Editing Creole language (section)

===Theories focusing on non-European input===
Theories focusing on the substrate, or non-European, languages attribute similarities amongst creoles to the similarities of African substrate languages. These features are often assumed to be transferred from the substrate language to the creole or to be preserved invariant from the substrate language in the creole through a process of [[relexification]]: the substrate language replaces the native [[lexical items]] with lexical material from the superstrate language while retaining the native grammatical categories.<ref>See the article on [[relexification]] for a discussion of the controversy surrounding the retaining of substrate grammatical features through relexification.</ref> The problem with this explanation is that the postulated substrate languages differ amongst themselves and with creoles in meaningful ways. {{Harvcoltxt|Bickerton|1981}} argues that the number and diversity of African languages and the paucity of a historical record on creole genesis makes determining lexical correspondences a matter of chance. {{Harvcoltxt|Dillard|1970}} coined the term "cafeteria principle" to refer to the practice of arbitrarily attributing features of creoles to the influence of substrate African languages or assorted substandard dialects of European languages.

For a representative debate on this issue, see the contributions to {{Harvcoltxt|Mufwene|1993}}; for a more recent view, {{Harvcoltxt|Parkvall |2000}}.

Because of the sociohistoric similarities amongst many (but by no means all) of the creoles, the [[Atlantic slave trade]] and the plantation system of the European colonies have been emphasized as factors by linguists such as {{Harvcoltxt|McWhorter|1999}}.