All students of Creole languages are intrigued and fascinated by a remarkable fact: they are all similar. Not in the way that one would expect, that their grammars are like those of the European languages, but quite the opposite. They all have grammars that resemble each other but are very unlike the European ones. Their words may come from English or from Portuguese, and they may be found in the Caribbean or on an island in the Indian Ocean, at the opposite side of the globe; the similarities are there all the same.

One of these resemblances is found in the verbal systems. Markers suchas the ones we described above are foundin almost all Creole languages, and they work more orless in the same way in all the languages. For example, the Creoles with a French vocabulary often have a marker pe (from French après) with the same meaning and the same use as ain Nevis Creole. Sometimes the form of the marker is ap (also from après), but that makes no change to the meaning.

There are several such grammatical similarities between all or most Creole languages. How can this be? They emerged at different places and at different times, and in several cases there cannot have been any direct contact at all. The problem has given rise to a whole literature and many learned disputes.A number of theories have been proposed.

The most spectacular one is that the grammar of Creole languages is the grammar that emerges when children have to form a language of their own, without good models from the adults. Those grammatical systems would then be instances of a kind of universal grammar supposed to be innate in human beings and available in the absence of external models.A somewhat similar but less sensational idea is that the grammar of Creole languages is the type of grammar that humans can most easily understand and learn.

A completely different kind of explanation is that all Creole languages are descendants of one original pidgin language used by the Portuguese. There probably existed a widespread pidgin based on Portuguese, and it seems to have left traces in most pidgins and Creoles. For example, they almost always include the word pikin or pikanin, “small,” which stems from Portuguese pequeno or Spanish peque?o or peque?ín.

A third way to account for the similarities is to look for models in the West African languages that were the native tongues of many of the slaves.

A fourth attempt is to point out that for many of the peculiarities of Creole languages there seem to exist forerunners in the European languages, or in some of their dialects. What has been going on, then, would have been ordinary linguistic change, albeit at an accelerated speed. The Creole languages would be harbingers of the future shape of English or French. Certain French researchers have even launched the term fran?ais avan?é, “advanced French,” to denote the French-based Creole languages.

All those attempts at an explanation suffer from the weakness that they can account for some of the similarities but not forothers. There are also some striking parallels that have still other reasons. For example, the text above contains the word aks for “ask,” and this word appears in many English-based Creoles. However, it is not an innovation at all in these languages, but a dialectal variant of the English word. The first attested example is more than a thousand years old. Some of the slave-drivers have left a trace of their native dialect.

So some of the similarities turn out to have fairly trivial causes. Still, some of the parallels in grammar are very striking but can hardly have had a common origin. This means that similar grammatical devices, such as the particles corresponding to progressive form in English, must have been invented several times in different places. This must mean that those devices somehow were near at hand for the creators of the new languages.

However, the idea that this represents an innate universal grammar is not the only possible way to account for it. After all, those grammatical devices are not particularly frequent in other languages of the world. They ought to be so, if humans were genetically predisposed to use them. It is just as possible that these devices are the ones that come most naturally to people who have some knowledge both of a west European language and of one or several West African languages. If that is so, which I suspect, the problem is still very interesting, but it may not be very relevant for the study of our innate linguistic capacity.

But that is just my personal opinion, and most researchers in the field may opt for other ideas. No final solution to the problem of the similarities between Creoles seems to be in sight.