Derek Bickerton

Derek Bickerton (1926-2018) was a linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, best known for his studies of creole and pidgin languages and of the origins of language as a whole. His work on creoles led him to the language bioprogram hypothesis, the proposal that children who hear only an unstructured pidgin build a full grammar from an innate capacity, which became an important reference point in debates about first language acquisition and the biological basis of language. His career as a teacher and researcher was spent largely at the University of Hawaii. He died peacefully at home on March 5, 2018, aged 91, survived by his wife and children.