Language Documentation: Books

A Grammar of Mongsen Ao, the result of the author's fieldwork over a ten-year period, presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language spoken in Nagaland, north-east India. This book offers valuable new insights into the structure of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in a linguistically little-known region of the world. It will be of value to any linguist seeking to clarify genetic relationships within the Tibeto-Burman family, and it will serve more broadly as a reference grammar for typologists interested in the typological features of a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India.

The aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive description of the phonetic and phonological features of Ao, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the hill state of Nagaland, north-east India. The description is primarily based upon the data of three native speakers, and the language under study is a variety of the Mongsen dialect spoken in Waromung village, situated in the Mokokchung district. This is the first extensive acoustic description of a language belonging to the Kuki-Chin-Naga branch of the Tibeto-Burman family.

Language documentation is a field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language. This volume presents in-depth introductions to major aspects of language documentation, including overviews on fieldwork ethics and data processing, guidelines for the basic annotation of digitally-stored multimedia corpora and a discussion on how to build and maintain a language archive.

This book on language typology highlights and identifies similarities and differences among languages of the world. This introductory title has sections on historical change, language acquisition, and language processing.

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve questions that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. This book will be applicable to researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change.

This volume brings together the views of linguists and communities about support and revitalisation of endangered languages. The chapters refer to ideological bases of reactions to language endangerment drawing their discussions from case studies of how language ideologies and beliefs affect language practices (and vice versa).

This book introduces readers to the linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It contains wide-ranging and accessible discussions of every important aspect of the languages of the region, including word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families andtypology, key syntactic structures, writing systems, and communicative styles.It shows students of particular Asian languages how their language fits structurally and culturally into the regionallanguage mosaic. With its exercises, solutions, glossary, and many fascinating cases and insights, the book is an ideal introduction to descriptive and field linguistics.

This Handbook presents the typology, classification and historical reconstruction of this important language family of South and Southeast Asia. The work includes 21 grammar sketches presenting each branch, plus extensive overview chapters.

This product represents seven years of compilation from the work of nearly two hundred world-renowned scholars in linguistics. The volume explores the structure, history and culture of 191 languages worldwide, with the aim of providing both the general public and linguistics experts with an authoritative source of rich, structured data on the world's major ethnolinguistic groups.

Languages are vehicles of value systems and cultural expressions and are an essential component of the living heritage of humanity. Yet, many of them are in danger of disappearing. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger aims to raise awareness about endangered languages around the world. This third edition has been completely revised and expanded to include new series of maps and new points of view.

The World Atlas of Language Structures is a book and CD combination displaying the structural properties of the world's languages. 142 world maps and numerous regional maps display the geographical distribution of features of pronunciation and grammar, such as number of vowels, tone systems, gender, plurals and tense. Each world map shows an average of 400 languages and is accompanied by a fully referenced description of the structural feature in question. This title is useful for linguists and others seeking to understand human languages.