California Indian Languages (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520266674)

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basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages--from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the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

Author: Victor Golla
ISBN-10: 0520266676
ISBN-13: 9780520266674
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 09/20/2011
Pages: 400
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.80lbs
Size: 11.00h x 8.70w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/01/2012 pg. 118
Choice 04/01/2012
Books & Culture 05/01/2013 pg. 17