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

by Derek Bickerton (Author) "I waded out of thigh-deep, pellucid water onto a beach of pure yellow sand..." (more)
Key Phrases: plantation creoles, original contact language, nonpunctual marker, Pidgin Hawaiian, West Africa, Pidgin English (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

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.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang (March 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809028174
• ISBN-13: 978-0809028177
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #638,115 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "To really get to the heart of something, you can't have too little training.", March 13, 2008

By	Found Highways (Las Vegas) - See all my reviews

This is the most interesting intellectual biography I've read. Bickerton's motto above helped him to wander into linguistics when he was teaching English literature in Africa, and then become one of the first scientists to discover how creole languages work.

Bickerton investigates the creole languages invented by the descendents of West Africans enslaved by European powers - - the English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch. He doesn't have the "Sitzfleisch" for library research, so he spends time in bars with the "unrighteous working class" in Columbia, Brazil, Barbados, Hawaii, Mauritius, and a dozen other places.

Bastard Tongues is a linguistic detective story. It takes Bickerton almost twenty years to find the answer to his mystery - - how creoles develop into full-fledged languages (just as complex as French or English) from the simpler contact languages (pidgins) that slaves used to communicate with their European overseers.

One of the most interesting of Bickerton's discoveries is how creoles exist on a continuum from "deeper" (almost incomprehensible to someone not a native speaker) to a level closer to the European language.

Bickerton goes into detail about how "the infernal machine" of a slave economy worked and shows how it was the nature of the slave economies in the "New World" that determined the evolution of their languages. Bickerton did as much for the field of history as linguistics. His analysis of the "expansion" and "establishment" phases of the American slave economies, and his investigation of the "maroons" - - escaped slaves, from the Spanish "cimarron," ("wild" or "runaway") is as interesting as the creole grammar.

His explanation of the TMA systems (tense, modality, aspect) in creoles will satisfy anybody who wants to get deep into interesting grammars without the academic jargon in some linguistics books. ("The difference between people and linguists is that people are interested in words and linguists are interested in grammar.")

Even if you're not overly interested in linguistics, but are interested in Hawaiin history, this book is fascinating. Sarah Roberts, one of Bickerton's students at the University of Hawaii, thought to look at court records rather than more literary sources for Hawaiin creole (or "Pidgin" with a capital P as it's called).

When Bickerton started in linguistics, there were three main theories about the origin of creoles: monogenesis (there was one ur-creole that influenced all the others), the superstrate theory (the creole mostly comes from the dominant language, say French or Portuguese), and the substrate theory (the creole mostly comes from the native language of the creole speakers (for instance, an indigenous West African language).

I never thought I'd say this in a review of a linguistics book, but SPOILER AHEAD.

Derek Bickerton showed that creole languages follow the same bioprogram that all human beings use to invent language, and that the reason creoles in the Pacific and South America resemble each other in basic grammar is because their users have the same mental equipment.

It looks like Bickerton's real intellectual leap wasn't so much in assuming creole-speaker-creators would use the same process as other kinds of language users, it was in NOTICING IN THE FIRST PLACE that the grammars of unrelated creoles were very much alike in very basic ways.
Bickerton's comparison of Saramaccan (a creole spoken in Surinam, with primarily English vocabulary) and Fa d'Ambu (the language of an island off West Central Africa with primarily Portuguese vocabulary) proves it.

Obviously, this owes something to Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar (or Steven Pinker's "language instinct"), but Bickerton doesn't get involved in nature vs. nurture or biology vs. culture arguments. One thing I like about books by British and Australian linguists is that they don't feel the need to affirm or refute Chomsky's ideas. They take what works and leave what doesn't.

Bickerton also writes about Nicaraguan Sign Language, since deaf children create the same kind of full-bodied language that speaking children do, only using the mode of gesture instead of speech. Signed languages are just as complex as spoken ones. (Anyone who's read this far in this review will enjoy Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind by Margalit Fox.)

More controversially, Bickerton proposes what linguists historically have called "The Forbidden Experiment," and which the National Science Foundation once approved for him, then cancelled. There are stories of rulers and "scientists" who supposedly isolated children without a language to see what would happen. (Fox's book Talking Hands goes into this subject as well, since that's the situation for deaf children who find themselves in a community of other deaf children, in which case they will create a basic pidgin in sign. When deaf children find themselves with others who have a basic sign language, they grammaticalize the pidgin and create a creole, a fully-formed signed language.)

I'm not as sure as Bickerton that the experiment he's proposing is a good idea, but like a lot in this book, it makes you think.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Washington Post review got it wrong, April 26, 2008

By	Justin Thyme (Montecito, CA) - See all my reviews

This book was reviewed in the NY Times, LA times and Washington Post all on the same day. For some reason, Amazon only posts the Washington Post review and not the other ones, which I think were much more accurate.

The last sentence of the Washington Post review leaves the impression that the book may be a slog for non-linguists - but I have to say the opposite is true. I know next to nothing about linguistics, but found the linguistic parts to be very understandable and informative. Most of the book is about characters, situations and little known bits of intriguing history, woven together in a compelling way. It's not often that you want to read a non-fiction book all in one go, but this book was impossible to put down.

The writer's love of travel and ideas and his genuine interest in the people and world he encounters is positively infectious. Reading the book made me want to dump my job and go back to school to start a new vocation - something Derek Bickerton himself did. Just take a look at the LookInside pages and see for yourself.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bastard Tongues, April 22, 2008

By	Shawn Rhein "avidreader" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I am not a linguist, but I thoroughly enjoyed "Bastard Tongues" written by Derek Bickerton. This book details Bickerton's adventures to out-of-the-way places around the world while studying creole and pidgin languages. It is beautifully written with such enthusiasm that it sweeps the reader along and makes it virtually impossible to put the book down.
This book is quite unique in that it is both a personal memoir and a travelogue while at the same time teaching interesting facts about pidgin and creole languages in a way that is easily understood by the layperson.
There is a lot of humor here and, all in all, I found this book to be extremely entertaining, and a worthwhile read.