ABSTRACT
The term 'creole' remains the major eighteenth-century Caribbean planter historians such as Edward Long and Bryan Edwards or contemporary observers such as Moreau de Saint-Mry used them to designate individuals and groups who had become nativized in the New World in the aftermath of the Columbian voyages. As Sidney Mintz, Richard Price, and Aisha Khan have pointed out, the proliferation of terms such as 'creole' and 'creolization' in the anthropological literature has been driven less by empirically grounded research than by processes of abstraction. Linguists, at least, seem prepared to acknowledge that their attempts at generalizing about the genesis and the development of creole languages stand and fall with sociolinguistic inferences impossible to draw in the absence of detailed historical data. Mintz and Price ultimately failed to make the most of their own suggestions in 'merely drawing upon creolization theory to analyze Afro-American linguistic change, but stopping short of proposing an explicitly creoles approach to other cultural formations'.
