In:Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas: In honor of John V. Singler
Edited by Cecelia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzić and Philipp Angermeyer
[Creole Language Library 53] 2017
► pp. vii–vii
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the generosity of many institutions and individuals who helped to make this volume possible. First and foremost, we wish to pay tribute to John V. Singler, his exacting standards of scholarship, his unyielding integrity and honesty as a scholar and the significant contribution he has made to the field of pidgin and creole studies and language contact.
John also sets a great example for his students. His generosity as an adviser – which we were fortunate to experience first-hand and are most grateful for – has meant that John has supervised many students working on diverse lines of research in sociolinguistics and studies of language contact. One of John’s former students, Maryam Bakht, provided the impetus to produce a collection in his honour. Her original plan was to do two volumes, one with work by John’s colleagues and one showcasing his students’ work. The current volume is organized around a thematic focus of language contact in Africa and the African diaspora in the Americas and comprises primarily the scholarship of his long-time colleagues in the field. We hope to see volume two some day!
We also wish to thank Bill Haddican, Rafael Orozco, Stephanie Hackert, James Walker, Sally Thomason, and Miriam Meyerhoff for their help in reviewing chapters in the volume and Rick Grimm for his careful copyediting. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their expert input and constructive criticism of various chapters. We would be remiss if we failed to thank Renée Blake, whose intimate knowledge of John’s work, participation in planning sessions, and encouragement, was instrumental in getting us past the proposal stage.
We would also like to thank Miriam Meyerhoff, editor of Creole Language Library and Kees Vaes, editor at John Benjamins, for their guidance and encouragement.
Most of all, we are deeply grateful to the contributors to this volume for sharing their excellent work and, thereby, honouring the work of John V. Singler!
