Endangered languages (review)

This book is a special issue of the Linguistische Berichte journal, consisting of 12 articles that highlight unusual features found among endangered languages of the world. The editors have selected the articles to capture an impressively wide range of topics and regions. In this collection there is one article focused on Australia, two on South America, two on Africa, three on Mesoamerica, two on Asia, one on North America, and one on the general region of the Asia-Pacific. In addition to these papers there is an introduction that summarizes each of the contributions; this introduction also provides a useful overview of the recent literature on language endangerment. The editors state that they decided not to group them according to region of provenance or by linguistic subfield in order to maximize diversity. This review will briefly discuss six of these articles; I have chosen these articles for diversity of both region and topic in order to be representative of the collection as a whole.

In the first paper, "Warramurrungunji undone: Australian languages in the 51st millennium" (pp. 19–44), Nicolas Evans gives a solid general overview of the state of indigenous languages in Australia and provides descriptions of typologically unusual features in these languages. Some of these features include respect registers with extensive replacement of content words as well as complex trirelational kinship terms. Particularly fascinating is his discussion of examples of what he calls "unimaginable languages". One language, Kayardild, allows as many as four case morphemes on a single word; this language also defies typological generalizations by allowing inflections to change word class. This article is a good mixture of discussion of unusual language features along with sociolinguistic themes such as multilingualism, registers, and speech communities.

Knut Olawsky's "ObViouS OVS in Uraina syntax" (pp. 45–72) explores the basic word order of an Amazonian language, an OVS word order that has been previously described as rare or non-existent. He describes word order for both transitive and intransitive clauses and gives examples of various constructions that use a different order, drawing on both independent and dependent clauses to demonstrate that OVS is indeed the unmarked order. Olawsky gives convincing evidence that this sequence is pervasive in the language; moreover, he demonstrates that deviations from this pattern involve sentences displaying pragmatic features such as focus or emphasis. Claims of OVS word order have been made for various other languages, but these claims have often been disputed. This paper therefore makes a significant contribution by establishing a strong case for such a sequence.

Nora England's article "The influence of Mayan-speaking linguists on the state of Mayan linguistics" (pp. 93–112) stands out for its discussion of sociolinguistic issues. She states in her introduction that massive language shift in the past several decades has also been accompanied by a movement of cultural affirmation that has resulted in a substantial number of Mayan speakers choosing to study linguistics. England observes that "the linguistic contributions of Mayas in Guatemala are unparalleled anywhere else" (p. 93) and that it is generally unusual for members of endangered language communities to have such an active role. This paper reviews the linguistic work done by these speakers and provides a useful discussion of issues around forms used for standardized grammars. One issue she explores in more depth is the appropriateness of using a historically attested form as the standard form. Because most of these languages are relatively well documented, many speakers are now producing works focusing on specific aspects of languages rather than solely creating grammars and dictionaries. England concludes her paper with a discussion of future contributions that can be expected from Mayan speaker-linguists.

Friederike Lüpke's paper "Vanishing voice: The morphologically zero-coded passive of Jalonke" (pp. 172–190) explores the active-passive alternation in a West African language. This discussion is of particular interest as many linguists doubt if it is possible to use the term "passive" for a phenomenon with no overt marking. She begins her paper with a review of the...