My husband, John Holm, who has died from prostate cancer aged 72, was a creolist: he studied language varieties that used to be dismissed as “broken” English or “kitchen” English. His two-volume survey of the world’s pidgins and creoles set the agenda for a new field of linguistics, and gave life to the story of how human groups react when they meet, in war or trade or slavery.
John reported on every known variety, from the Seychelles to Russo-Norsk. He also broke the barriers that had limited English-speakers to studying English creoles, and French-speakers to French. And he insisted on the dignity of languages that were often dismissed as a catalogue of mistakes.
To do this, he brought outsiders into the academic world and nurtured postgraduates. On occasions, he saved lives by wiring cash to Central American friends menaced by people-traffickers in Mexico.
He was born in Jackson, Michigan, to James and Leah Holm, left-leaning activists involved in civil rights campaigns. His father, an electrical engineer, lit up Islamabad.
In his teens he hitchhiked out of the American Midwest to Nicaragua, where he heard Pirate English, the creole of the Caribbean coast. He was fascinated by speech that he could not understand, even though it seemed so close to his own English. Back in Michigan he studied English literature, then went to Bogotá, Colombia, to teach, returning to the US to take a second degree in teaching English as a foreign language in New York at Teachers College, Columbia University. Briefly a social worker in New York, he didn’t feel fit for the power he had over other people’s lives, but he learned from the extremes they faced.
Teaching in downtown Detroit in the 60s, in a classroom opposite the Motown building, he started to study AAVE, the “Black English” of his students; he was living downtown, too, so it was not only a classroom puzzle. He saw AAVE as a language with roots in Africa as well as England. He pointed out that saying “It red” was not leaving out a verb but using a construction common in Niger-Congo languages. The discovery was solid evidence when Black English became a political and social issue.
He took his PhD in linguistics in London, where he and I met, and went on to give the Bahamas a Dictionary of Bahamian English (1982), and to write on the English of Central America. Later on, he turned his attention to languages that do not fit the creole model: Afrikaans and Brazilian Portuguese, and Black English.
He helped found societies to bring together creolists from every country and, after a decade or so at the Graduate Center of City University New York, he went to the University of Coimbra in Portugal to help encourage the study of all the stigmatised varieties of Portuguese.
He and I married last year. He is also survived by his brother, James.
