Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

1. Introduction -- 2. Key concepts in the history of creole studies -- 3. Phylogenetics in biology and linguistics -- 4. Methods -- 5. Creole typology I -- 6. Creole typology II -- 7. West African languages and creoles worldwide -- 8. The typology and classification of French-based creoles -- 9. The simple emerging from the complex -- 10. Dutch creoles compared with their lexifier -- 11. Similarities and differences among Iberian creoles -- 12. Afro-Hispanic varieties in comparison -- 13. Cognitive creolistics and semantic primes -- 14. Lexicalization patterns in core vocabulary -- 15. The semantics of Englishes and Creoles -- 16. Feature pools show that creoles are distinct languages due to their special origin -- 17. Complementing creole studies with phylogenetics -- 18. From basic to cultural semantics -- 19. Linguistics and evolutionary biology continue to cross-fertilize each other and may do so even more in the future, including in the field of creolistics.

This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the " creole" concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

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