It is often asserted that all languages are equal in complexity, but this has never been actually demonstrated. This presentation will be a progress report from a long-term project investigating the hypothesis that widespread non-native acquisition of a grammar significantly decreases its quotient of complexity. Pidgins and creoles represent extreme cases along these lines, but my current investigation focuses on standardized languages that contrast sharply in complexity with their sisters. In all cases examined thus far, the contrast and its historical appearance correlate with sociohistorical instances in which non-native acquisition was extreme, presumably effecting "suboptimal transmission" to a degree leaving effects perceptual even centuries afterward. I will give overviews of these findings in relation to English, Mandarin, Arabic and Persian, among other languages.

JOHN MCWHORTER, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993, after getting an MA in American Studies from New York University. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, on how the world's languages arise, change,and mix. He has also written a book on dialects and Black English, The Word on the Street. The most recent of his two books on creoles was The Missing Spanish Creoles. Beyond his work in linguistics, he is the author of Losing the Race and an anthology of race writings, Authentically Black. He is a Contributing Editor for The New Republic, and has also written on race issues for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The National Review, The Los Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, and The New York Times, and writes book reviews regularly for Books and Culture. He has appeared on Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, Talk of the Nation, Today, All Things Considered, Good Morning, America, The Jim Lehrer Newshour, and Fresh Air. His latest book is Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care.