NLPLPL 2008

There's a sislpimtic view of creoles among many socio-linguists: that they can only form under certain conditions?i.e., ~16th-19th century colonial contexts. Then they see a lot of aspects of contact linguistics from that same perspective. The fact is, contact situations and their social aspects come in all different shapes and sizes, from any period. And the shapes of their social and linguistic outcomes are still largely unpredictable.I saw somewhere recently (in a movie? or perhaps in a chapter of some book) a statement much more resembling yours, from another serious linguist (maybe just not with as big a name as John McWhorter). I think the general context was explaining why linguists are / should be rushing to document so many languages. I've seen other arguments in serious socio-linguistic works against loss of local languages to larger, more cosmopolitan languages, saying things about how there's often enough little improvement in conditions even when a whole society becomes nearly bilingual, and how a couple generations after complete loss of the language, the people who would've otherwise been speaking it regret having lost it.I also find McWhorter's statement very ethno-centric. Not all indigenous populations mistreat women, and lack of access to modern medicine and technology doesn't always do a society any good; for a traditional way of life, traditional medicine and technology usually do a decent enough job (though of course, there are gaps in any society's knowledge of medicine).Also, as a last note, in many cases it's not English killing off smaller languages, but larger local languages, even if they're not super-power languages (i.e., not just languages like Spanish, Russian, and Swahili, but even languages like Assamese).