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'Creolistics', or 'Creology' is the scientific study of the so-called creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a 'creolist'.
Creolistics investigates the relative creoleness of languages suspected to be creoles, what Edgar W. Schneider (1990) calls ''the cline of creoleness''. No consensus exists among creolists as to whether the nature of creoleness is prototypical or merely evidence indicative of a syndrome, a set of recognizable phenomena seen in association with little inherent unity and no underlying single cause. ''Creoleness'' is at the heart of the controvery opposing John McWhorter (1998) and Michael Parkvall (2001), on one hand, and Henri Wittmann (1999) and Michel DeGraff (2003, 2005), on the other. In McWhorter's definition, creoleness is a matter of degree, in that prototypical creoles exhibit all three of the traits he proposes to diagnose creoleness, whereas less prototypical ones depart somewhat from the prototype. Along these lines, McWhorter defines Haitian Creole, exhibiting all three traits, as “the most creole of creoles” (McWhorter 1998:809). A creole like Palenquero, on the other hand, would be less prototypical, given the presence of inflection to mark plural, past, gerund, and participle forms. Objections to the McWhorter-Parkvall hypotheses point out that the typological parameters of creoleness (little or no inflection, little or no tone, transparent derivation) can be found in languages such as Manding, Sooninke and Magoua French which are not stereotyped as "creole". Wittmann and DeGraff come to the conclusion that efforts to conceive a yardstick for measuring creoleness in any scientifically meaningful way have failed so far.
The answer might be that creoleness is better described and referred to as a syndrome. In some cases, the modified source language might be the substrate language when warranted by a homogeneous substrate (John Singler 1988). In other cases, the modified source language clearly is what creolists identify as the superstrate language (Wittmann 2001); and in still other cases, no single source language might be identifiable (DeGraff 2001). The same approach must be applied to identifying indiviual features as inherited or non-inherited and to distilling the defining grounds which separate creole languages from mixed languages such as Michif, especially when relexification is somehow claimed to be a moving factor (Wittmann 1973, Singler 1996, Wittmann & Fournier 1996, DeGraff 2002).
Though the call for a sane approach to creolistics goes back to Givón (1979), the first unbiased overview of the scientifically meaningful characteristics of creole languages must go to the credit of Arends, Muysken & Smith (1995). In their account of approaches to creole genesis, they group theories into four categories:
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★ ''Theories focusing on the European input''
:
★ ''Theories focusing on the non-European input''
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★ ''Gradualist and developmental hyptheses''
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★ ''Universalist approaches''
and confine Pidgins and Mixed languages into separate chapters ouside this scheme whether relexification come into the picture or not.

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Bibliography

Bibliography

★ Arends, Jacques, Muysken, Pieter & Norval Smith (1995). ''Pidgins and creoles: An introduction''. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

★ DeGraff, Michel (2001). On the origin of creoles: A Cartesian critique of Neo-Darwinian linguistics." ''Linguistic Typology'' 5:2-3.213-310.[1]

★ DeGraff, Michel (2002). "Relexification: A reevaluation." ''Linguistic Anthropology'' 44:4.321-414.[2]

★ DeGraff, Michel (2003), (2004). "Against creole exceptionalism." ''Language'' 79.391-410.[3] 80.834-839. [4]

★ DeGraff, Michel (2005). "Do creole languages constitute an exceptional typological class?" ''Revue française de linguistique appliquée'' 10:1.11-24.

★ Givón, Talmy (1979). ''Prolegomena to any sane creology.'' ''Readings in Creole Studies'', Ian Hancock (ed.), 3-35.

★ McWhorter, John H. 1998. "Identifying the creole prototype: Vindicating a typological class." ''Language'' 74.788-818.

★ Parkvall, Michael (2000). ''Out of Africa: African influences in Atlantic Creoles''. London: Battlebridge.[5]

★ Parkvall, Mikael (2001). "Creolistics and the quest for Creoleness: A reply to Claire Lefebvre." ''Journal of Pidgin & Creole Linguistics'' 16:1.147-151.

★ Schneider, Edgar W. (1990). "The cline of creoleness in English-oriented Creoles and semi-creoles of the Caribbean." ''English World-Wide'' 11.79-113.

★ Singler, John Victor (1988). "The homogeneity of the substrate as a factor in pidgin/creole genesis." ''Language'' 64.27-51.

★ Singler, John Victor (1996). "Theories of creole genesis, sociohistorical considerations, and the evaluation of evidence: The case of Haitian Creole and the Relexification Hypothesis". ''Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages'' 11:185-230.

★ Wittmann, Henri (1973). "Le joual, c'est-tu un créole?" ''La Linguistique'' 9:2.83-93.[6]

★ Wittmann, Henri (1999). "Prototype as a typological yardstick to creoleness." ''The Creolist Archives Papers On-line'', Stockholms Universitet.[7]

★ Wittmann, Henri (2001). "Lexical diffusion and the glottogenetics of creole French." CreoList debate, parts I-VI, appendixes 1-9. ''The Linguist List'', Eastern Michigan University & Wayne State University.[8]

★ Wittmann, Henri & Robert Fournier (1996). "Contraintes sur la relexification: les limites imposées dans un cadre théorique minimaliste." ''Mélanges linguistiques'', Robert Fournier (ed.), 245-80. Trois-Rivières: Presses universitaires de Trois-Rivières (''Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée'' 13).[9]