**1. Introduction**

While there has been some controversy since the turn of this century as to whether it is definitional to creole languages that they emerge from pidgin varieties, it is empirically documented that certain creoles have done so. Examples include the Bislamic creoles such as Tok Pisin (Mühlhaüsler 1986), the central African creole Sango (Samarin 2000), and Hawaiian Creole English (Roberts 2000). There are also traits in all creole languages beyond these that indicate ancestry either in pidginization or other degrees of the interrupted transmission of language (cf. McWhorter 2018). It is therefore possible to reconstruct structural developments typical of the pathway from pidgin to a full language.

In the tradition of previous studies such as Fischer (1978) and Meier (1984), but utilizing data and perspectives developed since, this study will compare the manifestation of six grammatical features in creoles and signed languages. The features will be six that have been widely addressed in the literature on the pathway from pidgin to creole. The goal will be to establish both parallels and contrasts between these processes in the two types of language, in order to assess which processes may be universal to the language competence and which are conditioned by the difference between the spoken and manual modalities.

The presentation will proceed upon certain assumptions about creole languages, which follow.


(General statements about creole traits are based on the author's knowledge, confirmed by consultation with the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online [ApiCS].)

**Citation:** McWhorter, John. 2022. Spoken and Sign Language Emergence: A Comparison. *Languages* 7: 184. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/languages7030184

Academic Editors: Wendy Sandler, Mark Aronoff and Carol Padden

Received: 14 February 2022 Accepted: 17 June 2022 Published: 18 July 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### **2. Word Order**

Neither creoles nor signed languages offer direct evidence of one word order being fundamental to language, either diachronically or synchronically. However, signed languages possibly lend more insight on this issue than creoles.

#### *2.1. Word Order in Creoles*

It has often been claimed that creolization yields SVO order regardless of the word orders of the source languages, with this suggesting that SVO is language's fundamental word order in, for example, Universal Grammar (cf. Bickerton 1981). An especially interesting piece of evidence for this idea is Berbice Creole Dutch, with SVO order despite its main and possibly only substrate language being the SOV African language Ijo, and even its lexifier language Dutch being partly SOV.

However, in a broader view, creoles' word order is determined considerably by the degree of contact with their source languages after genesis. For example, the Indo-Portuguese creoles have emerged with Portuguese's SVO despite the SOV order of their Indo-Aryan and Dravidian substrate languages. However, Portuguese itself has exerted heavy pressure upon many of them during their lifespans (for example, Korlai Portuguese emerged amidst Catholic religious instruction (Clements 1996)), and notably, the Korlai variety has moved towards SOV as it is increasingly used only among speakers of its substrate Marathi. These creoles have offered little indication of what a "basic" word order would be.

In the same way, Berbice Creole Dutch, for which all but no historical sources survive, may have begun as SOV but moved towards SVO under pressure from English and Guyanese Creole English over time. Similarly, the creolized version of the pidgin Chinook Jargon was SVO despite Chinook itself being VSO, but then its speakers' dominant language was English. It is sparsely discussed that Philippine Creole Spanish is VSO as are its substrate languages; however, these indigenous Philippines languages have always been spoken alongside it.

All other creoles are the product of source languages that are all (or in the case of Hawaiian Creole English, mostly) SVO. There has been properly no case in which an SOV lexifier and an SOV substrate is documented to have yielded an SVO creole. The Berbice Dutch case is closest, but besides it possibly having emerged as SOV, Dutch is SOV in embedded rather than matrix clauses, meaning that the elementary input from it would have been SVO in any case.

#### *2.2. Word Order in Signed Languages*

In contrast, signed languages' word order is obviously much less affected by spoken languages in terms of grammar, and they are often SOV in contrast to the spoken languages in their contexts. This includes Italian Sign Language (Fischer 2014), Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (Sandler et al. 2005), Nicaraguan Sign Language (Flaherty 2014), and the signed language of Providence Island (Washabaugh 1986), where hearing signers used SOV order when in daily contact with the deaf but tended more towards SVO otherwise, this being the order of the English and Spanish spoken on the island.

However, many signed languages have been argued to have SVO as their fundamental order, such as American Sign Language (henceforth ASL). Furthermore, within individual signed languages, the manual modality allows a good deal of heterogeneity in word order, depending, for example, on whether or not the object is human (Meir et al. 2017), or because of the possibility of the simultaneity of expression (e.g., of a verb and its object, or of a non-manual sign extending over the duration of the others), or agreeing verbs favoring SOV order while plain ones favor SVO (e.g., in Flemish Sign Language Vermeerbergen et al. 2007). Because of factors such as these, Bouchard and Dubuisson (1995) question whether signed languages can be analyzed as having a basic word order at all, arguing that the manual modality leaves the sequence of elements less important than in the spoken language.

#### *2.3. Implications for the Language Faculty*

However, no analyst has proposed a reason for why the manual modality would especially favor verb-finality itself, as opposed to word order heterogeneity. Given that SOV is such a common basic word order among signed languages (although hardly a universal), signed languages demonstrate, at least, that there are no grounds for an assumption that SVO order is a default setting upon which SOV is a variation (cf. Flaherty et al. 2016 for evidence that silent gesturing favors SOV). This can be taken as lending indirect but useful support to the idea of SOV as human language's diachronically original, and perhaps even synchronically fundamental, word order (cf. Givon 1971; Gell-Mann and Ruhlen 2011).
