The
language bioprogram theory or
language bioprogram hypothesis (
LBH) is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different
creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their
superstrate and
substrate languages. As articulated mostly by
Derek Bickerton,
creolization occurs when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured
pidgin; these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar. As this capacity is universal, the grammars of these new languages have many similarities.