This collection of essays on the pidginization and creolization of language is taken from a conference held at The University of the West Indies in April 1968. Its editor, Dell Hymes, was an incredibly influential sociolinguist and anthropologist in his lifetime, president of the Linguistic Society of America (1982), the American Anthropological Association (1983) and the American Folklore Society. He was a pioneer of the sociolinguist movement, striving to find ways to connect language and speech to human relations and anthropological study. Within this collection of essays, the reader will find varied studies of pidgin and creole languages by academics considered leaders in their field, particularly at this time. The topics of these essays range from those exploring the employment of pidgin languages in specific territories, such as Vietnam, the West Indies and the US, to those essays looking at the formation and hybridization of pidgin and creole languages generally.