Looking up ‘creolization’ on any data base, or doing a search at amazon.com or simply googling the term will show that it is more widely used outside linguistics than inside – especially in anthropology, sociology, history and literary studies. Jourdan (2001: 2903) notes that the term has been borrowed from linguistics where one of its definitions is the creation of a new language out of contact between at least two different languages. Creolization in the sociocultural context usually refers to the creation of new aspects of culture as a result of contact between different cultures. This column presents some background information on ‘sociocultural creolization’ and its links with linguistic creolization. Then some of the conceived differences between the sociocultural and linguistic approaches are described. The paper concludes with implications of these differences for the field of creolistics.