Language Starts Over—Creoles II

Creoles, as new languages, do not have the volume of frills that older ones do, but they have complexities that qualify them as “real languages.” For example, Saramaccan Creole, spoken in Suriname by descendants of runaway slaves, has multiple words for “to be” depending on shade of being and a special way of marking that an act of throwing or pushing or falling ended instead of going on indefinitely. Like real languages, creoles change over time, have dialects, and mix with other languages. Creoles are based on the innate language ability of humans: children exposed to a pidgin will expand it into a creole spontaneously, as happened in Hawaii at the turn of the 1900s.