Creolistics, an important branch of language contact theory and sociolinguistics, is one of the most socially engaged areas of language study today. "Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in the Twenty-First Century" explores where the field is headed in the new century, in the judgment of eleven leading scholars. At the same time, the authors look backward toward the migrations starting five hundred years ago of Old World people to the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere, and the strange turns the European colonial languages underwent here. Their analyses underscore our belief that language change can only be understood in its social context, even though those changes often took place under horrifying conditions that were illegal even under the laws of the time.