The series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (CALC) 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 happy to add to our list Emanuel J. Drechsel's Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English. The reader is provided with historical documentation of the languages of communication between, on the one hand, Polynesians and, on the other, Western explorers, merchants, beachcombers, and other “adventurers” in the Pacific. He or she will learn about the important ethnographic function of Maritime Pidgin English (MPP) as a lingua franca in these interactions during the second half of the eighteenth century until it was replaced by Pidgin English in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This is an analysis consistent with the hypothesis that Hawaiian Pidgin English also emerged no sooner than the late nineteenth century, owing largely to usage of Pidgin Hawaiian between the local populations and the contract laborers, before the former would replace the latter, concurrently with the spread of English on the islands and the emergence of Hawaiian Creole English. The reader will also learn about the role of interpreters on board the ships that sailed the Pacific, a special set of individuals that facilitated communication between the Islanders and the Westerners, why it was so easy for them to learn (to speak) MPP, and how they developed variable competence in English and other European languages. I would be remiss not to mention the meticulous analyses cum reconstitutions that Drechsel provides of the structures of attestations of MPP that he has painstakingly documented from various historical sources.

The book is thus a precious source of information about the extent of communication between Westerners and Natives during their encounters in the Pacific since the second half of the eighteenth century and the kind of simplification that Tahitian, among other languages, appears to have undergone during the pidginization process. An important question arises as to why Tahiti emerges as so prominent in these encounters. Furthermore, who were the agents of the restructuring processes, on which the reader is equally invited to speculate? What was the specific role of the European explorers, merchants, and seamen in the emergence and spread of MPP and similar varieties elsewhere in the world? What was the role of the native actors and what stratum of the indigenous populations did they represent? How were they selected and/or recruited? What specific kinds of interactions did the Europeans and Natives have in these encounters that may be considered the hallmark of pidginization? These and several related questions arise from the wealth of historical documentation that this book makes available for the first time regarding the exploration of the Pacific and its trade colonization by Westerners.