Language Starts Over—Signs of the New

Many linguists have argued that because creoles are real languages, they are not even identifiable as different from older languages unless we know their history. But in fact, creoles are the only languages that lack, or have very little of, the grammatical traits that emerge only over time. No creole marks shades of possession regularly, has gender markers distinguishing tables from chairs on the basis of sex, or has more than a little of the irregularities that bedevil us in learning older languages. In all of this, creole grammars are the closest to what the grammar of the first language was probably like.