The Languages of Native North America (review)

The latest addition to the Cambridge Language Surveys Series is the long-awaited The languages of native North America (LNNA). The wait was well worthwhile. LNNA is magnificent, an outstanding contribution to the series. It will be necessary reading for anyone choosing to work on Native languages of North America for many years to come. LNNA is without precedent in its scope, providing the reader with typological surveys, language sketches, and a detailed bibliography.

Before turning to the substance of LNNA, some comments on its author are in order. Marianne Mithun is uniquely qualified to take on the enormous task of writing about the languages of North America. Classifications normally identify around 50 language families within North America. M herself has done fieldwork on languages from a number of these families including Pomoan (Central Pomo), Eskimo-Aleut (Central Alaskan Yup’ik), Iroquoian (Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, Cayuga, Onondaga), Algonquian (Plains Cree), Chumashan (Barbareño Chumash), and Siouan-Catawban (Lakhota, Santee), and she has supervised students working on other North American languages. Much of the data in the book comes from her own fieldwork. The breadth of her research—grammatical theory, typology, evolution of grammatical systems, language maintenance and revitalization, language description—gives her a perspective on North American native languages that very few linguists have today. Cambridge University Press could not have made a better choice in selecting M for this task.

LNNA adds to a significant body of literature on the native languages of North America. In the past ten years, many outstanding publications, including Lyle Campbell’s American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America (1997; and a winner of the Linguistic Society of America Bloomfield Award) and Ives Goddard’s Handbook of North American Indians, Languages, volume 17 (1996) have appeared. In addition, numerous dissertations, dictionaries, and grammars covering a wide range of aspects of North American languages have also become available. This activity around the native languages of North America allows for a coverage of both more breadth and depth than has been possible in the past. It is ironic that at a time when many of the languages are highly endangered, more work on them than ever is being produced.

Let me now turn to the book itself. As indicated above, LNNA is a superb book, and it is difficult to write a traditional review that points to both strengths and weaknesses. In the remainder of this review, I instead outline the structure of LNNA and preview a few of the many enticements it contains.

LNNA has three major goals. The first is to provide a survey of the major structures of the languages; the second is to sketch important aspects of the languages and language families; and the third is to give a bibliography. The book is written for the person who is interested in the languages of North America but is not necessarily a trained linguist.

In the introduction, M sets the stage with brief surveys of genetic diversity and geographical distribution of languages. She then reviews the history of documentation of the languages and the various classification schemes that have been proposed. Finally, M highlights the importance of North American languages for the growth of the study of typology, starting as early as 1819 with a report by Peter Stephen Duponceau. As M points out, these languages were fascinating to outsiders from early on and have continued to challenge those studying them over the centuries. This chapter summarizes work that can be read about in more depth in other sources, including Goddard 1996 and Campbell 1997.

In the first major part of the book, M addresses structural properties of the languages, including chapters on sounds, words, grammatical categories, sentences, and special languages. This part comprises just over half the book. She focuses on features that are cross-linguistically unusual or especially well represented in the North American languages.

Ch. 1 on sounds and sound structures, examines inventories of the North American native languages, transcription systems, syllable structure, tone...