Leading scholars examine the history of linguistics from ancient origins to the present. They consider every aspect of the field from language origins to neurolinguistics, explore the linguistic traditions in different parts of the world, examine how work in linguistics has influenced other fields, and look at how it has been practically applied

Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland. Campbell's project is to take stock of what is known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics.

Nowhere was the linguistic diversity of the New World more extreme than in California, where an extraordinary variety of village-dwelling peoples spoke seventy-eight mutually unintelligible languages. This comprehensive illustrated handbook, a major synthesis of more than 150 years of documentation and study, reviews what we now know about California's indigenous languages. Victor Golla outlines the basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages—from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the twentieth-century by Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues, to the extraordinary work of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. Golla also devotes chapters to the role of language in reconstructing prehistory, and to the intertwining of language and culture in pre-contact California societies, making this work, the first of its kind, an essential reference on California’s remarkable Indian languages.

North East Indian Linguistics Volume 5 presents the latest research on the languages of North East India. This present volume both builds on earlier contributions made by established NEILS participants and introduces new work by scholars making their first mark in regional scholarship. Providing a rich database in the form of two appendices, Alexander Kondakov's paper represents a solid sociolinguistic background against which future grammatical investigation of Koch dialects can be conducted. Mark W. Post's paper continues Kondakov's focus on the social and cultural dimensions of dialectology, in an attempt to resolve the vexing question of Galo's genetic position in the Tani languages. Gwendolyn Hyslop presents the most comprehensive statement yet of the internal structure of this little-studied subgroup spanning Arunachal Pradesh and neighbouring Bhutan. Continuing investigation into nominalization and relational marking in North East Indian languages, Stephen Morey demonstrates that Latin-style grammatical 'case' labels are often inappropriate for the languages of North East India. The volume closes with an analysis of Wihu song poetry by Stephen Morey and Meenaxi Bhattacharjya - the latest of several ground-breaking contributions to ethno-musico-linguistic studies in North East India emerging from the Volkswagenstiftung-funded project led by Stephen Morey.

This collection of 31 articles (dedicated to Margaret Langdon) represents the multitude of approaches to Native American languages taken by linguists today. Half of the essays treat Hokan languages, but Uto-Aztecan, Penutian, Muskogean, Iroquoian, Mayan, and other groups are also represented, with pieces on phonology, syntax, the lexicon, and discourse.

This comprehensive survey of indigenous languages of the New World introduces students and general readers to the mosaic of American Indian languages and cultures and offers an approach to grasping their subtleties. Authors Silver and Miller demonstrate the complexity and diversity of these languages while dispelling popular misconceptions. Their text reveals the linguistic richness of languages found throughout the Americas, emphasizing those located in the western United States and Mexico while drawing on a wide range of other examples from Canada to the Andes. It introduces readers to such varied aspects of communicating as directionals and counting systems, storytelling, expressive speech, Mexican Kickapoo whistle speech, and Plains sign language. The authors have included the basics of grammar and historical linguistics while emphasizing such issues as speech genres and other sociolinguistic issues and the relation between language and worldview. American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts is a comprehensive resource that will serve as a text in undergraduate and lower-level graduate courses on Native American languages and provide a useful reference for students of American Indian literature or general linguistics. It also introduces general readers interested in Native Americans to the amazing diversity and richness of indigenous American languages.