Creole: A search for a common language.
Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World’s Lowliest Languages, by Derek Bickerton, $26, Hill and Wang (March 2008), ISBN-10: 0809028174, ISBN-13: 978- 0809028177, pp. 288.
Linguistics might not strike most people as the most titillating subject, but in the hands of Dr. Derek Bickerton it is an entertaining and mind-expanding topic with all the drama of a treasure hunt for the Holy Grail. The professor’s work will fascinate those who revel in the intricacies of language, grammar and cultural anthropology. Those who do not should pass.
His quest is to chart the DNA of “creole” languages, the subject of two of his previous books. Bickerton, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaii, has written three other books on the roots of language and four novels. This book is told as a memoir of his journeys, interspersed with his discoveries about language, not as a typical academic report. The New York Times called it “gossipy, vain and pugilistic — in other words, all the juicy things an academic memoir should be but too rarely is.”
Bickerton took up linguistics at the suggestion of a professor he met in a faculty bar in Ghana — bars crop up a lot in this travelogue — while discussing cultural miscues in teaching English literature to local students. He was soon off to the University of Leeds in England to study. Next, he stumbled into a job as resident linguist of Guyana, then newly independent from British colonialism, to analyze the native “Creolese” language.
First, he would have to learn the language, a task he began with more imagination than experience. He consulted native educators and students only to find that few among them agreed on the “right” way to say anything. (He soon curtailed one method of inquiry, recording nocturnal conversations in bars, because he found that drinkers often overcompensated — being so guarded in their diction that unadulterated Creolese was illusive.)
