other places around the world, interviewing poor and working class peoples whose language is furthest from the rarified European strata. As a memoir, it’s far too bare-bones – I get the feeling Bickerton included that material just so the reader would know his credentials in the school of life – but as an exploration of Creole language and an introduction to Chomskyian ideas on language instinct, it’s accessible, readable, and fully informative.

[Dirk · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book after it was given to my by my friend Sargeant following a certain conversation. I started reading it out of obligation. As I should have known, that is no reason to read a book.

Bickerton argues that grammar is innate to the human brain, and that creole languages hold the key to this innate structure. If you are interested in language and you want to read a highly informal account of how it works, you may be interested in this book.

There is a lot of TMI from Bickerton's personal life to wade through here, mostly old drinking stories, also his asides concerning the habits of his colleagues and his impressions of them. The story is highly personalized, which could add appeal for some readers.

For all the casual storytelling, however, the grammatical examples are sudden and highly technical. I didn't feel like I really understood grammar any better at the end of the book, only the narrative of his discover of a grammar (still contested, I believe, by his academic peers.)

This book didn't tell me a compelling life story and it didn't give me any real understanding of grammatical structures. I did get lots of anecdotal trivia, but really I doubt that I would recommend this book to anyone.

[Cherry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is part autobiography, part interesting book about linguistics, particularly how Creoles come about. The linguistic details are very absorbing, but his message was hardly ground-breaking news. It contains a bit of history, which is necessary for understanding how the groups of people came to be together, and the dynamics that there were between them. What surprised me was not what he was saying, but what he said the objections were. If people were still arguing that creoles come from a 'proto-creole' in 2008 (when this was published) maybe he's right about how backward academics are.

The author sees himself as a champion of the 'regular guy' or the working class guy. His preferred research method includes beer, and he frequently speaks scathingly about academics and how they do things wrong because it's the way things are done, and just are wrong because, well, they're academics and have degrees in narrow-minded superiority. There's too much of this, though, so after the first few digs, it just seems like a lot of self-congratulatory smugness from an academic rogue. OK, he's a rebel. This quietens down in the second half, which is more linguistics and less auto-biography. Whew. He's still right, though.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part adventure story and part intellectual biography, this book is Derek Bickerton's labor of love, a story of an accidental journey into the world of colonial bastard tongues, feeding an intense curiosity and culminating in the man's advocacy of heretofore misunderstood Creoles and the people who speak them. As an added bonus, we get insight into humanity's innate ability to form languages, and how scant inputs have combined in remarkably similar ways across the world.

The underlying story, as well as the puzzles that Bickerton solves throughout his career, is stunning; however, the narrative isn't structured very well, and the author is occasionally better at telling us things rather than showing them, and he seems to take enormous pride in his anti-establishment attitude for its own sake.
However, if he had been part of the establishment, he would have been just another academic designing field research to confirm his own prejudices, failing to try to appreciate the Creole languages on their own terms: as living monuments to people's resilience and resourcefulness in the face of the horrors of plantation slavery.

[Candace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such an interesting book. I have always been interested in patois. I've learned a couple of Jamacian patois phrases from my friend Devon at work but I never seem to be able to get the correct inflection. The book made me see how woefully ignorant I am of the mechanics of the English languege. I know I should give myself a break - the author is a Linguist after all. The long held assumption that common language was spread through nautical jargon spoken worldwide is challenged by Bickerton through his own renegade research. I liked the way he mingled with the "real" language speakers and tried to match theory with actuality. It was not an easy book for me to get through because he seemed to assume that readers would understand the intricate mechanics of language. Not this reader! The story was so compelling that it brought me along the journey even with my linguistical deficiencies. Good story.

[Gabrielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bickerton is laboring under the illusion that people interested in creole languages will also be interested in him. He opens the book with foreshadowing so lacking in appeal or intrigue that I had no idea what he was referring to when he finally got around to explaining it, and had to go back and reread the first page. He spends page and pages detailing his career moves in the field of lingustics, discussing the lead-up to grand experiments that never got off the ground, and droning on about the thought processes and research that led him to discover some very anticlimactic points. When he's not trying to sound approachable and human, his discussion of the phrasing, grammar, and tone of creole languages quickly falls back on academic jargon and abbreviations that are explained only briefly if at all.

In the hands of a better writer there could have been something here.

[Jack Scholl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is yet more support to Steven Pinker's thesis in The Language Instinct that there is indeed genetic grounding for language. Several times in the book, Derek Bickerton offers up the details of the ideal experiment to test this notion, but it appears that modern (litigious, PC) society will be unlikely to allow such an experiment, despite its potential to improve the lives of the experiment's subject. I share few of the author's personal characteristics (much of the book dwells on his life in possibly interesting tropical places), but I can certainly agree with the details of his arguments. Read this if you want to know how a new language is created in the interface of 2 or more mutually unintelligible languages.

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening view into the world of linguistics, this researched book shows us the roots of our world's languages and explores places we never thought to look. Bickerton is a whimsical and down-to-Earth writer and thinker who wants to find the source of all Creole and Pigeon languages, for that is the only way to find the true source of all language. He travels from country to country, soaking up culture and deep Creole languages, posing as drunkards in the lowliest of bars to get at the real civilization without any code-switching going on.

Half linguistic textbook, half memoir, this is an interesting read and anyone who enjoys language will find the research fascinating.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! A linguistics book that is funny, sharp, witty, educational, and entertaining all in one. Even if you don't understand the first thing about languages and how they develop, you should give this a read. It also pairs nicely with Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind, since both deal with the way the human mind is programmed to develop a rich, full language despite any obstacles it may encounter.

[Turi Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually take a look into language books that I see - it's an interesting subject, but books about it are usually too dry for me to really get into. With Derek Bickerton's book, though, I knew I'd like it right away. He takes the reader on a tour of the world, following his career as something of a maverick linguist specializing in pidgins and creoles. There are moments where the technical linguistic aspects were over my head, but he kept them interesting and jumped right back into his story as well. Kind of reminded me of Richard Feynman, which is HIGH praise...

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I loved how Bickerton fused many anecdotes into the story to help you better understand the content. Also...word to the wise brush up on your grammar before you read this book. Luckily my mom teaches English and she had all the answers to my grammar questions, but if your mother isn't an English teacher and you didn't pay much attention in primary school, you'll be doing quite a bit of google-ing.

If your a lay person like myself and you're interested in linguistics, I'd definitely recommend this book. Happy Reading!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linguistics is a minor passion of mine, so i was excited about this "accessible" book. He spends a lot of time on discrediting colleagues and accepted theories, but also goes into the social factors that play key roles how Creole languages develop. But his true interest - experimenting to see whether children with inadequate language inputs will create robust language - is what kept me reading.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don't have to find linguistics terribly intriguing to get into this book, but it certainly helps. It reads kind of like a nonfiction book and kind of like a novel, taking us through the life of the author as he journeyed through parts of the world and parts of the linguistic academic circles. Guaranteed to make you think a little more about the language you take for granted... even if you majored in linguistics.

[Yair · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Bastard Tongues" is an interesting mix of travelogue, autobiography, linguistics primer, and inside view of the scientific discovery process. Bickerton's dry, self-deprecating humor and amusing anecdotes make it an enjoyable read, while still explaining the what motivated his studies, how he pursued his discoveries, and why they are important. Along the way he provides an insightful commentary on science, the scientific method, and modern academia.

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping to like this a lot more than I did. It delivered in the beginning with just the right mix of humor and linguistics, but the end got too jumbled with the author's personal politics. For a very promising start, the middle was all over the place, and the end was abrupt with a sickeningly sweet bow to tie it up. Still, I learned some interesting things and got to pretend that I, too, was a ground-breaking linguist, if only for a few hours.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won't lie, this book wasn't a piece of cake. There are portions that are very dense with linguistic jargon that I could only skim and barely understood at all. That being said, most of the book was extremely interesting and a quick, fun read. I also came away from this book feeling like I had learned something about world history that I didn't know before. I give it a thumbs up!

[Abraham · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Bastard Tongues" has two important things going for it: 1) The author has lived an interesting life, and 2) The theory he puts forward, to understate it, is intriguing. And since it is basically a mixture of a memoir and a soapbox for the author to explain the results of his decades of research (formal and otherwise), this book is a worthwhile read.

[Elsie]

I enjoyed his casual style of writing. I felt like I was exploring with him. The last paragraph sums it all up, refuting the idea that Creole languages are bastard languages but rather purest expression. He theorizes that we all are born with a language structure in which to fit or create whatever we are exposed to.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. I wish he could have pulled off the experiment of 6-10 families with one year old children thrown together on an island, all speaking different languages. The children would have probably come up with a full-fledged grammar using words input by the experimenters. It got nixed by some chicken shit academics. Too bad for science and lingusitics. Anybody in ESL should read this.