Series editor's foreword

Summary

The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact was set up to publish outstanding monographs on language contact, especially by authors who approach their specific subject matter from a diachronic or developmental perspective. Our goal is to integrate the ever-growing scholarship on language diversification (including the development of creoles, pidgins, and indigenized varieties of colonial European languages), bilingual language development, code-switching, and language endangerment. We hope to provide a select forum to scholars who contribute insightfully to understanding language evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. We favor approaches that highlight the role of ecology and draw inspiration both from the authors' own fields of specialization and from related research areas in linguistics or other disciplines. Eclecticism is one of our mottoes, as we endeavor to comprehend the complexity of evolutionary processes associated with contact.

We are very proud to add to our list Edgar W. Schneider's Postcolonial English: varieties around the world. This is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive uniformitarian account of how English has spread around the world and diversified into a multitude of varieties (including creoles) thanks both to England's important participation in the European colonization of the world since the seventeenth century and to the American and British leadership role in the recent wave of economic globalization. If the spread of English has before been compared to that of Latin, Schneider has easily produced the only book that makes this comparison obvious.