Editing Creole language (section)

====Monogenetic theory of pidgins and creoles====
The [[monogenetic theory of pidgins]] and creoles hypothesizes that all Atlantic creoles derived from a single [[Mediterranean Lingua Franca]], via a West African Pidgin Portuguese of the seventeenth century, [[relexification|relexified]] in the so-called "slave [[Factory (trading post)|factories]]"{{explain |date= January 2021}} of Western Africa that were the source of the [[Atlantic slave trade]]. This theory was originally formulated by [[Hugo Schuchardt]] in the late nineteenth century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Taylor,<ref>such as in {{Harvcoltxt|Taylor|1977}}</ref> Whinnom,<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Whinnom|1956}}, {{Harvcoltxt|Whinnom|1965}}</ref> Thompson,<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Thompson|1961}}</ref> and Stewart.<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Stewart|1962}}</ref> However, this hypothesis is now not widely accepted, since it relies on all creole-speaking slave populations being based on the same Portuguese-based creole, despite no to very little historical exposure to Portuguese for many of these populations, no strong direct evidence for this claim, and with Portuguese leaving almost no trace on the lexicon of most of them, with the similarities in grammar explainable by analogous processes of loss of inflection and grammatical forms not common to European and West African languages. For example, {{Harvcoltxt|Bickerton|1977}} points out that relexification postulates too many improbabilities and that it is unlikely that a language "could be disseminated round the entire tropical zone, to peoples of widely differing language background, and still preserve a virtually complete identity in its grammatical structure wherever it took root, despite considerable changes in its phonology and virtually complete changes in its lexicon".<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Bickerton|1977|p=62}}</ref>