This book is a welcome addition to the rather scanty material so far available on Hawaii, one of the richest unexplored mines of information for linguists concerned with contact situations. It is an insider's book, by somebody who has been concerned with the subject for more than thirty-five years; it is a general introduction containing a great deal of information on the phonology (including extensive treatment of prosodic features) and lexis of both Hawaiian Creole and Standard Educated Hawaiian English; it is full of examples of both lexical items and connected text; and although aimed at the non-linguist, it is linguistically informed. There are many more specialised studies now in progress at the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii, but Professor Carr's book begins to do for Hawaii what Frederic Cassidy's popularly-learned Jamaica Talk did for Jamaica. It contains, moreover, observations on many features of great interest to students of creole languages in general.

The publication of this (very well-produced) volume, with a preface by Jan Voorhoeve, is an important event for students of Creole languages. The main part (pp.51–42) is the text of an autobiographical account, written in Sranan, by the Surinam Matuari Bush Negro Johannes King, who died in 1898 when nearly 70 years old. He was a native speaker not of Sranan but of a related Bush Negro language which had no written form at the time; he taught himself to read and write, and his own spelling (unfortunately for linguists not wholly retained here) reflects interference from his own language. We now have, therefore, a partially normalised, but not very extensive, early text in Sranan, with a long introduction and summary in English. King's account is one of the first original works in Sranan. I have not yet had time to study it in detail, but it is quite clearly a text that will amply repay close study.