Language bioprogram theory

The language bioprogram theory or language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages. As articulated mostly by Derek Bickerton,creolization occurs when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured pidgin; these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar. As this capacity is universal, the grammars of these new languages have many similarities.

By comparing Hawaiian Creole, Haitian Creole and Sranan, Bickerton identified twelve features which he believed to be integral to any creole:

Having analyzed these features, he believed that he was able to characterize, at least partly, the properties of innate grammar. Bickerton in his LBH, defined very precisely what he considers to be a creole: a language that has arisen out of a prior pidgin that had not existed for more than a generation and among a population where, at most, 20% were speakers of the dominant language and where the remaining 80% were linguistically diverse. Such a definition excludes many languages that might be called creoles. Moreover, lack of historical data makes it often impossible to evaluate such claims. In addition, many of the creole languages that fit this definition do not display all the twelve features, while, according to Mühlhäusler (1986), the left-out creoles often display more of them. Another problem, raised by Mufwene (1986), is that if the same bioprogram was the starting point of all creoles, one must explain the differences between them, and language diversity in general, as the bioprogram is universal.

On the other hand, Bickerton, puts emphasis on children's contribution to the development of a creole and the abrupt character of this process. For example, in Bickerton (1983), he exhibits ungrammatical utterances made by English-speaking children between the ages of two and four, and argues that they are very similar to perfectly grammatical sentences of English-based creole languages:

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