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Article published In: Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 40:1 (2025) ► pp.94–121

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Empiricism against imperialism

Science, dogma and the neocolonial heritage of creole studies. Reflections on Meakins (2022)

ORCiD logo with link | Aarhus University
Published online: 17 August 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00119.bak
Abstract
Large scale typological studies have been criticized for being unscientific, biased, methodologically unsound and as perpetrating neocolonial attitudes. Meakins, Felicity. 2022. Empiricism or imperialism. The science of Creole Exceptionalism. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 37(1). 189–203. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar echoes these views in her first JPCL column. The conclusions of all studies using large typological datasets, however, point in the direction that creoles do have structural properties that distinguish them from their lexifiers and the languages of the world, including a dozen not mentioned in Meakins’ column. Opponents use data that are a factor of thousand less extensive, yet apparently more credible. Creoles developed in adverse circumstances, and the flexibility of human genius led to new structural properties, apparently shared across the world. The opposite view, that creoles are continuations of their lexifiers, runs the risk of justifying colonialism, as if forced deportation, blackbirding, slavery, imperialism and colonialism could not have had catastrophic consequences for the continuation of languages. Devastating sociohistorical circumstances led to the creation of new societies, and human ingenuity created their fully-fledged natural languages.
Article outline
  • Creoles are normal languages
  • Creoles are a socio-historical category indeed – But with linguistic consequences
  • Language change and development
  • Cognitive unity: Creoles and their linguistic properties
    • Meakins’ column
    • Errors in data?
    • Is scoring easy?
  • Creoles as the result of coercion and displacement of people or of peaceful continuity?
  • Is there anything wrong with analytic languages?
  • Do people want to learn the language of their colonizers?
  • Creativity in creole creation
  • Race against the tide
  • Simplicity and complexity
  • Massive datasets or one creole as example?
  • Others with the same results
    • Is Bakker unscientific and are the others good scientists?
  • Dogmatism
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (40)
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Rüter, Lara & Ingo Plag
2025. Measuring the similarity between languages. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages DOI logo

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