As has been seen, a Creole language is not very similar to the European language it has taken most of its words from. A person who knows only standard English does not understand the language of Nevis, and vice versa. Is it a language of its own? The answers have varied.

The Creole languages emerged mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many of them are still spoken. For a long time, at least up to the end of the nineteenth century, no one who was not a speaker of a Creole language believed that they were anything else than bad English (or French, or Portuguese, etc.). Around that time a few linguists started to take an interest in these forms of speech, but systematic research did not really begin until the 1960s. Those linguists who work with description and analysis regard them as separate languages, not as forms of the European language.

The main reason is a purely linguistic one. If two forms of speech show fundamental differences in the way they denote major linguistic categories such as tense and number, the linguistic systems are very dissimilar from a linguist's point of view, even if the vocabularies are partly identical.

However, it has been proposed earlier in this book that whether a form of speech is a language of its own has to be decided by the speakers themselves. It is what they say and think about their way of speech that decides what it actually is. Often this is a question of names, for a language needs a name in order to be considered to exist. A name often does not appear until the language acquires a written form, as we have seen.

The language forms that modern researchers have identified as Creole languages are around fifty altogether. Each of them has a vocabulary based upon one of English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch. Most of them are used by fairly few people, from a few hundred up to a few hundred thousand.

In most cases we cannot be too sure about what the speakers themselves think of their form of speech, as this has by no means always been recorded by researchers. Some are obviously languages in their own right, in the view of speakers and others alike. The clearest case is Haitian, which is spoken as a native language by almost all the 6 million citizens of Haiti. It has a name of its own, there is an official orthography as well as literary works, and the language is used for instruction in elementary school. Haitian has taken its vocabulary from French, but only a small élite in Haiti uses standard French, and contacts between the two languages are comparatively insignificant; Haitian is developing in a direction of its own. Another well-established Creole language is Papiamentu, used by a few hundred thousand people on Cura?ao and neighbouring islands outside Venezuela. As a consequence of history its vocabulary stems from three European languages: Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch.

In many cases, however, the situation is quite different. Most of these speech forms are designated by such terms as “Barbadian Creole English” or “Lesser Antillean French Creole.” These names are clearly not used by the speakers but are scholarly classifications. The speakers themselves do not necessarily employ any particular name for what they speak. From several places there is evidence that they use such expressions as lingo or patois. That is, they talk about their “idiom” or “dialect” or something similar, without using any other label. Also, it is not unusual for speakers to insist that what they speak is a form of English, or French, etc.

This is to say that these forms are actually not languages in the sense that the speakers themselves think that they are independent linguistic units. The reason for this is just what one might expect. Speakers of Creole languages are to a considerable extent descendants of slaves, and they have often inherited their low status and vulnerable position. They mostly do not take pride in their language, but regard it as an inferior variant of something else that has higher rank and prestige. Often they are ashamed of speaking Creole. Neither the speakers nor their languages enjoy esteem in the societies where they live, for mostly Creole speakers do not constitute the majority, as they happen to do in Haiti and Cura?ao, but are disadvantaged minorities, and their language forms often compete with the standard language, English or French. It is also inappropriate to draw an absolute demarcation line between the standard language and the Creole, as there may be many intermediate forms.