This book is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the native North American languages. These several hundred languages show tremendous genetic and typological diversity, and offer numerous challenges to current linguistic theory. The book includes an overview of their special characteristics, descriptions of special styles, a catalog of the languages that details their locations, genetic affiliations, number of speakers, and major structural features, and lists published material on them.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. The Nature of the Languages: 1. Sounds and sound patterns; 2. Words; 3. Grammatical categories; 4. Sentences; 5. Special language; Part II. Catalogue of Languages: 6. Relations among the languages; 7. Catalogue.

Reviews

'This volume is a most welcome continuation of a most useful series. it is a great pleasure to review Marianne Mithun's The Languages of Native North America in the Cambridge Language Surveys, since one can only express admiration for the tremendous amount of labour behind this book. There are very few people in modern native North American linguistics, if any, who could do an equally beautiful job as Mithun.' Linguistic Typology