Michael Dirda

A linguist recounts his many adventures in pidgin and Creole.

BASTARD TONGUES

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

By Derek Bickerton

Hill and Wang. 270 pp. $26

Was it in "Mary Poppins" or "The Sound of Music" that Julie Andrews told us that a spoonful of honey helps the medicine go down? In the case of Bastard Tongues -- an often highly technical account of Creole and pidgin languages and what they reveal about the way the brain processes grammar -- linguist Derek Bickerton hopes to keep the reader engaged by structuring his book as a kind of memoir. In essence, he portrays himself as an iconoclastic British ex-pat, with a taste for liquor, low-life and good times. He reminisces with colloquial zest about his times in Africa, the Caribbean, Central America and Hawaii (where he became a tenured professor, now emeritus, at the University of Hawaii). He goes to some pains to underscore that there's nothing hoity-toity about him:

"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 exaggerated care, because they know they are drunk but don't want 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."

So long as Bickerton tells after-dinner stories about his adventures -- once a murderer fell at his feet and embraced his legs saying, "You are God!" -- the reader is reasonably happy. Wow, you can be a real scholar and get paid to hang out in dives! With a bit of chutzpah, you can blackmail your way out of an unsatisfactory academic appointment! Why, you and your entire family -- wife and three kids -- can just traipse around the world, living in vans and huts! You can even, almost to your own surprise, become one of the world's great experts on Creole languages.

Before very long, however, the reader comes to recognize that Bastard Tongues is a memoir with an ulterior motive. Bickerton is not just regaling us with anecdotes from his life and career. He wants to use these as the pegs to present the evolution of what one might call the Bickertonian thesis about the nature of pidgin and Creole languages.

According to the book's glossary, pidgin is "a much reduced form of language used when people speaking two or more mutually incomprehensible languages have to communicate with one another." Slaves and their masters typically used some kind of pidgin (the word comes the Chinese pronunciation of the English word "business"). By contrast, Creole is "a full language that emerges when children acquire a pidgin as their native language." In his text Bickerton explains both more fully. At the time he was starting out in linguistics, "a pidgin was a makeshift affair, not a full language and nobody's native tongue. Many believed it was no more than a 'reduced' or 'simplified' version of some European language; people spoke about languages being 'pidginized,' about 'Pidgin English,' 'Pidgin French,' and the like. Typically, a pidgin had a strictly limited vocabulary and little if anything in the way of grammar, while its speakers, whether African or European, were mostly adults. But then the slaves had children, and when the children learned the pidgin they somehow managed to transform it -- they 'creolized' it -- resulting in a Creole language. A Creole might not (due to its pidgin past) have the wide range of words and structures found in older languages, but it was still a full human language, able to discharge all the functions that human languages are expected to discharge. In a phrase common at the time, the Creole 'expanded' the pidgin."

Bickerton gives many example sentences from various Creoles, including a Guyanese Creole translation of Descartes's dictum, "I think, therefore I am" -- "Mi mind gi' me se me de mek me de." (Literally " 'My mind gives me that I exist' causes '(the fact that) I exist.' ") Soon, though, all but the strongest readers are likely to tire as Bickerton's arguments about creolization grow ever more detailed, technical and demanding. He himself confesses that "one of the differences between linguists and people is that people like words better than grammar and linguists like grammar better than words -- they're looking for systems, and words just aren't systematic." Before you know it, he is writing like this:

"If Creoles were produced by children from pidgin input, and if they were substantially similar wherever they were produced, it could be that the LAD [language acquisition device] contained (or even consisted of) a biologically based program, or 'bioprogram' for short -- something that would enable children receiving confused and/or inadequate linguistic input to still create a full human language."

Knowing that the reader is probably growing restive after such a sentence, Bickerton immediately tries to rescue things: "I wrote up this idea and presented it at the Creole conference we held in Hawaii in 1975. Everyone in Creole studies immediately rejected it." Nonetheless, he continues to explore its possible truth, even while examining the social contexts behind the development of pidgins and Creoles -- slavery, immigration, ethnic isolation, lack of formal schooling. What puzzles Bickerton most of all is how Creoles from around the world resemble one another in their grammar. He scorns the notion that this could be the result of diffusion -- sailors spreading languages like so many Typhoid Marys -- and finally writes:

"How was it possible for children in Hawaii to ignore all the English they were exposed to, in school and elsewhere, and acquire a Creole construction that they could never possibly have heard? Short of a desperate appeal to blind coincidence, there's only one possible explanation. The children were born with a grammar that obliged them to use finite constructions for clauses of purpose or intention, and that grammar was the same in Hawaii as it was in Suriname, despite the thousands of miles that separated them."

In other words, according to Bickerton, infants must be born with a biologically innate set of linguistic tendencies. He ends by wondering whether "two or more children together, without any access to language of any kind, could succeed in creating a language." His theory says they would, and he suggests an experiment to test it. Orphans under the age of 1 are placed in an isolated mansion in South America, but their caretakers aren't permitted to use any normal language, just an artificial vocabulary. "Words, but no grammar, no syntax . . . Hidden microphones are everywhere, and any caregiver who utters a grammatical sentence will be out of there fast. We're not interested in whether children can make up their own vocabulary. We know vocabulary can't be innate because every child that learns a different language learns a different vocabulary. We want to know if, given a basic vocabulary, children can produce regularly structured sentences without ever having heard one. We want to find out, once and for all, whether syntax comes from experience or from the human mind."

Is Bickerton right? Do human beings possess an inherited template for language? He admits that his views are still being debated, and where experts disagree, it's virtually impossible for an ordinary reader to make a conclusive judgment. Bastard Tongues does seem persuasive, but I confess to having had some real trouble in staying interested when the arguments grew tedious or over specialized: "This -- the use of the locative verb as the nonpunctual marker -- is found in a Creole more radical than those of Hawaii and Guyana, Sranan . . . where the locative verb de provides the nonpunctual marker de (usually reduced in speech to e)." To me Bickerton's thesis sounds like a fairly logical development from Noam Chomsky's theory that the deep structures of language are latent in the human brain. Be that as it may, Bastard Tongues, despite all its anecdotal zest, is likely to test the stamina of all but the most determined readers. *

Michael Dirda can be reached at mdirda@gmail.com.