The most nonstandard or lowest-status dialect or variety of a language in a linguistic continuum.
From Latin 'basis' (base) + Greek 'lektos' (speech, dialect). Coined by sociolinguist Derek Bickerton in the 1970s to describe creoles and the base level of language variation.
The basilect is literally the 'base speech'—creole linguists realized that when people mix languages, the simplest, most fundamental structures emerge first, so they called it the base level of language development.
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