Creoles

Abstract

Creole languages are new languages, each of them with communities of L1 speakers, that have developed from adults’ second-language renditions of, usually, European languages amidst conditions of colonization and imperialism. The period in question lasted from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. This chapter discusses various aspects of creolization such as its clinal manifestation, the diachronic relationships between creoles, and especially the various theories accounting for how creole languages were born.