Abstract

It has become both elusive and illusive to characterize creole vernaculars as unique based on their structures or on the nature and/or role of language contact in their emergence. If anything, their emergence is telling us loud and clear how inadequately genetic linguistics has overlooked population movements and language contact as actuators of systemic changes and language speciation. It has not underscored (sufficiently) the significance of substrate influence, systemic hybridization, and typological realignment in language speciation. Focusing on French creoles, I show that the Romance creoles are new Romance vernaculars that diverge from their lexifiers in ways similar to the divergence of the latter from Vulgar Latin. In some ways, the creoles are less divergent from their nonstandard lexifiers than the traditional Romance languages are from theirs, prompting us to factor in the significance of layers of language contact (during their longer history) in shaping the structures of neo-Latin vernaculars in Europe. Their non-rectilinear and non-unilineal evolutions also remind us of the competition that obtained among the numerous neo-Latin vernaculars within their national borders and the particular role of academies in aspiring at linguistic unity and artificially influencing their evolution. Otherwise, creole vernaculars should help us better understand how the Romance languages have evolved! And the ultimate conclusion is that creole vernaculars are far from being “bastard tongues.”