In John McWhorter's Defining Creole anthology of 2005 his collected articles conveyed the
following theme: His hypothesis that creole languages are definable not just in the
sociohistorical sense but in the grammatical sense. His publications since the 1990s have
argued that all languages of the world that lack a certain three traits together are creoles
(i.e. born as pidgins a few hundred years ago and fleshed out into real languages). He also
argued that in light of their pidgin birth such languages are less grammatically complex than
others as the result of their recent birth as pidgins. These two claims have been highly
controversial among creolists as well as other linguists. In this volume Linguistic Simplicity
and Complexity McWhorter gathers articles he has written since then in the wake of responses
from a wide range of creolists and linguists. These articles represent a considerable
divergence in direction from his earlier work.
