SLA AND THE EMERGENCE OF CREOLES

Although the emergence of creoles presupposes naturalistic SLA, cur-rent SLA scholarship does not shed much light on the development of creoles with regard to the population-internal mechanisms that pro-duce normalization and autonomization from the creoles ’ lexifi ers. This is largely due to the fact that research on SLA is focused on individuals rather than on communities of speakers producing their own separate norms, whereas genetic creolistics deals precisely with this particular aspect of language change and speciation. It is not enough to prove that transfer from the fi rst to the second language is possible and can evolve into substrate infl uence on the emergent vernaculars—transfer is not ineluctable and varies from one learner to another. Additionally, how and why particular features of some speakers spread to a whole population (or to parts thereof), whereas others do not, must be ac-counted for. Consistent with colonial socioeconomic history, the gradual emergence of creoles suggests a complex evolution that canno