The authors of this substantial volume each have more than 30 years of research experience in the Pacific region, primarily in Melanesia – especially Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides). This focus is reflected in the content. Despite the title, the book deals only with Pacific pidgins and creoles that are lexified by English, thus leaving out, for example, Tayo (a French-lexified creole of New Caledonia). Furthermore, it concentrates almost entirely on the three dialects of Melanesian Pidgin: Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), Pijin (Solomon Islands), and Bislama (Vanuatu), with an emphasis on the latter.

The volume consists of eleven chapters, including six figures and 39 tables, and two appendices. Chap. 1 is a short introduction giving some background about the authors and an outline of the contents. Chap. 2 consists of brief sketches of most of the English-lexified pidgins and creoles of the Pacific. The third chapter gives an overview of theories of development from the past 30 years that are relevant to the Pacific – first for pidgins and creoles in general, and then for those in Oceania. This is done by focusing on the work of particular scholars: Derek Bickerton, Peter Mühlhäusler, Ross Clark, Roger Keesing, Bill Camden, Jean-Michel Charpentier, Tom Dutton, Jakelin Troy, and Terry Crowley.

The next seven chapters are concerned with the historical development of Melanesian Pidgin and other relevant pidgins. Four different periods are distinguished: 1788 (the first year of the British invasion of Australia) to 1863 (the beginning of the importation of indentured laborers from the Pacific islands); 1863 to 1906, the end of indentured Pacific islands labor in Australia; 1906 to 1975, the year the first Melanesian nation, Papua New Guinea, became independent; and 1975 to the present. Linguistic data from before the 1960s comes from historical sources such as diaries, travelers' accounts, government reports, and court records.

Chap. 4 outlines contacts that occurred from 1788 to 1863 between Europeans and indigenous people of Australia and various Pacific islands. These occurred as the result of the occupation of the Australian continent by European settlers, and the subsequent maritime links between Sydney and Pacific islands in connection with whaling, the pork trade, and the collection of sea slugs (bêche-de-mer) and sandalwood. The following islands are discussed: Tahiti, Cook Islands, Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), Ponape (Pohnpei), New Caledonia, Loyalty Islands, New Hebrides (Vanuatu), Solomon Islands, and Fiji. Chap. 5 portrays the varieties of language that developed as the result of these contacts with examples and word lists, first from New South Wales Pidgin (1788–1850) and then from the “Pacific Pidgin” that was developing in the islands listed above. This chapter clearly demonstrates the influence of Australian pidgins on Pacific pidgins, as first reported by Baker 1993.

Chap. 6 discusses contacts from 1863 to 1906 resulting from the Pacific labor trade. During this period, nearly 100,000 Pacific Islanders – mainly from Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Loyalty Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Kiribati (to use the modern names) – were recruited to work on European-owned plantations primarily in Queensland, Samoa, and Fiji, but also in Hawai‘i, French Polynesia and New Caledonia, and in the three other Melanesian countries as well. This chapter describes plantations in each of these places and the origins of the laborers working there. Chap. 7 goes on to present and discuss linguistic data from this period, illustrating the emergence of stable pidgin languages in the region. Written sources provide pages of examples from New South Wales and various Pacific islands. Testimony from the 1885–1886 Royal Commission on the Pacific labor trade held in Queensland, as well as records from the Christian missions working in Queensland, provide data on “Queensland Canefields English.” Examples from tape recordings are also presented, first from interviews conducted in the 1960s with elderly Pacific Islanders in Queensland who had been plantation workers there between 1885 and 1890 (Dutton 1980), and second from recordings of older speakers of Bislama in Vanuatu, made by several researchers in the late 1960s and 1970s. A detailed comparison of data from these two sources confirms the close connection between the pidgin of the Queensland plantations and Melanesian Pidgin.

Chap. 8 concentrates on the period from 1906 to 1975, when the indentured labor system had come to an end in Australia and most Pacific Islanders had been repatriated to their home islands. The chapter describes the establishment of colonies in these islands by European powers – Britain and France in the New Hebrides, Germany in New Guinea and Britain in Papua (both later taken over by Australia), and Britain in the Solomon Islands. But more important, the chapter documents the internal, colonial plantation system that began to expand in each country during this period. Detailed information is given about the location of the plantations and the sources of laborers from within the colony, and also about the effects of World War II in each country.

In investigating the linguistic situation during this period, the authors conclude in chap. 9 that by the end of the labor trade, there was already “a generally uniform Pacific Pidgin spoken throughout Island Melanesia” (349). Their main goal in this chapter is to demonstrate the subsequent differentiation into three separate varieties that occurred as the result of the internal plantation system in each country. The concentration is on lexical differentiation – the adoption of from 5% to 10% of vocabulary from different local indigenous languages in the New Hebrides variety and in the New Guinea variety, as well as lexical items from French in the former and from German in the latter. In contrast, the Solomon Islands variety retained a much larger proportion of vocabulary derived from English. The chapter includes many texts from the literature for each variety and concludes with a summary of some lexical and morphosyntactic differences among the three modern dialects, Bislama, Pijin, and Tok Pisin.

Chap. 10 examines the role of the Melanesian Pidgin dialects in politics, writing, and education in the postcolonial era (1975 to the present). Bislama in Vanuatu gets the most coverage (52 pages), followed by Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea (16 pages) and Pijin in the Solomon Islands (6 pages). Chap. 11 is a short summary and synthesis of data presented in the preceding chapters. This is followed by Appendix 1, consisting of the Bislama version of the Vanuatu constitution, and Appendix 2, containing 30 maps. There is also a general index.

This volume synthesizes an impressive amount of historical and linguistic data. The authors present some interesting new information, such as statistics showing the importance of Ponape as a “major axis” in the Pacific between 1840 and 1860 (91) and details of older forms and regional variation in Bislama (279–94). However, the overall conclusions generally reinforce those of previous work, including research on internal plantations and dialectal differentiation (Siegel 1998), not mentioned in the book. The discussion of post-independence language planning deliberations in Vanuatu (in which the authors were directly involved) is an interesting contribution to the field, but again a previous publication covering some of the same ground is not mentioned (Crowley 2000).

It is unfortunate that the authors are not very comprehensive in their coverage of recent research in the area, and some of the literature they cite is out of date. For example, the references they give for “a fuller discussion of modern-day Tok Pisin and its roles” (336) are from 1979, 1985 and 1986; they do not refer to important recent publications on Tok Pisin, such as Smith 2000, 2002.

The strongest point of this volume is the enormous amount of historical linguistic data it provides. However, much of this data is presented without comment or analysis, and in many cases without translation (e.g., 441). This brings into question the particular audience that the authors had in mind. Chaps. 2 and 3 would serve as a good introduction for those unfamiliar with Pacific pidgins and creoles and research on Melanesian Pidgin, but familiarity with the features of the language seems to be assumed in later chapters, as well as a familiarity with Vanuatu and its history. (For example, most readers would not know that “Santo” [322] is used to refer to the town of Luganville mentioned earlier on the page.)

Another problem with the volume has to do with terminology. First, the distinction between pidgins and creoles is not made clear. For example, the Pitcairn-Norfolk language is called a pidgin (11–12, 296) although by any definition it would be a creole because it is the native language of its speakers. Also, there is no explanation of the fact (briefly mentioned on p. 24) that Melanesian Pidgin itself is often called a creole because it has native speakers and an expanded grammar and lexicon (see, e.g., Thomason 1997:79–80). With regard to Bislama, Pijin, and Tok Pisin, they are sometimes referred to as three varieties of Melanesian Pidgin (2) and sometimes as three separate Pidgin Englishes (3). Furthermore, the term “Bislama” is normally applied to the modern variety spoken in Vanuatu, but in the text it is used to refer to the early Melanesian Pidgin spoken in the 1800s (108) and to Pacific Pidgin in general (152). And in some places, the term “pidgin” is used in place of “Bislama” (e.g., 446).

Terminological problems are especially acute with regard to Hawai‘i, where in addition to the indigenous language, Hawaiian, there are three different contact varieties. Pidgin Hawaiian (lexified by Hawaiian) and Hawaiian Pidgin English (lexified by English) are no longer spoken. Hawaiian Creole English, locally known as “Pidgin,” is the native language of a large proportion of the population of Hawai‘i. (Many linguists refer to this as Hawai‘i Creole [English] to avoid association with the Hawaiian language.) All of these languages are confused in this volume. On p. 3, Hawaiian Pidgin English is said to be treated fully in Roberts 1995, but this work is about Pidgin Hawaiian. Elsewhere, Hawaiian Pidgin English is equated to Hawaiian Creole English (e.g., 12). In discussing Bickerton's (1981) Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, the authors say it was “based on the example of Hawaiian” (24) and that “Bickerton distinguished ten similarities shared exclusively by Atlantic Creoles and Hawaiian”. Of course, this should be Hawai‘i Creole, not Hawaiian.

Some inaccuracies can be found in the text. For example, the Tok Pisin word for ‘evil spirit’ is masalai not marsalai (387), and ‘chicken’ is kakaruk, not kukuruk (394). An in-text reference to Mühlhäusler 1987 should be 1978 (21), and the reference listed for Siegel 1997 is incorrect (546). Other errors, too numerous to mention here, should have been picked up by the editors, especially with regard to missing and superfluous words, and the many cases of repetition. In one instance, three complete sentences of one paragraph on p. 109 are repeated verbatim (except for one word) on p. 154, and again on p. 250.

It is to be hoped that these editing problems as well as terminological matters and inaccuracies can be remedied in a future edition with updated references. But even as it stands now, the volume will be useful to those interested in the historical development of Melanesian Pidgin.