Media Credit: Courtesy of Yvonne Bickerton Derek Bickerton, a former Linguistics professor, has published a memior, "Bastard Tongues," which talks about his lifelong interest in the study of languages.

An English major from Cambridge with a love of adventure, Derek Bickerton answered an advertisement to teach English in Ghana in the early '60s. Soon after, he fell in love with the study of the Creole languages that he encountered there, a love that has led to a career in linguistics that has truly changed the field. Now as professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaii, Bickerton has published "Bastard Tongues," a memoir of his career as a Creolist and his Bioprogram hypothesis, which posits that there is an inherent biological capability within the human brain programmed to construct language. Bickerton, along with his longtime friend and UT professor of linguistics, Ian F. Hancock, sat down with The Daily Texan during his recent visit to Austin.

Daily Texan: Both the literary and reading entertainment communities have really enjoyed your book and received it well. How do you think the academic, and specifically the linguistic community, is responding to "Bastard Tongues"?

Derek Bickerton: I think they'll be conflicted. Some of them will get a feel for what I'm doing, but most of them will be a little upset because they don't think I take them seriously enough, and academics love to be taken seriously. I think they will say I have attitude.

DT: You talk in your book about how so many other Creolists refuse your Bioprogram theory. Why do you think that is?

DB: You know, to this day, it mystifies me. I can see the reason that some of them are anti-generativist and will reject anything that smells ever so faintly of [Noam] Chomsky. Others, I can't understand it. I honestly don't know. ... It's really the other Creolists [who reject it so adamantly], the people who should be the experts. You know what a crab barrel is? Well, this is the image used in the Caribbean to describe Caribbean politics. But I think it applies equally to Creole studies. The crabs at the bottom of the barrel want to get to the top, and the only way they can get to the top is by pulling down whoever is on top of them. I basically think that all that's going on here. Why else would you resist by denying things that to me seem so blatantly obvious that the rest of the linguistic community accepts?

Continued...

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