What you will get from this article
- What it means for a pidgin to become a creole
- How Nicaraguan sign language “came into being”
- Why this is used as evidence that language is an instinct, and how solid the story is
The answer first. As the last article showed, “language is everywhere” does not by itself prove an instinct. Pinker’s decider is the observation that children build a grammar richer than the material they are given. They take adults’ imperfect input and remake it into a language with full grammar. If language were only something taught by parents, this should not happen.
Pidgin and creole (pp. 32–35)
A pidgin is a makeshift jargon created for practical purposes by people with different mother tongues, arising on slave plantations and in indentured labour where there was no chance to learn one another’s languages. Its marks: choppy strings of words borrowed from the colonizers’ language, variable word order, little grammar (p. 33).
In Hawaii, the sugar boom of the late nineteenth century brought workers from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, the Philippines and elsewhere, and a pidgin developed. The linguist Bickerton recorded early immigrants’ speech in the 1970s. Here is one example.
Me cape buy, me check make.
Hearers fill in something like “I bought coffee; he made me out a check” from context (p. 34). Only words and context carry the meaning; there is no tense, no affixes, no consistent way to say who did what to whom.
But the children who grew up in Hawaii from the 1890s spoke quite differently.
Da firs japani came ran away from japan come.
This is a Hawaiian Creole sentence meaning “The first Japanese who arrived ran away from Japan to here” (p. 34). Word order and grammatical markers are standardized, and auxiliaries, prepositions and relative pronouns appear that the pidgin lacked. Pinker says the children, instead of reproducing their parents’ pidgin, injected grammatical complexity where none existed.
Not content to reproduce the fragmentary word strings, the children injected grammatical complexity where none existed before, resulting in a brand-new, richly expressive language.
The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is a creole (p. 33).
A caution
Pinker plainly says that Bickerton’s particular claims are controversial because they depend on reconstructing events decades or centuries ago (pp. 35–36). Bickerton’s view that creoles from unrelated language mixtures show uncanny resemblances is likewise a hypothesis Pinker reports.
Nicaraguan Sign Language: language arising before our eyes (pp. 36–37)
Pinker says Bickerton’s basic idea has been corroborated by two natural experiments in which creolization can be watched in real time. One involves sign language.
- Sign languages are not pantomime or gesture; they are found wherever there is a community of deaf people, each a distinct, full language, using the same kinds of grammatical machinery as spoken languages (p. 36).
- In Nicaragua, until the educational reforms of the Sandinista government in 1979, deaf people were isolated and no sign language existed. The first schools tried to drill lip-reading and speech, and failed. But on playgrounds and school buses the children invented their own signing (p. 36).
- What the early children built was a pidgin-like system (LSN), used differently by each signer and reliant on circumlocution.
- But children who entered school around age four, when LSN already existed (Pinker’s example is Mayela), signed more fluidly and compactly. This is called ISN (p. 36).
ISN has spontaneously standardized, and all young children sign it the same way. Grammatical devices absent in LSN, such as sweeping a verb from a point for the speaker to a point for the hearer to mark “from whom to whom,” appear in ISN (p. 37).
A language has been born before our eyes.
But it was the collective product of many children. Pinker goes on to say he would like to see one child adding grammatical complexity to the input received (p. 37).
The case of Simon (pp. 37–39)
A deaf child born to deaf parents learns sign language as a mother tongue. Most deaf children, however, are born to hearing parents. Meeting sign language later, they find it hard to acquire and never use it like a native.
The psycholinguists Singleton and Newport studied a nine-year-old deaf boy, “Simon.”
- His parents, deaf, had learned sign language at fifteen or sixteen, and their signing was imperfect and full of grammatical errors (p. 38).
- Simon saw only his parents’ defective signing, yet signed much better than they did. He used inflection rules almost perfectly, stacking two modifications on a verb in a fixed order (p. 39).
Pinker’s interpretation: somehow Simon shut out his parents’ “noise,” took the inflections they used inconsistently, and reinterpreted them as mandatory. Though his parents never noticed the implicit logic in their two kinds of inflections, Simon picked it up (p. 39). Pinker calls this an example of creolization.
Why is this evidence for an “instinct”?
Here is ToL’s own sorting of the above.
| Observation | Suggestion |
|---|---|
| Children build a language with more complex grammar than their parents’ pidgin | The complexity was not in the input but on the children’s side |
| Deaf children, untaught, build sign language as a group | The tendency to make language is not confined to speech |
| Simon signs better than his parents | Children extract rules from irregular input |
Pinker writes that extraordinary acts of creation do not need extraordinary circumstances like deafness or plantation Babels, and that the same kind of linguistic genius is involved every time a child learns a mother tongue (p. 39).
Cautions
- Bickerton’s theory still has supporters and critics. Pinker himself says “particular claims are controversial.”
- Later work on Nicaraguan Sign Language, and criticisms of it, are not covered here.
- These observations show that children have an ability to make language. Whether that ability is specific to language or a general learning ability needs the arguments of the following articles (children know what they were not taught; brain and genes).