A Grammar of Patwin brings together two hundred years of word lists, notebooks, audio recordings, and manuscripts from archives across the United States and synthesizes this scattered collection into the first published description of the Patwin language.

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the basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages—from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the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.

This volume represents a reconstruction of Proto-Wintun, the parent language of a group of California Indian languages. It includes a grammatical sketch of Proto-Wintun, cognate sets with reconstructions and an index to the reconstructions. The book fulfills a need for in-depth reconstructions of proto-languages for California Indian language families, both for theoretical purposes and deeper comparison with other proto- or pre-languages.

This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.

This book is the result of over 50 years of research, and it represents an intellectual journey. It is maximally accessible by tabulating the data and inserting frequent cross-references. Dictionary entries are in the alphabetical order of the deepest reconstruction in the set, and there is an English-Utian section at the end of the volume. Yokuts (or Proto Yokuts) is also inserted where there is a resemblance. This strategy is especially helpful for those who wish to use the volume for remote comparison. In this manner, it can serve as a reference book for seminars on non-traditional languages. The volume is also of interest to theoreticians because Utian languages exhibit features that are rare worldwide.

This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processes - whereby lexical words eventually become markers of grammatical categories - converge and differ across various types of language. While grammaticalization at its core is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which the same pathways of change are replicated across languages, certain language types and language areas have distinct preferences with respect to what they grammaticalize and how. Previous work has principally addressed this question with specific reference to languages of Southeast and East Asia that do not seem to grammaticalize paradigms of categories in the same manner as Indo-European languages, or form extensive grammaticalization chains. This volume takes a broader approach and proceeds systematically area by area: specialists in the field address the processes of grammaticalization in languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages. The studies reveal a number of unique pathways of grammaticalization in each language area, as well as identifying the universal shared features of the phenomenon.

A Concise Dictionary of Nakoda (Assiniboine) brings to life the hopes and dreams of Nakoda (Assiniboine) elders. The Nakoda language—also known as Assiniboine, an Ojibwe ethnonym meaning “Stone Enemy”—is an endangered Siouan language of the Mississippi Valley branch spoken in southern Saskatchewan and northern Montana. Nakoda belongs to the Dakotan dialectal continuum, which includes Dakota, Lakota, and Stoney. The fieldwork for this project was done between 2018 and 2020 with Elder Wilma Kennedy, one of the last fluent speakers living in Carry The Kettle, Saskatchewan. The volume brings together many valuable stories and colorful expressions as well as archaic words that do not appear in any known sources of the language. Particular care was taken to obtain the derivatives of many verbal stems, along with sentences for many of the verbs, adverbs, and other function words. More than a list of words, this volume contains definitions and standard spellings along with a wealth of grammatical information. The dictionary contains more than 6,000 Nakoda-to-English translations, more than 3,000 English-to-Nakoda translations, and more than 1,500 sentences that will be extremely helpful for those interested in mastering the different usages of words and the various sentence patterns of the language. This dictionary of Nakoda can be used by anyone interested in learning or would like to refresh their knowledge of the language.