Defining Creole Paperback

John McWhorter

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.

9780195166699

English

Oxford University Press

10-02-2005

444

John H. McWhorter earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University and is the author of two books on creole languages, Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis and The Missing Spanish Creoles. He has also written The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. In addition, he writes on race and culture for the New Republic and other publications and is the author of Losing the Race, Authentically Black, and Doing Your Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. He lives in New York City.

...a valuable contribution to one of the ongoing debates in the field, as it is a very articulate statement of McWhorter's controversial position on the issue of creole exceptionalism * The Year's Works in English Studies *