Outlines three features that render creoles synchronically distinguishable from other languages, all three clear results of a break in transmission followed by a development period too brief for the traits to be undone as they have been in older languages. Shows that an expanded data set reveals flaws in the socio-historical argumentation behind…

Revised version of a paper presented at the Caribbean Linguistics Conference, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, April 1971; research assisted by a grant from the Ford Foundation for the Dialect Survey of Guyana. (DD)