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It is now a quarter of a century since the first appearance of Roman Jakobson's Kindersprache, probably the most characteristic of his writings on phonology. My impression is that it has never been as well known as it ought to be in this country, and that it is not as well understood as it should be, either. Whatever the reasons for this might be, if in fact it is the case, an English translation is obviously the best remedy. There are, in addition, however, other reasons which warrant a translation. I mentioned that the Kindersprache is perhaps the most representative of Jakobson's phonological writings. It is certainly the most comprehensive, as it is his fullest and most detailed discussion not only of phonological typology, but of the related problems of language acquisition and phonemic regression. And although most of the problems in these areas have been discussed in English versions by Jakobson, this is the only work to integrate them so fully within the same volume. One should remember that comprehensiveness is in many ways the essence of Jakobson's investigations, which provide explanations for a wide variety of facts that would otherwise remain disparate and only accidentally related. Finally, the importance and influence of such a classic work as the Kindersprache are significant, and in fact, have grown rather than diminished in recent years, at least for a great many researchers in linguistics, psychology and language pathology. The reason for this, I think, is that one finds for the first time, in the Kindersprache, a formal linking of the problems of linguistic universals and of language acquisition, ie, the view that any explanation of the latter is to …