Is Manateean a Delphinic Creole?
The Manateean language, spoken by a dwindling community in tropical south Florida, has long been noted for its simple grammatical structure. Bickerton (1987) compared Manateean with other pidgins and creoles and found that it closely paralleled them in structure. The implications of this discovery for the species-specificity of the innateness hypothesis were obvious; for it, like all sensible people, we accept Bickerton’s Language Bioprogram Hypothesis as an explanation for the common structure of pidgins, then we must suppose that the bioprogram inheres not only in humans but in at least one other large mammalian species as well. On the other hand, previous work (e.g., Greystoke 1937, Link 1968) has demonstrated that the same innate structures as are found in humans do not inhere in great ape languages such as Mangani and Chimpanzee. The problem with Bickerton (1987) is that it only suggested, rather than proved, that Manateean was a creole. If it is not, then the similarity in struct
