Author Description

These books represent the most systematic and comprehensive guide ever published to the world's pidgins, creoles and mixed languages, designed, edited, and written by the world's leading experts in the field. The three-volume Survey brings together over ninety leading experts to present concise accounts of the world's pidgin and creole languages. The division of its three volumes reflects the languages from which they originated. Each entry provides a linguistic and social history of the pidgin or creole in question and an analysis of their linguistic characteristics, and is accompanied by a location map and a bibliography. The accompanying Atlas of Pidgins and Creoles presents full colour maps of the distribution among the pidgins and creoles of 130 structural linguistic features. These cover their phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexicons. Each map is accompanied by a commentary. The project is the successor to the successful World Atlas of Language Structures and draws on the same linguistic, cartographic, and computing knowledge and skills of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Individually and together the volumes represent an outstanding and unique resource of central interest and value to linguists of all persuasions throughout the world.