Our Creolized Tongues

It is often assumed that creole languages represent ‘exceptional’ language development in which a contact language or a variety largely spoken by late L2 learners nativizes and becomes the main language of a community. It is therefore not uncommon that scholars of contact languages or revitalized languages (e.g., Hebrew) ask whether such languages are creoles or not. The common assumption is that so-called creoles exhibit certain specific linguistic features which distinguish them from other non-creolized languages, and which could be used as a yardstick to evaluate the status of other languages as creoles. But, what if any given language is a creolized form of a pre-existing language spoken by previous generations? In this paper, I argue that language acquisition always happens in a situation of contact comparable to creole contexts, in which learners are faced with heterogeneous inputs and recombine competing linguistic features into new linguistic items. Under this view, all natural languages involve a hybrid grammar. I further discuss how recombination leads to linguistic variation both at the learner’s and population level.