Linguists, anthropologists and historians have employed the concept of 'creolization' to theorize about enslaved societies' creation of new cultures and languages in the New World. Much of what historians can take from Creole linguistics is encapsulated in the 'ecological approach' to language development coined by Salikoko Mufwene, a genetic linguist who specializes  
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[^0]:    2 Anthropologists and folklorists writing after Turner's watershed study have used his work to continue a search for Herskovits' 'Africanisms', African 'survivals' and 'retentions'. Herskovits, M. 1940, pp. 6, 7, 16, 18-20; one example of this voluminous literature is Jones-Jackson (1987).
3 Joyner's micro-study (2009) of the Creolized enslaved community on one portion, the Waccamaw Neck along the Cooper River, in the South Carolina Lowcountry, made explicit connection between linguistic and cultural creolization. Brown (2012) suggests that historians have used the concept of creolization to resolve the dualism between Africanisms and continuity vs American influences and creativity, which dates back to the debate between Melville Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier.  
Table 1. Scale of intensity of New World Africanisms
![img-9.jpeg](img_ref_10)  
Source: Edda L. Fields-Black
in the development of new languages, including Creole languages. ${ }^{4}$ Mufwene's 'ecological approach' draws on population genetics to explain the complexities of all languages, not only Creoles. Mufwene (2001, pp. xii, 21, 25, 95, 113) argues that the only thing special about so-called Creole languages is the ethnicity of their speakers; the same processes are at work in the development of all of the world's languages. On the one hand, the 'ecological approach' analyses the 'external ecology' in which languages evolve, i.e. language contact among groups,  
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[^0]:    4 Mufwene has also conducted extensive research on the Gullah Geechee language: Mufwene, 1986; Mufwene and Charles Gilman, 1987; Mufwene, 1989; Mufwene, 1991; Mufwene, 1992; Mufwene, 1994a; Mufwene, 1994b; Mufwene, 1995; Mufwene, 1997.