Bastard tongues is, at heart, the story of the author’s explorations into the origins of creole languages around the world. But there is more to it. Derek Bickerton didn’t begin his academic career as a linguist. The book opens with a story from his time as a teacher of English literature in Africa. He implies that his work as a college professor was really just a way to “travel and have new experiences” (p. 4), and that is why he was in Africa. But after taking a career turn into linguistics, he became fascinated with the phenomenon of creole languages and eventually developed his own theory about how they originated. Bastard tongues places the evolution of Bickerton’s ideas about the origins of creole languages in the context of his bumpy career in academia and his travels to different parts of the globe.

Creoles appear when groups speaking two or more unrelated languages are thrown together; most of Bickerton’s examples come from areas with a history of plantations developed by Europeans in the Caribbean and Pacific islands, and in other places. The parts of Bickerton’s story likely to be of most interest to linguists are his observations on the origins of creoles, and his evolving understanding of how they might have originated. The curious fact that creoles around the globe are more similar in grammar to one another than to the languages that spawned them leads Bickerton to think that learning about the birth of creoles gives insight into the development of human languages in general. He agrees with Chomsky that humans have a universal grammar template in their brains – he calls it a “bioprogram.” Bickerton believes that the creoles all build on this template.

What makes this book different from one another scholar might have written on a similar topic is not just Bickerton’s new picture of the development of creoles. He also seems to have had the non-specialist reader in mind as his target audience. There is not much technical information in the book, and what there is Bickerton explains clearly. The book has a good index, but no list of scholarly references. In the front is a map showing “Creole Languages of the World,” with the creoles he discusses identified. The book is written in the first person. Bickerton depicts himself as a bit of a rogue in academic circles and describes some of his difficulties with university administrations. He also makes a point of describing his conversations and information gathering in working-class bars, saying he has “a taste for the low life and scatological humor” (69). Besides the appeal these dives have for him, Bickerton says that his research led him there to find the “deepest” creoles, spoken by the working classes far removed from the urban elites.