Children Who Invented a Language

In 1880, thousands of immigrants from Europe and Asia were brought to Hawaii, to work in the island's new sugar industry. The result was linguistic chaos, because the immigrants - mostly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese - could understand neither the largely English-speaking owners of the sugar plantations nor the native Hawaiians. At first, a crude pidgin English emerged as each group struggled to make an sense to the others. But by 1910 - in other words, within a single generation - a remarkably sophisticated language had developed. Now known as Hawiian Creole, the language included ready-made words from all the original languages in the islands’ mix, but it's rules of grammar bore very little resemblance to any of them. Hawaiian Creole’s astonishingly rapid evolution was studied in detail by Derek Bickerton, a professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii. And he came to the conclusion in his book, “Roots of Language”, that Hawaiian Creole had been invented entirely by children at play. Only the children could have done it, he said, because there was no time for their parents to have learnt the new language and passed it on. Indeed, he points out, their parents did not understand Hawaiian Creole when it first appeared. They had to learn it from their offspring.