Is English a "creole language"?
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The first two panels of today's SMBC:
The rest of the strip:
The AfterComic:
The mouseover title: "Hoping the Welsh isn't lol."
The premise seems to be that King Arthur has arisen again, to deal with socio-economic crises in today's Britain. I'll leave interpretation of the Arthur legend to others, and focus on the description of English as "this weird French-German creole language".
We can discard the "weird" part as a humorous invocation of what all 6th-century inhabitants of the British Isles might have thought about its now-dominant language.
The introduction of French into the English stew was of course several centuries after Arthur's (fictional) time — but the question of whether English should be described as a "French-German creole language" is a small part of a larger controversy over what a "creole language" is, whether it is a category with sharp boundaries, which languages belong in the category (or belong where on a spectrum of creole-ness), and even whether the whole category is problematic.
The Wikipedia article starts with this definition:
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period.
For a carefully-reasoned argument against Middle English (the French-German hybrid) belonging in the creole-language category, we can cite Manfred Görlach's 1986 chapter "Middle English – a creole?":
Among various new approaches creolistics, the investigation and description of pidgin and Creole languages, has proved to be a most stimulating, if to many scholars controversial, discipline. […]
The attraction that pidgin and Creole languages have held for many scholars has prompted historical linguists to look for earlier language states or situations comparable to those that led to the formation of pidgins and Creoles in post-Renaissance societies. Most Romance languages, Yiddish, Middle English, Bulgarian, or even the Germanic languages as a group within the Indo-European family of languages, have all been compared with, or even claimed to be, creole languages. […]
Unless simplification and language mixture are thought to be sufficient criteria for the definition of a Creole or creoloid (and I do not think they are, since this would make most languages of the world Creoles, and the term would consequently lose its distinctiveness), then Middle English does not appear to be a creole.
The Wikipedia article's section on Controversy offers a useful sketch of the issues. A sketch of the sketch:
Creoleness is at the heart of the controversy with John McWhorter and Mikael Parkvall opposing Henri Wittmann and Michel DeGraff. In McWhorter's definition, creoleness is a matter of degree, in that prototypical creoles exhibit all of the three traits he proposes to diagnose creoleness: little or no inflection, little or no tone, and transparent derivation. In McWhorter's view, less prototypical creoles depart somewhat from this prototype. […] Objections to the McWhorter-Parkvall hypotheses point out that these typological parameters of creoleness can be found in languages such as Manding, Sooninke, and Magoua French which are not considered creoles. Wittmann and DeGraff come to the conclusion that efforts to conceive a yardstick for measuring creoleness in any scientifically meaningful way have failed so far. […] Mufwene (2000) and Wittmann (2001) have argued further that Creole languages are structurally no different from any other language, and that Creole is in fact a sociohistoric concept (and not a linguistic one), encompassing displaced population and slavery. DeGraff & Walicek (2005) discuss creolistics in relation to colonialist ideologies, rejecting the notion that Creoles can be responsibly defined in terms of specific grammatical characteristics. […]
On the other hand, McWhorter points out that in languages such as Bambara, essentially a dialect of Manding, there is ample non-transparent derivation, and that there is no reason to suppose that this would be absent in close relatives such as Mandinka itself. Moreover, he also observes that Soninke has what all linguists would analyze as inflections, and that current lexicography of Soninke is too elementary for it to be stated with authority that it does not have non-transparent derivation.