Derek Bickerton is emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii; with his wife Yvonne, a former actress and sex therapist and still a flamenco dancer, he lives on the North Shore of Oahu and tries not to travel anymore. He has three children—two sons, Jim, senior partner in an environmentally friendly law firm in Honolulu, Ash, a post-modern artist living in Bali, and one daughter, Julie, a former dancer with American Ballet Theater now ballet director of a dance academy in Florida—and six grandchildren, two currently in Obama's old school. He has published several novels as well as five books on language, the best known of which are Roots of Language and Language and Species. He has traveled on every continent except Antarctica and more islands than you can shake a stick at. How can you claim to be an authority when you yourself admit you've had virtually no training? A: I've had on-the-job training, the best kind. There's a lot of mystique about paper qualifications and part of the book's goal is to remove that. What would a prospective graduate student get out of reading your book? A: That you don't have to choose between an exciting life of travel and adventure and a respectable life in academia. You can have both. What would the man (or woman) in the street get out of reading your book? A: Well, I hope some entertainment along the way, but mostly the idea that you don't absolutely need a lot of paper qualifications to succeed in the world of scholarship. If there's something you care about enough, and you don't get scared or discouraged easily, you can do it. Just get to the heart of something that few other people bother with, and that will lead you anywhere you want to go. How did you, as an educated middle-class white male, manage to go into low bars and strike up conversations with uneducated working-class people of a different color? A: Very easily. All you have to do is deal with everyone as an absolute equal and show interest in people without being nosy. And just be easy and natural. Are you aware that some Creole scholars disagree strongly with what you say about the origin of these languages? A: How could I fail to be? I'm happy to debate them any time. There's one big thing my critics will never deal with--they have no explanation for why Creole languages are as alike as they are. Far more alike than anyone would expect, considering the different places and circumstances in which they began, and the countless different languages that were around when they began. How would you describe your book? Would you call it a memoir, a linguistics book, a history, a travel book or what? A: All of the above. It's a real genre-bender. There are elements of all these things, but I've tried to blend them into a whole in which the different strands will light one another up. Let me know if you think I've succeeded!