In creolist circles, there has been a long-standing debate whether creoles differ structurally from non-creole languages and thus would form a special class of languages with specific typological properties. This debate about the typological status of creole languages has severely suffered from a lack of systematic empirical study. This paper presents for the first time a number of large-scale empirical investigations of the status of creole languages as a typological class on the basis of different and well-balanced samples of creole and non-creole languages. Using statistical modeling (multiple regression) and recently developed computational tools of quantitative typology (phylogenetic trees and networks), this paper provides robust evidence that creoles indeed form a structurally distinguishable subgroup within the world’s languages. The findings thus seriously challenge approaches that hold that creole languages are structurally indistinguishable from non-creole languages.

In creolist circles, there has been a a long-standing debate whether creoles differ structurally from non-creole languages and thus would form a special class of languages with specific typological properties. This debate about the typological status of creole languages has severely suffered from a lack of systematic empirical study. This paper presents for the first time a number of large-scale empirical investigations of the status of creole languages as a typological class on the basis of different and well-balanced samples of creole and non-creole languages. Using statistical modeling (multiple regression) and recently developed computational tools of quantitative typology (phylogenetic trees and networks), this paper provides robust evidence that creoles indeed form a structurally distinguishable subgroup within the world’s languages. The findings thus seriously challenge approaches that hold that creole languages are structurally indistinguishable from non-creole languages.

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This paper deals with the issue of genetic relationships between English-based Atlantic creoles. A method borrowed from biology will be applied to a set of lexical and structural features found in the sample presented in Hancock (1987) in order to assess the degrees of affinity between these languages and their evolutionary histories. We will argue that the phylogenetic networks approach proposed here is the most suitable for the classification of creole languages. At the same time, we will show that this tool can also be used to assess the degree of radicalness of a creole, another issue which has been at the heart of creole studies.

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