I am finishing this book at the University of Coimbra, the first and oldest university of Portugal, where I first came as a student of Portuguese in 1988 in order to gain better access to the literature on the Portuguese-based Creoles and the Brazilian vernacular. This seems entirely proper, since it was a Fulbright award in 1993-1994 that first allowed me to teach here and to begin work on this book. I am grateful to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, to the colleagues who were so helpful, especially Ana Luis and Clara Keating, and to those professors – Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, Martin Kayman and Jorge Morais Barbosa – whose extraordinary efforts led to the creation of the chair I now hold here.

It is an honour to be part of one of the great medieval universities of Europe, but that is not the whole story of this book. From 1980 until 1998,1 taught at the City University of New York (CUNY). Few people outside that institution can appreciate the riches of its cultural diversity, such as the thousands of its students who speak Creole and semi-creole languages. Mitchell (1997) notes that ‘More students of color earn their bachelor degrees from the City University of New York than any other institution in the country.’ Although many of these students speak standard English as their first language, many also speak Creole English or French, African American Vernacular English or nonstandard Caribbean Spanish.