California Indian Languages

Description

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basic structural features of more than two dozen language types| and cites all the major sources| both published and unpublished| for the documentation of these languages–from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries| to the data amassed during the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