5) even claims that creoles should be seen as “the world’s simplest grammars”, since, having developed out of pidgins just a few hundred years ago, they would not have had the time to enrich their systems with the structural complexities-often resulting from long processes of grammaticalization-which appear to characterize older languages. In particular, McWhorter ( 1998) proposes a Creole Prototype, according to which a creole would be generally characterized by (1) minimal inflectional affixation (2) minimal use of tones and (3) semantically transparent derivation. On the one hand, some scholars have claimed that creoles may be classified according to their structural properties (Bickerton, 1981) or as a typological class (Bakker et al., 2011 McWhorter, 1998, 2001 Seuren and Wekker, 1986). For the past 30 years the field of contact linguistics has been characterized by a heated debate, recently labeled the Creole Debate (McWhorter, 2018a), which focuses on the structural and typological status of creole languages.
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