Hugo Schuchardt was effectively the founder of the flourishing field of creole studies. He assembled an enormous corpus of source-material in the form of texts, transcripts, word-lists and dictionaries and between 1880 and 1920 published the results with his own commentaries in a series of reviews and articles. Professor Gilbert has edited and translated a coherent selection of the most important essays, comprising Schuchadrt's studies of the English-based creoles and two of his major theoretical papers on the Lingua Franca and the Language of the Saramacca Negroes in Surinam. His introduction surveys Schuchardt's work as a whole and analyses his more specific contributions in these selections. The volume will be welcomed by a wide range of linguists and anthropologists.