In this fifteen-chapter book, Rickford buttresses the validity of pidgins and creoles as languages, foregrounds the contributions of creolistics and variationist sociolinguistics to each other and beyond, and highlights theoretical and methodological gaps. The book draws largely from Rickford's experiences as a fieldworker in Cane Walk in Guyana and a range of creoles.
In chapter 1, Rickford reports on the difficulty of ‘getting in’ and ‘getting on’ with fieldwork as an outsider and amidst a ‘racial and political maelstrom’. To remedy this, he emphasizes the need to be introduced by an esteemed insider, re-visitations, Walt Wolfram's ‘principle of linguistic gratuity’, and including peers and family members in interviews, among others.
In chapter 2 (with Elizabeth Closs Traugott), the authors discuss that although attached to a history of slavery and colonialism and represented pejoratively in the media and literature, not all pidgins and creoles such as Tok Pisin and Belizean Creole are evaluated in the same light. Also discussed is their employment as identity markers. In addition to this indexical function, chapter 3 builds on the ‘adequacy’ of pidgins and creoles not just as languages of communication, but also of a myriad of other functions, exemplified with micro-analyses of texts and macro-surveys.
Several chapters call variationists to question and (re)assess methods and ideologies. In chapter 4, a single interview and the danger-of-death question have proved insufficient in capturing the vernacular, with repeated interviews and different interlocutors being more effective techniques. In extension to style, chapter 11 emphasizes situation over topic as significant in yielding vernacular variants. In chapters 4 and 6, we are alerted to implicational scaling and R. B. Le Page and Andrée Tabouret-Keller's ‘acts of identity’—pivotal tools for understanding constraint ordering and the spread of change. Chapter 13 reveals Rickford's bottom-up approach in attending to ‘class’ in Cane Walk: Estate vs. Non-Estate classes, while drawing from sociological theories to support his construction of the variable. In chapter 14, the notion of a ‘speech community’ is deconstructed, and we see it must constitute both commonalities and differences to cohere. Chapter 5 ties all of this in with the need to cultivate a practice of drawing from frameworks within and beyond linguistics to fill the gaps.
Chapters 7 (with Angela Rickford as first author), 8, and 12 (with Sharese King) highlight the value of real-life applications and the utility of the creolistic and variationist enterprises to particularly education and the law. These chapters serve as reminders that the pursuit of justice and community outreach should be within the remit of linguists. Chapters 9 and 10 (with Robin Melnick) direct us to the phonological, morphological, and syntactic complexity of creole systems and redirect us to the necessity of internal analysis. Finally, in chapter 15, Rickford concludes with the need to appreciate the people and the ‘contents and artistry’ of their stories, and to enjoy sociolinguistic fieldwork.
This collection of curated articles and essays written specifically for the text is telling of the magnitude of Rickford's contribution to sociolinguistics and creole studies.
