xvii Przedmowa, czyli o istocie i konieczności prowadzenia badań kreolingwistycznych include not just investigation of their genesis, but also their social history, including the social forces that determine their degree of vitality. Mintz for his part advocated for a social anthropological approach to creole formation that would include investigation of the demographics, community settings and codes of social interaction that characterized each community. He pointed out that a comparison of Caribbean colonial societies reveals that: On the one hand, important sociological and historical differences made each such case unique. Yet on the other, the colonial and immigrant character of the Caribbean area, and the remarkably rigid nature of the social systems engendered by plantation colonialism, undoubtedly affected in certain common ways the processes of language learning and linguistic differentiation. (Mintz 1971: 485) The present book is in many ways an answer to these pioneers’ call for further integration of the social and linguistic aspects of the birth and evolution of creole languages. The book is timely since Creole linguistics is now a well-established part of the linguistic programs of universities throughout the globe, whether as an autonomous specialization in its own right or as a component of more general areas of study such as historical linguistics, contact linguistics and others. The authors are therefore to be commended for promoting the sub-discipline among the thriving scholarly community of Poland, by writing the first introduction to Creolinguistics in Polish. They are among a growing body of creative and energetic young scholars in the field of Contact Linguistics, who have been disseminating knowledge about these subdisciplines in Poland This excellent book is just the latest addition to their accomplishments over the last decade, which include organizing regular scholarly conferences under the earlier title Languages in Contact, and currently Beyond Language. Books such as this are a highly valued addition to the already vast scholarly works in English, and this one in particular offers the Polish academe a book in its own language which explores contact languages, the mechanisms and processes of their development and eventual fate. This work has great potential to bring together both research traditions and researchers in various fields, first, by expanding the directions of research that is already firmly-established in the English-speaking world, and, second, by establishing a fresh nucleus for future research and debates on language contact in general, and in particular on the processes and mechanisms that it involves. The authors of this work have devoted a lot of time to promoting the work of many Polish scholars who have worked on issues within contact linguistics
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