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

A novelist, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaii and self-proclaimed “street linguist,” Bickerton chronicles his studies of creoles—the “bastard tongues” of the title—isolated languages with “dubious and disputed parentage” spoken by the lower classes. Bickerton seeks to explain creoles' linguistic anomaly: all creoles, though isolated from one another, have similar grammatical traits. This chatty, humorous memoir, laced with lucid analyses, shows how a creole initially seems to be a mishmash of nonsensical words (e.g., “She mosi de bad mek she tek he”), but is later revealed to be linguistically lush (translation: “She could only have married him because she was completely broke”). Most creoles, the author says, were created out of necessity due to the language divide that existed between imperialist states and their colonies, and Bickerton theorizes that creoles are evidence of humans' “innate language bioprogram that enables them to construct a new language out of [linguistic] bits and pieces.” Creating a multifaceted, immersive approach to the study of linguistics, Bickerton explores the miraculous human capacity for language and how the emergence of creole languages “represents a triumph of... the human spirit.” (Mar.)