The article concludes with a survey of contributions which the study of Creoles has made, or can make, to general linguistics, including language structure, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and genetic linguistics. After assessing their strengths and shortcomings, I propose ways in which the strengths can be integrated to account more accurately for the subject matter. It identifies today's major competing hypotheses (viz., the substrate, superstrate, and universalist hypotheses).
The rest of the article is devoted to various topics on the development of Creoles. I also explain why pidgins and Creoles are discussed together as a group although they are not typologically identical and their lexifiers belong in different genetic families. It does not contradict the observation that pidgins are typically spoken as non-native lingua francas with limited communicative functions, whereas Creoles are native vernaculars used for wide ranges of communicative functions. This distinction is consistent with the position that Creoles developed not from pidgins but from ancestors that were structurally closer to their colonial lexifiers.
In this article I correlate the distinction between pidgins and Creoles with two different colonization styles, viz., trade colonies for pidgins, and settlement colonies for Creoles. Mufwene, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001
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