Monogenesis. The monogenetic theory survives the objections, fatal to any theory of substratal influence, raised by the presence of overall creole similarities in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. However, the main positive argument in its favour was that, until recently, there was no other discernible explanation of these similarities. […] We are asked to believe that an original contact language could be disseminated round the entire tropical zone, to peoples of widely differing language background, and still preserve a virtually complete identity in its grammatical structure wherever it took root, despite considerable changes in its lexicon. We are not asked to believe that this colossal task was accomplished by a tiny minority of persons for whom the language in question was not even their native tongue, since to ask this would be to widen the credibility gap past all bridging; but a moment’s thought will suffice to convince one that monogenesis entails precisely such a belief. There was very little easterly movement of population from the supposed birthplace of the language in West Africa […] Transmission must therefore have been predominately via Portuguese seamen, merchants, and administrators in the early stages, and later on by their equivalents of other European nationalities […] in any region where they travelled, the bulk of them were transients; those who settled or had any long or meaningful contact with the regions involved could have constituted only an insignificant minority of the population that learned and used the contact language.
- Bickerton (1977), a pag.62