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The article discusses the need for linguists to change their approach to teaching Creole languages in order to rectify historical biases and promote equitable inclusion. The authors developed the Mis/Underrepresented Languages: Teaching and Inclusion (MULTI) Project, which provides pedagogical resources for integrating Creole language data and expertise into linguistics courses. The project aims to amplify the voices of Creole language users and empower educators to incorporate Creole languages into their classrooms. It includes resources such as video clips of interviews with Creole users, contextualized problem sets, and a facilitation guide for incorporating these materials into curricula. The text also emphasizes the importance of diversity and inclusivity in linguistics education, particularly in relation to underrepresented languages and language varieties. [Extracted from the article]

The main objective of this paper is to test experimentally the role of convergence in language acquisition (second language acquisition specifically), with implications for creole genesis. Although there is ample evidence that similar features in languages in contact are enhanced both in second language acquisition and the creation of new languages, scholars are rarely explicit about the exact nature of that similarity and have not been in a position to observe convergence in progress. Our experiment is unique on two fronts as it is the first to use an artificial language to test the convergence hypothesis by making it observable, and it is also the first experimental study to clarify the notion of similarity by varying the levels and types of similarity that are expressed. We report an experiment with 94 English-speaking adults, designed to test how language learners acquire a new language in which the form and function (meaning) of linguistic items are either similar to or distinct from those in their L1. A miniature artificial language was created that included morphological elements to express negation and pluralization. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: congruent (form and function of novel grammatical morphemes were highly similar to those in English), reversed (negative grammatical morpheme was highly similar to that of English plural, and plural grammatical morpheme was highly similar to that of English negation), and novel (form and function were highly dissimilar to those of English). For each task, scores were entered into a one-way ANOVA with condition as the between-subjects factor. Participants in the congruent condition performed best, indicating that features that converge across form and function are learned most fully. More surprisingly, results showed that participants in the reversed condition acquired the language more readily than those in the novel condition, contrary to expectation. This experiment contributes to a more fine-grained understanding of what degree of similarity promotes acquisition and language creation and provides evidence that form-function mapping promotes learning over form or function alone; crucially, the study challenges the received assumption that acquiring features that are totally novel may be easier than acquiring “reversed” features whose form maps onto L1 but whose function is distinct from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]