Bastard Tongues

In nearly everything we’ve read about Derek Bickerton, writers have excitedly described him as a “trail-blazing” or “groundbreaking” linguist, which maybe gives his field a little too much credit as a swashbuckling wing of academia. We’re as much of an amateur language nut as the next nerd, but forgive us if we don’t see Bickerton as the Indiana Jones of the word.

Bickerton does, however, serve as an affable field guide to the world’s creole and pidgin languages, so-called bastard tongues thanks largely to their lack of written history and written rules, and their ancestry in several more—for lack of a better term—“mainstream” languages. As much a travelogue as a book on language, Bastard Tongues begins in Guyana, where a wet-behind-the-ears Bickerton gets his first assignment. He begins by assembling a few native speakers of Creole and soon discovers that all three speak widely differing variants of the same language. He offers some theories, and part of the fun of the book is watching him disprove his own hypotheses as he advances in the field.

Bastard Tongues’s travel writing will be its biggest selling point. Bickerton, who’s had a second career as a novelist, paints multidimensional portraits of remote areas. He writes like an enthusiastic explorer, in a style reminiscent of travel writing from another century. But the book’s politics spoke loudest to us. By traveling to places rarely visited by foreigners and investigating the language of developing countries, he often spotlights the people on the lowest socioeconomic rung of these countries. Consciously or not, Bickerton has a decolonizing effect. Creole, then, becomes not simply and intermingling of other languages—one used by the uneducated class—but rather a lively and wholly original cultural product of the rich and complex Guyanese population.