[…] creoles were in most cases different enough from any of the languages of the original contact situation to be considered “new” languages. Superficially, their closest resemblance was to their European parent, but this was mainly because the bulk of the vocabulary items were drawn from that source, and even here, there were extensive phonological and semantic shifts. In the area of syntax, features were much less easily traceable.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.2

[…] the term creole is used to refer to any language which was once pidgin and which subsequently became a native language; some scholars have extended the term to any language, ex-pidgin or not, that has undergone massive structural change due to language contact […].
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.2

[…] I shall use the word creole to refer to languages which: 1) Arose out of a prior pidgin which had not existed for more than a generation. 2) Arose in a population where not more than 20 percent were native speakers of the dominant language and where the remaining 80 percent was composed of diverse language groups.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.4

[…] it should be apparent that the theory presented here is at an opposite pole to those who sought to derive creoles from the babyish imitations of European’s condescending simplifications and that creoles, far from being “primitive” in anything but the sense of primary, give us access to the essential bedrock on which our humanity is founded; their re-creation, in the face of what the French sociologist Roger Bastide aptly termed the “Cartesian savagery” of colonialism, represents a triumph of the human spirit […].
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.300