The title of this book immediately puts the reader in mind of Weinreich's (1953) classic of the same name, a volume which (a little surprisingly) is not mentioned in the book under review. Though this similarity of title is misleading, both books are notable for their combination of first-hand observation based on solid descriptive work and their impressively well informed accounts of further case studies which illuminate the phenomena their respective authors discuss. It will be understood by any reader who goes beyond the front cover, however, that Holm's focus in this book is more specialized than the title may suggest.

Holm's interest in this book is in what he calls “semi-creoles,” which are (at least in morphological terms) partially restructured forms of certain languages which frequently coexist with other forms of the same language that have not undergone the same degree of simplification and regularization (and in some cases, large-scale abandonment) of their morphosyntactic systems. Holm is eminently qualified to provide the first book-length survey of such languages, since in addition to his work on languages that are less ambiguously creoles (notably Miskito Coast Creole English), he has conducted research on such semi-creoles as Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese, as well as on what we may style “lightly creolized” languages such as Bahamian English. Five languages are the focus of the book, each one deriving from one of the five major lexifiers of the colonial-era European-lexifier Creole languages: African American Vernacular English (henceforth AAVE), various forms of the Dutch-lexifier semi-creole Afrikaans, Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese (BVP) – including the variety recorded from the village of Helvécia in Bahia, where the dominant whites were originally germanophone and francophone Swiss rather than lusophone Brazilians – Nonstandard Caribbean Spanish (NSCS, with special reference to restructured forms of Puerto Rican, Cuban and basilectal Dominican Spanish), and the Vernacular Lects of Réunionnais French (VLRF).

Holm begins with a preface in which he defends the idea that creole languages can be distinguished from languages that have undergone more quotidian rates of change, because “the structural gap between French and Creole French is at least as great as that between French and its source language, Vulgar Latin” (p. xvi), and because the changes that gave rise to creoles took place in the space of a lifetime rather than in a millennium. Having set up an underlying distinction between creoles and “unrestructured” languages as points of comparison in the following chapters, Holm is then able to point out the ways in which semi-creoles differ from their lexical source languages (and, at least implicitly, from languages that everyone would regard as creoles). The emphasis of these comparisons in the following chapters is on structural (morphological and to some extent syntactic) features of semi-creoles, and specifically those features that show modification (usually through simplification, generalization of the use of particular morphological techniques, or abandonment of morphological elements) from the related “unrestructured” language.

Holm precedes this analysis with a chapter which outlines, taking one language after another, the history of the study, categorization, and description of these languages by creolists and others, while chap. 2 outlines the social and demographic factors which Holm suggests account for the way these languages have developed. Both these chapters document what are fast-moving and frequently controversial fields in contact linguistics and beyond (as all will recall who followed the Ebonics debates of the mid-1990s or the discussions about creoles and colonialist attitudes to intrinsic linguistic creoleness in Language in 2004–2005), and in both chapters (and indeed throughout the book) Holm demonstrates deep and up-to-date erudition in the gamut of literature on each variety and a solid understanding of the facts and issues involved. Numerous tables, maps, and sage references to research and hypotheses of Holm's predecessors in these investigations (including the work of young creolists such as Mikael Parkvall, Katherine Green, and Dante Lucchesi) make this vast terrain easy to navigate.

The heart of the book is in chaps. 3–5, “The verb phrase,” “The noun phrase” (which covers personal and some other pronouns), and “The structure of clauses.” Again the presentation of data is on a language-by-language basis, with a comparison of structural phenomena in each semi-creole and in its uncreolized counterpart language. The comparative “uncreolized” structural material is useful support for a reader whose Standard Portuguese, say, may be nonexistent, and translations of each item and sentence into English are provided throughout. However, the sources' own transcriptions are used (which implies a knowledge of the graphemics of English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, plus Afrikaans, which few readers may command), rather than the IPA. The structural information about the semi-creoles in these chapters will be new to many readers, and on occasion may give them pause when they reflect on what “simplification” actually amounts to. To take a striking example from chap. 4: The account of Afrikaans noun plural formation and adjectival gender marking on pp. 97–98 (which by no means exemplifies all the complications found in these topics) shows that morphological simplification and a certain degree of regularization of plural formation operate together with, but separately from, the application of phonological rules which simplify surface phonological forms in Afrikaans. Meanwhile, some irregular Dutch plurals are retained though they are phonologically modified (Dutch stad:steden versus Afrikaans stad:stede ‘town:towns’). The result is that Afrikaans plural formation is considerably more complicated than that of Dutch, while the rules for the use or non-use of –e on Afrikaans attributive adjectives are all but impossible to pin down; the Dutch rule is simplicity by comparison. Data from other languages are included where helpful; thus, chap. 5 has comparative data on clause and sentence structure from Papiamentu (for comparison with NSCS) and Malagasy (for comparison with VLRF).

In the concluding chapter, Holm draws the social and structural threads together in an attempt to account for why these languages underwent partial restructuring. His answers are both social and linguistic: Semi-creoles arose in areas where neither native nor nonnative speakers of European languages were sufficiently numerous for one group to dominate the other, while semi-creoles arose in areas where both “unrestructured” and creolized forms of the same language were present and in use. But we have to wait until the table on p. 138 for a truly comparative presentation of structural phenomena across the five languages. Eighteen morphosyntactic features that have been discussed in the previous chapters are surveyed across the semi-creoles, their most likely substrate languages (Khoisan in the case of Afrikaans, Malagasy and maybe Bantu languages for VLRF, and a variety of Niger-Congo languages for the rest), and their “unrestructured” lexifiers. The most restructured language according to this metric is AAVE, with 15 out of a possible 18 points, while VLRF scores 14, BVP 13, and Afrikaans and NSCS both 9 points. Meanwhile, among the lexifiers, English, French, and Portuguese score 2 points each on this scale, Spanish 1, and Dutch zero. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography and an index containing names, topics, and places all listed together.

The emphasis on inflectional morphological and syntactic features in this work is understandable, given that complex morphological systems in each language are the parts of each language that undergo drastic change in the course of semi-creolization, and what we have here are admirable morphological sketches of the semi-creoles. But one could have hoped for more information regarding other parts of the languages surveyed. To what extent do their phonetic inventories or segmental and canonical phonological systems differ from their “unrestructured” counterparts? What differences, if any, do we find in semi-creoles' range and use of derivational morphological techniques and morphs? Furthermore, given that some creoles, in an echo of their assured pidgin pasts, can occasionally use words that are nouns or adjectives in the lexifier language as verbs in the creole (for instance, Mauritian Creole French koken ‘to steal’ and kontan ‘to like’ from French coquin ‘scoundrel’ and content ‘glad, happy’), do we find instances of similar behavior among high-frequency lexical items in semi-creoles, and if so, what are they?

The standard of proofreading is generally excellent, but one wonders about the apparently random variation between full first names and initials for authors listed in the bibliography.

A comparative approach to creolistics is nothing new, and Holm is a past master at it, but this work, essential reading for all interested in creolistics, is the first classic (and let us hope, by no means the last) of the new field of comparative semi-creolistics.