ABSTRACT
When the Dutch linguists Meijer and Muysken (1977) reclaimed Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927) for the emerging field of creole languages, the ensuing interest in his work catapulted Schuchardt from a dusty conservative footnote in the history of linguistics to the revered founder of a thriving, cutting edge field. Today, Hugo Schuchardt is consistently hailed as a founding father of creole studies1 (Kouwenberg and Singler 2008:
2-8; Romaine 2009: 858). This renaissance from within creole studies has unsurprisingly focused attention on his creole work and obscured his multifaceted interest and research in the broader field of language mixing and development as well as his varied oeuvre across a wide range of languages. The topics of Schuchardt’s writings span from antiquity to his own time and draw on an almost global frame of linguistic reference. Schuchardt had crossed many boundaries within his chosen field of linguistics, and he ventured into neighbouring disciplines throughout his academic career spanning more than six decades. He certainly took his own advice very seriously when he urged his fellow linguists and philologists to ‘follow the example of natural scientists and, for the sake of any phenomenon or group of phenomena, more frequently take a stroll about the world’ (Schuchardt 1885: 38).
