This chapter provides the briefest overview of the ‘linguistic method’. It briefly gives an example of a truly ‘Eureka’ moment in the history of linguistics, with the discovery of laryngeals in the ancient Hittite language. The focus is on the pidgin language, Fanakalo of South Africa, a relatively simple means of communication that combined mainly Zulu words with mainly an English-like syntax. Until fairly recently, an oft-repeated claim was that the pidgin was likely to have originated on the plantations of Natal in the mid to late nineteenth century. The hypothesis was that incoming plantation workers from India who spoke a variety of not all mutually intelligible languages had to learn the main languages of the colony, English and Zulu, rapidly and under less-than-ideal conditions. In so doing, they would have – so the hypothesis went – come up with a simple mixture of Zulu and English. I recount how this hypothesis was disproved, first on the grounds of linguistic plausibility and secondly, and more decisively, on the grounds of the archival records, which showed the pidgin to be in existence well before the arrival of indentured Indian workers.