1. The problem of multiple substrates: The case of Jamaican Creole

In this paper, I argue that the late seventeenth-century context in which Jamaican Creole emerged was one of multilingualism within the slave population, with no evidence for a dominant substrate language. This finding goes against established scholarship, which has claimed Akan as the dominant substrate for Jamaican Creole. A creolization context involving multiple substrates calls for a different substratist research methodology than that applied to cases where dominant substrates can be shown to exist. I will argue that a comparative typological research methodology is called for.