The New York Times Walking the Talk by Michael Erard, reviewed on March 30, 2008 Most linguists approach language as just another kind of natural fact, like cells or rocks. Most of the intellectual action takes place in chairs, and it ends less often in triumphant discovery than in quiet revelation. Then there's Derek Bickerton. One of the field's old lions, he has spent the last four decades studying pidgins and Creoles and writing a few novels on the side. A self-described macho "street linguist" for whom fieldwork is part pub crawl, Bickerton has a penchant for big ideas and a "total lack of respect for the respectable" that, judging from his new memoir, has put him at odds with bureaucrats and colleagues. "Bastard Tongues" is gossipy, vain and pugilistic—in other words, all the juicy things an academic memoir should be but too rarely is. The book opens with Bickerton wading ashore on a remote Pacific island. If we discount bar stools, little of the subsequent action takes place in chairs. In fact, Bickerton always seems to be leaping out of them. After finishing his doctorate, he writes, he'd gotten all the nonsense out of the way and "could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff." With this same irresistibly headlong tone, he describes jetting off to Guyana, Hawaii, Mauritius, Suriname and elsewhere to explore his ideas about languages without pedigrees. Pidgins are contact languages invented by people who don't share a language to use. Pidgin speakers, Bickerton explains, will "use words from your language if they know them; if not, they'll use words from their own, and hope you know them, and failing that, words from any other language that might happen to be around." Some pidgins, like Chinese Pidgin English (once spoken along China's coast) or the Chinook jargon of the American Northwest, originated in voluntary trade contexts. Others arose from the slave trade and plantation economies. Compared with pidgins, Creoles have bigger vocabularies and more grammar; the conventional view is that they are pidgins that became someone's native language (though some linguists disagree). Many Creoles—like Saramaccan, an English/Portuguese Creole spoken in Suriname, and Seselwa, a French Creole spoken in the Seychelles—have more features in common (like their verbs) than you'd expect from languages that have never been in contact. Is this because they were created when English, French or Portuguese words were laid onto the same bed of grammar as African languages? Or because later generations learned both the pidgin and their parents' languages, mingling the two? Or because a pidgin was created once, perhaps in a West African slave trade outpost or by sailors, and then transmitted elsewhere? Bickerton swats down all these theories and explains how he arrived at his own solution, the language bioprogram hypothesis, which he elaborated in the book "Roots of Language" (1981). According to this idea, a pidgin becomes a Creole when children learn it, filling in the grammatical gaps with patterns and words that come not from any specific language but from some universal language template they all carry in their heads. This was an extension of Noam Chomsky's influential claim for an innate universal grammar possessed uniquely by humans. You'd expect an idea like the bioprogram hypothesis from someone with the habit of jumping out of chairs. Nailing it down, however, requires more "sitzfleisch" (literally, flesh for sitting) than Bickerton acknowledges having. Amid all the tales of partying with beautiful Brazilian graduate students and bouncing though the Colombian mountains in the back of trucks, he neglects to mention that other scholars (including some of his own students) have delivered some heavy blows to the bioprogram idea in the last decade. They're unlikely to write memoirs, however, especially ones as diverting as "Bastard Tongues." Bickerton invokes local histories, social factors and other variables to defend the bioprogram from the claim that all those grammatical bricoleurs in diapers didn't push their Creoles in the same direction. Here's where a peculiarity of Creole studies, which has rumbled in the background of the book, comes to the fore: evaluating any claim means whacking through a jungle of detail in which arguments about, say, verbs in some Dutch Creole depend on data about population crashes in Suriname in the late 17th century. Bickerton may yet be proved right, especially if some reality-TV producer or billionaire philanthropist gets behind an experiment he hatched in the late 1970s. Bickerton proposed marooning six couples speaking six different languages along with children too young to have learned their parents' language on a Pacific island for a year, to see what language the adults might figure out and how the kids might alter it. The National Science Foundation objected to the project on ethical grounds, and the experiment was not financed. Bickerton is happy to let someone else take up his idea and finally put a stop to all the "word wastage" of arguments about "how much language structure the brain can create." "I'm out of it," Bickerton writes—though the reader hardly believes his modesty. "I'll consult, if asked. ... All I care about are the results." —Michael Erard is the author of "Um ... : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean."   Los Angeles Times A linguist's search among some of the world's most unusual languages for clues to who we are by Nathaniel Rich, reviewed on March 30, 2008 Some linguistic scholars sit at home and analyze field data, others convene demographically vetted test groups, but Derek Bickerton will have none of that cautious bunk. In "Bastard Tongues," his "favorite modus operandi was simply to drive around until I saw a bar I liked the look of." Drunks, he explains, "are the world's most underrated language teaching resource." They speak slowly and with exaggerated care, they often repeat themselves, and they don't mind if you ask them the same questions over and over. He always asks whether they've heard of people speaking a "funny" dialect. Whenever he hears about some isolated village or farming community that has a funny way of talking, he heads there. As soon as he arrives, he finds a bar he likes the look of and begins his night. There is a logic behind this madness. Bickerton has made transformative discoveries about the way we acquire language by seeking out those odd-sounding tongues that mainstream scholars have long ignored, and even failed to acknowledge as distinct languages. Namely, he has devoted his life to the study of pidgins and Creoles. "Pidgin" refers to the makeshift speech that springs into existence when people who speak mutually incomprehensible languages are thrown together. This occurred frequently under colonial rule; it also happened when slaves were shipped from numerous African countries and forced to work on the same plantation. Pidgin is spoken slowly and graspingly, has no formal set of rules or consistent structure, and relies heavily on the speakers' native languages. But it doesn't last. The children of slaves, even though they grew up hearing pidgin, spoke a different language among themselves—Creole. The Creole had a stable vocabulary and a structured, complex grammar. Their parents often couldn't understand what their own children were saying. After all, they had invented a new language. "Bastard Tongues" is the story of Bickerton's effort to solve the mysteries posed by his research. How did fully formed languages emerge from the scraps of pidgin? Why could children speak Creole, but not their immigrant parents? And why did Creole languages from all over the world display numerous similarities, despite their geographical isolation from each other? The book is part memoir, part intellectual detective story and part linguistics primer. Bickerton is a spirited, clever writer, and the tripartite nature of the narrative suits him. Just as soon as we've heard a little more than necessary about academic infighting, we find ourselves in an open truck leaving Cartagena, en route to a small town whose inhabitants are rumored to speak a funny kind of Spanish; once we arrive, we're given a demonstration of linguistic principles in action; but as soon as we've heard our fill about LADs (language acquisition devices) and ASPs (aspect markers), we're in Guyana, drinking home-brewed rum. Bickerton's innovative methods don't end at the local bar, however. His book focuses on two ambitious experiments for which he was never able to receive funding—though the fact that he got very close is a testament to the persuasiveness of his enthusiasm. He proposed marooning speakers of six mutually unintelligible languages, with their young children, on a desert island for three years to see whether the children would begin speaking a language of their own. He also suggested putting South American orphans on a large estate, where they would be cared for by nannies using an artificial vocabulary of nonsense words and monitored by surveillance cameras and microphones. "Anyone else is welcome to . . . run it and take the credit for it," he says, showing some awareness of the odds of achieving funding for it. "All I care about are the results." One is convinced after reading Bickerton that the results would back up his grand theory of human speech, which he calls the "language bioprogram"—an idea that draws significantly from Noam Chomsky's theory of a "universal grammar." All human beings, Bickerton argues, are born with a sense of grammar, a universal language template. Words can vary from place to place and are bound only by the limits of human creativity and the larynx. But grammar is innate. A child needs only to hear the most rudimentary smattering of sounds—a pidgin tongue, for instance—to fashion a language out of it, set with a complex structure. This is why Creole languages bear striking similarities to each other and to the world's older, more established languages. The National Geographic Enduring Voices project estimates that there are now fewer than 7,000 languages spoken in the world, and that number is declining precipitously—one dies every two weeks. Nearly half of today's spoken languages may disappear in this century. With the languages die the cultures and knowledge contained in them, and the range of human experience narrows. Bickerton's book doesn't make these losses more acceptable, but it does illuminate a bond shared by all tongues—a vestigial connection to Babel. We can take some solace in the ease with which we can create languages out of nothing. All you need, after all, is two infants, a nanny speaking nonsense and a desert island. —Nathaniel Rich is the author of "The Mayor's Tongue" and an editor at the Paris Review.