Try to understand this advertisement for a department store in a language related to English:

Kam insait long stua bilong mepela – stua bilong salim olgeta samting-
Mipela I-ken helpim yu long kisim wanem samting yu laikim bikpela na liklik long gutpela prais.

If some of the words look strangely familiar but don’t quite make sense, read the ad aloud to yourself, concentrate on the sounds, and ignore the strange spelling. As the next step, here is the same ad rewritten with English spelling:

Come inside long store belong me-fellow –store belong sellim altogether something—me-fellow can helpim you long catchim what-name something you likim, big-fellow na liklik, long good-fellow price.

A few explanations should help you make sense of the remaining strangenesses. All the words in this text are derived from English, except for the word liklik  for “little”. The strange language has only two pure prepositions: bilong meaning “of” or “in order to,” and long meaning almost any other English preposition. The English consonant f becomes p, as in pela for “fellow”. The suffix –pela is added to monosyllabic adjectives (hence bikpela  for “big”) and also makes the singular pronoun “me” into the plural “we” (hence mepela). Na means “and”. Thus the ad means:

Come into our store –a store for selling everything—we can help you get whatever you want, big and small, at a good price.

The language of the ad is Neo-Melanasian, alias New Guinea pidgin English, which serves in Papua New Guinea (PNG) as the language not only of much conversation but also of many schools and newspapers, and much parliamentary discussion. It developed as a lingua franca for communication between New Guineans and English-speaking colonists, and among New Guineans themselves, since PNG boasts about seven-hundred native language an area similar to California’s. When I arrived in PNG and first heard Neo-Melanisian, I was scornful of it. It sounded like long-winded, grammarless baby-talk. On talking English according to my own notion of baby-talkj, I was jolted to discover that New Guineans weren’t understanding me. My assumption that Neo-Melanisian words meant the same as their English cognates lead to spectacular disasters, notably when I tried to apologize to a woman in her husband’s presence for accidentally jostling her, only to find that Neo-Melanesian pushim doesn’t mean “push,” but instead means “have sexual intercourse with”.

Neo-Melanesian proved to be as strict as English in its grammatical rules and as capable of expressing complex ideas . Its supple vocabulary is based on a modest number of core words whose meaning varies with context and becomes extended metaphorically. As an illustration, consider the derivation of banis bilong susu as the Neo-Melanesian words for “bra”. Banis, meaning “fence” comes from that English word as spoken by New Guineans who have difficulty pronouncing our consonants f  and our double consonants like nc. Susu, taken over from Malay as the word for “milk”, is extended to mean “breast,” as well. That sense, in turn, provides the expressions for “nipple” (ai [eye] bilong susu), “prepubertal girl” (i no gat susu bilong susu em), “adolescent girl” (susu iI sanap [stand up], and “aging woman” (susu i pundaun pinis [fall down finish]). Combining these two roots, banis bilong susu denotes a bra as “the fence to keep the breast in”, just as banis pik denotes pigpen  as the fence to keep pigs in.

At first, I ignorantly assumed that Meo-Melanesian was a delightful aberration among the world’s languages. It had obviously arisen in the 170 years since English ships started visiting New Guinea. I supposed that it had somehow developed from baby-talk that colonists spoke to natives they believed incapable of learning English. Only when I began working in Indonesia and learned the language did I sense that Neo-Melanesian origins exemplified a much broader phenomenon. On the surface, Indonesian is incomprehensible to an English speaker and totally unrelated to Neo-Melanesian because its vocabulary is largely Malay. Still, Indonesian reminded me of Neo-Melanesian in its word use and in the grammatical items that it possessed or lacked.

As it turns out, dozens of other languages resemble Neo-Melanesian and Indonesian in structure. Known as pidgins and creoles (I’ll explain the difference later), they have arisen independently around the globe, with vocabularies variously derived largely from English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, or Arabic. Their interest stems from the insights they may offer us into human language origins, the most challenging mystery in understanding how our species rose from animal status to become uniquely human. Linguist Derek Bickerton’s articles and his stimulating recent book, Language and Species (University of Chicago Press, 1990), have much to say on this subject and are the basis for my discussion here.

Language is what lets us communicate with one another far more precisely than can any other animals. It lets us lay joint plans, teach one another, and learn from what others experienced elsewhere or in the past. With it, we can mentally store precise representations of the world and hence encode and process information far more efficiently than can any animals. Without language we could never have conceived and built Chartes Cathedral – or the gas chambers of Auschwitz. These are the reasons for speculating that our species’ Great Leap Forward within the last hundred thousand years – that stage in human history when innovation and art at least emerged, and when modern Homo Sapiens at last replaced Neanderthals in Europe – was made possible by the emergence of spoken language.

Between human language and the vocalizations of any animal lies a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. As has been clear since the time of Darwin, the mystery of human language origins is an evolutionary problem: how was this unbridgeable gulf nevertheless bridged? If we accept that we evolved from animals lacking human speech, then our language – along with the human pelvis, tools, and art—must have evolved an become perfected with time. There must once have been intermediate languagelike stages linking monkeys’ grunts to Shakespeare’s sonnets. However, the origins of language prove harder to trace than the origins of the human pelvis, tools, and art. All those latter things may persist as fossils that we can recover and date, but the spoken word vanishes in an instant.

Fortunately, two exploding bodies of knowledge are starting to build bridges across the seemingly unbridgeable gulf, starting from each of its opposite shores. Sophisticated new studies of wild animals’ vocalizations, especially those of our primate relatives, such as vervet monkeys, constitute the bridgehead on the gulf’s animal shore (see “In the Minds of Monkeys,” by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, Natural History, September 1990). The bridgehead on the human shore has been harder to place, since all existing human languages seem infinitely advanced over animal sounds. That’s what lends such interest to Bickerton’s argument that pidgins and creoles exemplify two primitive stages on the human side of the causeway.

One difference between human language and vervet vocalizations is that we possess grammar –the variations in word order, prefixes, suffixes, and changes in word roots (like they/them/their) that modulate the sense of the roots. A second difference is that vervet vocalizations, if they constitute words at all, stand only for things with referents that one can point to or ac out, such as “eagle” or “watch out for eagle”. While our language also has words with referents (nouns, verbs, and adjectives), up to half of the words in typical human speech are purely grammatical items, with no referents. These words include prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and auxiliary verbs (such as can, may, do and should). It’s much harder to understand how grammatical terms could evolve than it is for items with referents. Given someone who understands no English, you can point to your nose to explain the noun “nose”. How, though, do you explain the meaning of by, because, the, and did to someone who knows no English? How could apes have stumbled on such grammatical terms?

Still another difference between human and vervet vocalizations is that ours possess a hierarchical structure, such that a modest number of items at each level create a larger number of items at the next level up. Our languages use many different syllables, all based on the same set of only a few dozen sounds. We assemble those syllables into thousands of words. Those words aren’t merely strung together haphazardly, but are organized into phrases, such as prepositional phrases. Those phrases, in turn, interlock to form a potentially infinite number of sentences. In contrast, vervet calls cannot be resolved into modular elements and lack even a single stage of hierarchical organization.

As children, we master all this complex structure of human language without ever learning the explicit rules that produce it. The earliest written languages of five-thousand years ago were as complex as those of today, so that human language must have achieved its modern complexity long before that. Surviving hunter-gatherers and other technologically primitive peoples speak languages as complex as the rest of us do. Little wonder that most linguists never discuss how human language  might have evolved from animal precursors.

One approach to bridging this gulf is to ask whether some people, deprived of the opportunity to hear any of our fully evolved human languages, ever spontaneously invented a primitive language. Certainly, solitary children reared in isolation, like the famous wolf-boy of Aveyron, remain virtually speechless and don’t invent or discover a language. However, a variant of the wolf-boy tragedy has occurred dozens of times in the modern world. In this variant, whole populations of children heard adults around them speaking a grossly simplified and variable form of language, somewhat similar to what children themselves speak  around the age of two. The children proceeded unconsciously to evolve their own new language, far advanced over vervet communication but simpler than normal human languages.

These new languages were the ones commonly known as creoles. They appeared especially in plantation, fort, and trading post situations, where populations speaking different languages came into contact and needed to communicate, but where social circumstances impeded the usual solution of each group learning the other’s language. Many cases throughout the tropical Americas and Australia, and on tropical islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific and Indian Oceans, involved the importing by European colonists of workers who came from afar and spoke many different tongues. Other European colonists set up forts or trading posts in already densely populated areas of China, Indonesia, or Africa.

Strong social barriers between the dominant colonists and the imported workers or local populations made the former unwilling, the latter unable, to learn the other’s language. Even if those social barriers had not existed, the workers would have had few opportunities to learn the colonists’ tongue, because workers so greatly outnumbered colonists. Conversely, the colonists would also have found it difficult to learn “the” workers’ tongue because so many different languages were often represented.

Out of the temporary linguistic chaos that followed the founding of plantations and forts, simplified but stabilized new languages emerged. Consider the evolution of Neo-Melanesian an example. After English ships began to visit Melanesian islands just east of New Guinea about 1820, the English took islanders to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland and Samoa, where workers of many language groups were thrown together. From this Babel somehow sprang the Neo-Melanesian language, whose vocabulary is 80% English, 15% Tolai (the Melanesian group that furnished many of the workers), and the rest Malay and other languages.

Linguists distinguish two stages in the emergence of the new languages: initially, the crude languages termed pidgins, then later, the more complex ones referred to as creoles. Pidgins arise as a second language for colonists and workers who speak differing native (first) languages and need to communicate with each other. Each group (colonists or workers) retains its native language for use within its own group; each group uses the pidgin to communicate woith the other group. In addition, workers on a polyglot plantation may use pidgin to communicate with other groups of workers. Compared with vervet vocalizations, even the crudest pidgins are enormously advanced in their hierarchical organization of phonemes into syllables, syllables into words, and words into word strings. Compared with normal languages, however, pidgins are greatly impoverished in their sounds, vocabulary, and syntax. A pidgin’s sounds are generally only those common to the two or more native languages thrown together. Words of early-stage pidgins consist largely of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with few or no articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, or pronouns. As for grammar, early-stage pidgins typically consist of short strings of words with little phrase construction, no regularity in word order, no subordinate clauses, and no inflectional word endings. Along with that impoverishment, variability of speech within and between individuals is a hallmark of early-stage pidgins, which approximate an anarchic linguistic free-for-all.

Pidgins that are used only casually by adults who otherwise retain their own separate native languages persist at this rudimentary level. For, example, a pidgin known as Russonorsk grew up to faciltate barter between Russiand Norwgian fishermen who encountered each other in the Arctic. That lingua franca persisted throughout the nineteenth century but never developed further, as it was used only to transact simple business during brief visits. When speaking with their compatriots, each group of fishermen spoke either Russian or Norwegian. In New Guinea, on the other hand, the pidgin gradually became more regular and complex over many generations because it was used intensively on a daily basis; nevertheless, most children of New Guinea workers continued to learn their parents’ native languages as their first language until after World War II.

Pidgins evolve rapidly into creoles whenever a generation of the groups contributing to the pidgin begins to adopt the pidgin itself as its native language. That generation then finds itself using pidgin for all social purposes, not just for discussing plantation tasks or bartering. Compared with pidgins, creoles have a larger vocabulary, a much mor complex grammar, and consistency within and between individuals. Creoles can express virtually any thought expressible in a normal language, whereas trying to say anything even slightly complex is a desperate struggle in pidgin. Somehow, without any equivalent of the Academie Francaise to lay down explicit rules, a pidgin expands and stabilizes to become a uniform and fuller language.

Creolization is a natural experiment in language evolution that has unfolded independently over much of the world. The laborers have ranged from Africans through Portuguese and Chinese to New Guineans; the dominant colonists, from the English to Spaniards to other Africans and Portuguese; and the century, from at least the seventeenth to the twentieth. The linguistic outcomes of all these independent natural experiments share many striking similarities, both in what they lack and in what they possess. On the negative side, creoles are simpler than normal languages in mostly lacking such seemingly standard grammatical items as conjugation of verbs for tense and person, declensions of nouns for case and number, most prepositions, and the passive voice of verbs. On the positive side, creoles are advanced over pidgins in many respects, including consistent word order, conjunctions, relative clauses, and auxiliary verbs to express verb moods and aspect and anterior tense. Most creoles agree in placing a sentence’s subject, verb, and object in that particular order, and also agree in the order of auxiliaries preceding the main verb and in the meaning of those auxiliaries alone and in combination.

The factors responsible for this remarkable convergence are still controversial among linguists. It’s as if you drew a dozen cards fifty times from well-shuffled decks and almost always ended up with no hearts or diamonds, but with one queen, a jack, and two aces. Derk Bickerton derived his interpretation from his studies of creolization in Hawaii, where sugar planters imported workers from China, the Phillipines, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century. Out of that linguistic chaos, and following Hawaii’s annexation by the United States in 1898, a pidgin based on English developed into a full-fledged creole. The immigrant workers themselves retained their original native language. They also learned pidgin that they heard, but they did not improve on it, despite its gross deficiencies as a medium of communication. That, however, posed a big problem for the immigrants’ Hawaii-born children. Even if the kids were lucky enough to hear a normal language at home because both mother and father were from the same ethnic group, that normal language was useless or communication with kids and adults from other ethnic groups. Many children were less fortunate and heard nothing but pidgin at home, when mother and father came from different ethnic groups. Nor did the children have adequate opportunities to learn English because of the social barriers isolating them and their worker parents from the English-speaking plantation owners. Presented with an inconsistent and impoverished model of human language in the form of pidgin, Hawaiian laborers’ children spontaneously “expanded” pidgin into a consistent and complex creole within a generation.

In the mid-1970s, Bickerton was still able to trace the history of this creolization by interviewing working-class people born in Hawaii between 1900 and 1920. Like all of is, those children soaked up language skills in their early years but then became fixed in their ways, so that in their old age their speech continued to reflect the language spoken around them in their youth. (My children, too, will soon be wondering why their father persists in saying “icebox” rather than “refrigerator,” decades after the iceboxes of my parents’ own childhood disappeared.) Hence, the old adults of various ages, whom Bickerton interviewed in the 1970s, gave him virtually frozen snapshots of various stages in Hawaii’s pidgin-to-creole transisition, depending on the subjects’ birth year. In that way, Bickerton was able to conclude that creolization had begun by 1900, was complete by 1920, and was accomplished by children in the process of their acquiring the ability to speak.

In effect, the Hawaiian children lived out a modified version of the wolf-boy story. Unlike the wolf-boy, the Hawaiian children did hear adults speaking and were able to learn words. Unlike most children, however, the Hawaiian children heard little grammatical speech, and much of what they did hear was rudimentary and inconsistent. Instead, they created their own grammar. That they did, indeed, create it, rather than somehow borrowing grammar from the language of Chinese laborers or English plantation owners, is clear from the many features of Hawaiian creole that differ from English or from the workers’ languages. The same is true for Neo-Melanesian: its vocabulary id largely English, but its grammar has many features that English lacks.

I don’t want to exaggerate the grammatical similarities among creoles by implying that they’re all essentially the same. Creoles do vary depending on the social history surrounding creolization. But many similarities remain, particularly among those creoles quickly arising  from early-stage pidgins. How did creole’s children come so quickly to agree on a grammar, and why did the children of different creoles tend to reinvent the same grammatical features again and again?

It wasn’t because they did it in the easiest or sole way possible to devise a language. For instance, creoles use prepositions (short words preceding nouns), as do English and some other languages, but there are other languages that dispense with prepositions in favor of postpositions following nouns, or else noun case endings. Again, creoles happen to resemble English in placing subject, verb, and object in that order, but borrowing from English can’t be the explanation, because creoles derived from languages with a different word order still use the subject-verb-object order.

These similarities among creoles seem instead likely to stem from a genetic blueprint that the human brain possesses for learning language during childhood. Such a blueprint has been widely assumed since the linguist Noam Chomsky argued that in the absence of any hard-wired instructions, the structure of human language is far too complex for a child to learn within just a few years. For example, at age two my twin sons were just beginning to use single words. As I write this paragraph a bare twenty months later, still several months shot of their fourth birthday, they have already mastered most rules of basic English grammar that people who immigrate to English-speaking countries as adults often fail to master after decades. Even before the age of two, my children could make sense of the initially incomprehensible babble of adult sound coming at them, recognize groupings of syllables into words, and realize which groupings constituted underlying words despite variations of pronunciation within and between adult speakers.

Such differences convinced Chomsky that children learning their first language would face an impossible task unless much of the language’s structure were already preprogrammed into them. Hence, Chomsky reasoned that we ae born with a “universal grammar” already wired into our brains to give us a spectrum of grammatical models encompassing the range of grammars in actual languages. This prewired universal grammar would be like a set of switches, each with various alternative positions. The switch positions would then become fixed to match the grammar of the local language that the growing child hears.

However, Bickerton goes further than Chomsky and concludes that we are preprogrammed not just to a universal grammar with adjustable switches but to a particular set of switch settings: the settings that surface again and again in creole grammars. The preprogrammed settings can be overridden if they conflict with what a child hears in its local language. But when a child hears no local switch settings because it grows up amid the structureless anarchy of a pidgin language, the creole settings can persist.

If Bickerton is correct and we really are preprogrammed at birth with creole settings that can be overridden by later experience, then one would expect children to learn creolelike features of their local language earlier and more easily than features conflicting with creole grammars. This reasoning might explain English-speaking children’s notorious difficulty in learning how to express negatives: they insist on ceolelike double negatives, such as “Nobody don’t have this.” The same reasoning could explain the difficulty that English-speaking childen have with word order in questions.

To pursue the latter example, English happens to be among the languages that use the creole word order of subject, verb, and object for statements: for instance, “I want juice.” Many languages, including creoles, preserve this word order in questions, which are merely distinguished by altered tone of voice (“You want juice?”). However, the English language does not treat questions in this way. Instead, our questions deviate from creole word ordr by inverting the subject and verb (“Where are you?” not “Where you are?”) or by placing the subject between an auxiliary verb (such as “do”) and the main verb (“Do you want juice?”). My wife and I have been barraging our sons from early infancy onward with grammatically correct English questions, as well as statements. My sons quickly picked up the correct order for statements, but both of them still use he incorrect creolelike order for questions, despite the hundreds of correct counterexample that my wife and I model for them each day: Today’s samples from Max and Joshua include, “Where it is?” “What that letter is?” “What the handle can do?” and “What you did with it?” It’s as if they’re not ready to accept the evidence of their ears, because they’re still convinced that their preprogrammed creolelike rules are correct.

Now let’s use these studies to assemble a coherent, if speculative, picture of how our ancestors progressed from grunts to Shakespeare’s sonnets. A well-studied early stage is represented by vervet monkeys, with at least ten different calls that are used for communication and have external referents. The single words of young toddlers, like “juice” as uttered by my son Max, constitute a next stage beyond animal grunts. But Max made a decisive advance on vervets by assembling his “juice” word from the smaller units of vowels and consonants, thereby scaling the lowest level of modular linguistic organization. A few dozen such phonetic units can be reshuffled to produce a very large number of words, such as the 142,000 words in my English desk dictionary. That principle of modular organization lets us recognize far more distinctions than vervets can. For example, they name only six types of animals, whereas we name nearly two million.

A further step toward Shakespeare is exemplified by two-year-old children, who in all human societies proceed spontaneously from a one-word to a two-word stage and then to a multiword one. But those multiword utterances are still mere word strings with little grammar, and their words are still nouns, verbs and adjectives with concrete referents. As Bickerton points out, those word strings are like the pidgins that human adults spontaneously reinvent when necessary. They also resemble the strings of symbols produced by captive apes whom we have instructed in the use of those symbols.

From pidgins to creoles, or from the word strings of two-year-olds to the complete sentences of four-year-olds, is another giant step. In that step were added words lacking external referents and serving purely grammatical functions; elements of grammar such as word order, prefixes and suffixes, and word root variation; and more levels of hierarchical organization to produce phrases and sentences. Perhaps that step is what triggered he Great Leap Forward in human innovation and art within the last hundred thousand years. Nevertheless, creole languages reinvented in modern times still give us clues to how these advances arose, through the creoles circumlocutions to express prepositions and other grammatical elements.

If you compare a Shakespeare sonnet with the Neo-Melanesian ad that introduced this piece, you might conclude that a huge gap still remains. But I’d argue that with an ad like “Kam insait long stua bilong mipela,” we have come 99.9 percent of the way from vervet calls to Shakespeare. Creoles already constitute expressive complex languages. For example, Indonesian, which arose as a  creole to become the language of conversation and government for the world’s fifth most populous country, is also a vehicle for serious literature.

Thus, animal communication and human language once seemed to be separated by an unbridgeable gulf. Now we have identified not only parts of bridges starting from both shores but also islands and bridge segments spaced across the gulf. We are beginning to understand in broad outline how the unique and important attribute that distinguishes us from animal precursors.