This book provides an insightful and highly readable account both of the social setting in which the languages are spoken and of their main structural features.

The Kimberley, the far north-west of Australia, is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the continent. Some fifty-five Aboriginal languages belonging to five different families are spoken within its borders. Few of these languages are currently being passed on to children, most of whom speak Kriol (a new language that arose about half a century ago from an earlier Pidgin English) or Aboriginal English (a dialect of English) as their mother tongue and usual language of communication. This book describes the Aboriginal languages spoken today and in the recent past in this region.

The Kimberley Arafuran language Worrorra was spoken traditionally on the remote coastline and precipitously beautiful hinterland between the Walcott Inlet and the Prince Regent River. The language described here is that attested by its last full speakers, Patsy Lulpunda, Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah. Patsy Lulpunda was a child when Europeans first entered her country in 1912, and Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah both grew up on the Kunmunya mission. This comprehensive and detailed grammar provides as well an historical and cultural context for a society now drastically altered. In the 1950s Worrorra people left their traditional land and from the 1970s the number of people speaking Worrorra as their first language declined dramatically. Worrorra is a highly polysynthetic language, characterised by overarching concord and a high degree of morphological fusion. Verbal semantics involve a voicing opposition and an extensive system of evidentiality-marking. Worrorra has elaborate systems of pragmatic reference, a derivational morphology that projects agreement-class concord across most lexical categories and complex predicates that incorporate one verb within another. Nouns are distributed among five genders, the intensional properties of which define dynamic oppositions between men and women on the one hand, and earth and sky on the other. This volume will be of interest to morphologists, syntacticians, semanticists, anthropologists, typologists, and readers interested in Australian language and culture generally.

In a highly biodiverse part of Australia, the Kimberley conveys the excitement of discovering a new species, the resurgence of life in once fire-ravaged places, and the effect of humans on the landscape. This is the Kimberley at its most beautiful, from teeming bird life to elusive desert animals; from cascading waterfalls and tangled vine thickets to wide savannah plains. The book offers world-class photography, information on up-to-date scientific discoveries, and an in-depth understanding of the balance between flora, fauna, land, and sea. Featuring over 200 stunning images in full color, The Kimberley is well-written, accessible, and engaging.

“An absolutely unique work in linguistics publishing – full of beautiful maps and authoritative accounts of well-known and little-known language encounters. Essential reading (and map-viewing) for students of language contact with a global perspective.” Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie The two text volumes cover a large geographical area, including Australia, New Zealand, Melanesia, South -East Asia (Insular and Continental), Oceania, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, Mongolia, Central Asia, the Caucasus Area, Siberia, Arctic Areas, Canada, Northwest Coast and Alaska, United States Area, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The Atlas is a detailed, far-reaching handbook of fundamental importance, dealing with a large number of diverse fields of knowledge, with the reported facts based on sound scholarly research and scientific findings, but presented in a form intelligible to non-specialists and educated lay persons in general.

The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation. Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed.

This ground-breaking 1980 study of over 200 Australian languages is still valuable, especially for its non-technical opening chapters.