My PhD thesis—funded by the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership and supervised by Professor Mari Jones—focused on the question of whether creole languages undergo the same processes of contact-induced language change as other languages. Specifically, my thesis sought to question the notion of decreolization, a long-standing theory of language change specific to the field of creolistics. I sought to bring discussion of language variation and change in creole languages beyond the creolistics-specific notion of 'decreolization' in order to integrate creole languages into a mainstream understanding of language contact, variation and change. To do this, I built a large diachronic corpus of Louisiana Creole—a critically-endangered language own heritage—which I used to perform quantitative and grammatical analyses of phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical changes. These analyses found no evidence that decreolization should be considered a 'special case' of language change as is explicit or implicit in much of the creolistics literature. On this basis, I argue that creole languages are more properly analysed using the same frameworks of language contact and change as any other language.