xi Przedmowa, czyli o istocie i konieczności prowadzenia badań kreolingwistycznych Linguistic and the Cultural Mechanisms of Survival and Disintegration I’m delighted to write a short preface to what may be the very first introduction to contact linguistics, and specifically to pidgin and creole studies, ever written in the Polish language. One might think that the authors just relate what is written on the topic in English, but that would be very far from the truth. They use the English-language concepts, skillfully translating them into Polish, as their basis upon which they formulate their own creative ideas regarding the formation and development of contact languages. Importantly – they are systematizing the study of contact languages by showing how, where and why the discipline functions within anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics. As I noted in my (1988) article on “Sociolinguistics and Pidgin-Creole Studies,” many of the leading theorists in Sociolinguistics have been theorists in Pidgin Creole Studies, and vice versa, especially because pidgins and creoles compel attention to social history and they provide models and methods of anthropological and sociolinguistic analysis more than many languages do. They also compel attention to applied issues in education, and national language policy. This introduction to Creolinguistics is also invaluable because it provides excellent examples of Polish scholars who have been conducting seminal anthropolinguistic and ethnographic studies, long before the term contact linguistics was coined; for instance Baudouin de Courtenay, Kruszewski, Piłsudski, Rozwadowski, Sieroszewski, Piekarski, Czaplicka, Malinowski, and Milewski. This invaluable resource, written in Polish, will serve the purpose of informing Polish students and seasoned scholars alike about contact linguistics mechanisms and processes in their native language. Let me illustrate by paraphrasing the words that I wrote with my son Russell (Rickford, Rickford 2000: 10):
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE5NDY5MQ==