This paper discusses the possibility of quantifying complexity in languages in general, and in creoles in particular. It argues that creoles are indeed different from non-creoles, primarily in being less complex. While this has been argued before, this is the first attempt to prove it through the use of an extensive typological database. It is noteworthy that the diff ering complexity is not related to the relative lack of morphology in creoles, since they are also simpler than analytical languages. Finally, the parallels between pidgins and creoles (and in particular the fact that languages sociologically intermediate between the two categories are also structurally intermediate) support the increasingly questioned belief that pidgins are born out of pidgins.
2023. Word prosody of African versus European-origin words in Afro-European creoles. Linguistic Typology 27:2 ► pp. 481 ff.
Andrason, Alexander
2021. Сашко-lect: The translanguaged grammar of a hyper multilingual global nomad. Part 3 – Contact languages and translanguaging. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 138:3 ► pp. 119 ff.
2013. Creole studies in the 21st century: A brief presentation of the special issue on creole languages. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 45:2 ► pp. 141 ff.
Benítez-Burraco, Antonio & Steven Moran
2024. Editorial: The adaptive value of languages: non-linguistic causes of language diversity, volume II. Frontiers in Psychology 15
Berdicevskis, Aleksandrs, Arturs Semenuks & Vera Kempe
2022. Imperfect language learning reduces morphological overspecification: Experimental evidence. PLOS ONE 17:1 ► pp. e0262876 ff.
Bisang, Walter
2015. Hidden complexity – The neglected side of complexity and its implications. Linguistics Vanguard 1:1 ► pp. 177 ff.
Blasi, Damián E., Susanne Maria Michaelis & Martin Haspelmath
2017. Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages. Nature Human Behaviour 1:10 ► pp. 723 ff.
Blaxter, Tamsin
2021. Diachronic dialectology: new methods and case studies. Transactions of the Philological Society 119:S1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Daval-Markussen, Aymeric
2013. First steps towards a typological profile of creoles. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 45:2 ► pp. 274 ff.
2021. Tense–aspect–mood marking, language-family size and the evolution of predication. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376:1824
2017. Esperanto linguistics. Language Problems and Language Planning 41:2 ► pp. 168 ff.
Danae Perez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek & Daniel Schreier
2021. English and Spanish,
Saldana, Carmen, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby & Jennifer Culbertson
2021. Is Regularization Uniform across Linguistic Levels? Comparing Learning and Production of Unconditioned Probabilistic Variation in Morphology and Word Order. Language Learning and Development 17:2 ► pp. 158 ff.
Sessarego, Sandro
2020. Not all grammatical features are robustly transmitted during the emergence of creoles. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7:1
Shcherbakova, Olena, Volker Gast, Damián E. Blasi, Hedvig Skirgård, Russell D. Gray & Simon J. Greenhill
2023. A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis: the case of nominal and verbal grammatical marking. Linguistics Vanguard 9:s1 ► pp. 155 ff.
2013. Pidgins and Creoles. In The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 301 ff.
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