factual

Creoles Show Children Add Grammatical Structure

In colonial-era contact settings, populations from many language communities produced simple contact languages whose vocabulary was borrowed from a donor European language, but within a couple of generations — especially as children learn it — the language acquires new grammatical structure and becomes a fully-fledged Creole language.

factualpending

Speaker

N.J. Enfield

Evidence Quote

Particularly when children learn the language, they bring structure to it, new structure and within a couple of generations you get what used to be a kind of a simple contact language, quite quickly becoming what we might call a fully-fledged language

Source

203 | N.J. Enfield on Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Not ScientistsSean Carroll's Mindscape
Created: 6/13/2026, 12:18:59 AM

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