Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2023

Title: The Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Subtitle: History and Classification
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-indigenous-languages-of-the-americas-9780197673461?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Lyle Campbell

Reviewer: Sune Gregersen

SUMMARY

The Indigenous Languages of the Americas by Lyle Campbell is a comprehensive handbook on the history of American Indigenous languages. It contains a survey of the languages and language families of the Americas, a critical discussion of some hypothesized distant language relationships, and an account of various language contact phenomena involving American Indigenous languages. According to the introduction, the book aims both “to survey what is known” about this topic and to discuss some of the remaining unresolved issues and knowledge gaps (p. 2). It consists of nine chapters, an extensive bibliography, and indices of languages, names, and subjects. It also includes more than thirty maps as well as nested lists showing the structure of the language families under discussion.

In the introductory Chapter 1, Campbell presents his overall aims and discusses a number of terminological and methodological issues which play a role throughout the book. These include problems concerning language names and identification – such as the numerous Middle American languages historically called ‘Popoluca’ (with spelling variants) – the endangerment of American Indigenous languages, and the use of lexicostatistical methods in language classification. Campbell also discusses the problem of relating historical linguistic findings to genetic and archaeological evidence, noting that the linguistic diversity of the Americas – with c. 170 recognized language families and isolates – is consistent “with any of a large number of possible hypotheses about the possible first peoples in the Americas” (p. 20).

Chapters 2 to 4 survey the language families and isolates of the Americas from north to south: Chapter 2 covers “North American Indian Languages North of Mexico”, i.e. the Indigenous languages of Greenland, Canada, and the United States; Chapter 3 deals with “Middle American Languages (Mexico and Central America)”; and Chapter 4 is about the “Indigenous Languages of South America”. Uto-Aztecan languages are treated in Chapter 2 (pp. 82–92), except the Nahua (Aztecan) branch, which is discussed in Chapter 3 (pp. 163–165); three language families which extend from South America into Middle America – Arawakan, Chibchan, and Chocoan – are treated in Chapter 4 (pp. 189–194, 207–212, 214–215). For each language family, Campbell gives an overview of its internal structure, discusses the most important historical linguistic work and hypotheses about external relationships, and – where such work has been done – lists the phonemes reconstructed for the proto-language. For almost all of the language families, the overview also gives basic information on each individual language, such as its (historical) location and documentary status. Exceptions to this include the large Otomanguean, Pano-Takanan, Tukanoan, and Tupían language families (pp. 157–163, 244–248, 258–267), where the overview focusses on the entire family rather than the individual members. The overall structure also differs between the three survey chapters. The North American language families in Chapter 2 are discussed in rough geographical order, approximately from north to south and west to east. In Chapter 3 on Middle American languages, Campbell first treats the language families belonging to the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, a large Sprachbund extending from central Mexico to northwestern Costa Rica. “Non-Mesoamerican” language families are then discussed, i.e. languages of Middle America not belonging to this Sprachbund. In Chapter 4, finally, the language families of South America are treated in alphabetical order.

Chapter 5 is devoted to “Unclassified and Spurious Languages” in the Americas, i.e. languages which are “so poorly attested that it is impossible to classify them” (p. 280) as well as various kinds of linguistic “phantoms”. Campbell first gives an overview of unclassified languages in North, Middle, and South America, many of them only known from short wordlists or not recorded at all. He then discusses various non-existent languages which have been thought to exist, some of them due to deliberate hoaxes (e.g. Taensa, pp. 330–331), others to misinterpretations of linguistic evidence (e.g. Aksanás, p. 333) or simple misreadings (e.g. Membreno, p. 332, in fact the name of an author; cf. also Campbell 1988: 609). The chapter ends with a brief discussion of made-up languages encountered by the author in his own fieldwork and some of the possible motivations behind such fakes (a topic also discussed at greater length in Campbell 2014).

Chapter 6, “Distant Linguistic Relationships”, deals with a number of proposals for larger language families, also referred to as ‘stocks’, ‘phyla’, or ‘macro-families’ in the literature (Campbell advises against these terms; cf. pp. 9–10, 340). The chapter begins with a brief discussion of some recent “success stories” where linguistic relationships have been established or at least shown to be probable, such as the Pano-Takanan family combining Panoan and Takanan and the Plateau family linking Klamath-Modoc [kla], Molala [mbe], and the Sahaptian languages. Not all of these are reflected in the classification presented in Chapters 2–4, however; for instance, while Campbell describes Mora-Marín’s (2016) evidence for Mayan–Mixe-Zoquean as “very encouraging” (p. 366), Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean are listed as separate families in the chapter on Middle American languages, and I found no mention of the hypothesis in that chapter (pp. 148–157). After the success stories follow some methodological remarks on the importance of identifying regular sound correspondences between languages, not just surface similarities. Campbell questions the value of lexicostatistical methods like the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP; see Holman et al. 2008; Wichmann et al. 2022) because such methods do not distinguish between real cognates and similarities due to contact or chance. The main part of the chapter then discusses a number of long-distance relationships which have either recently been proposed or received renewed interest. Campbell pays particular attention to proposals which he judges to be unconvincing based on standard historical-comparative criteria. Among these are the Hokan hypothesis (Dixon & Kroeber 1913; Kaufman 2015), the proposed Dene-Yeniseian family linking Na-Dene with the Yeniseian languages of Siberia (Vajda 2018), and a “Chitimacha-Totozoquean” proposal linking Chitimacha [ctm] (southern Louisiana) with the Totonacan and Mixe-Zoquean families of Mesoamerica (Brown et al. 2014). Other proposals, such as Yok-Utian (p. 358) and the aforementioned Mayan–Mixe-Zoquean (p. 366), are reviewed more favourably and only discussed briefly. The chapter also includes two appendices, one reviewing the evidence for Greenberg’s (1987) “Macro-Panoan” hypothesis, the other containing a list of some of the many long-distance relationships that have been proposed since the 19th century.

The final three chapters deal with various aspects of language contact involving American Indigenous languages. In Chapter 7, “Linguistic Areas of the Americas”, Campbell reviews some thirty proposed Sprachbünde, again moving roughly from north to south. For each putative linguistic area, Campbell surveys the most important literature and some salient linguistic features characterizing the languages involved. In some cases a more detailed discussion is provided, such as the Northwest Coast linguistic area running from Alaska to Oregon (pp. 389–393), the Southeast linguistic area covering most of the American South (pp. 409–413), and the Mesoamerican linguistic area already mentioned above (pp. 413–422). Chapter 8, “Contact Languages”, deals with pidgins, línguas gerais, lingua francas, mixed languages, and some of the sociocultural factors that have played a role in language contact in South America. Some of these contact languages, such as Chinook Jargon (Chinook Wawa) [chn] are fairly well-known, whereas others are entirely undocumented. ‘Línguas gerais’ in this context refers to two Tupían languages, Nheengatu [yrl] and Língua Geral do Sul (also Língua Geral Paulista, cf. p. 261), which developed in Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under heavy Portuguese influence.

The section on lingua francas gives a brief overview of languages which sources indicate were used for interethnic communication; most of these are also discussed in Chapters 2–4. The section on mixed languages discusses the rare cases where different components of a language have different sources, such as Michif [crg], which combines a French-based nominal system with a verbal system from Plains Cree, and Media Lengua [mue], which combines Spanish vocabulary with Quechua grammar. Campbell also discusses some of the sociocultural factors that have influenced patterns of language contact in South America, most importantly the prevalence of linguistic exogamy in some areas. Finally, Chapter 9 is devoted to “Loanwords and Other New Words in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas”, i.e. the lexical effects of language contact. Among the topics covered are Wanderwörter, calques, borrowing between American and European languages, and the loanword avoidance that has been observed in many American languages. This last phenomenon is particularly interesting because the languages involved often show clear structural evidence of language contact, meaning that lexical influence is not a prerequisite for structural influence.

EVALUATION

Campbell’s handbook is a very useful guide to the state of the art of American historical linguistics. It surveys what is currently known about American Indigenous languages and their classification and contains many interesting discussions of controversies and unresolved questions in the field. Campbell notes in the preface (p. xii) that the book is not meant as a second edition of his 1997 handbook, and despite some obvious overlap the two books do not cover exactly the same topics. Whereas Campbell (1997) includes a detailed survey of the history of American linguistics, this topic receives little attention in the present book, presumably because there is relatively little new to add. By contrast, the new book has more chapters dealing with language contact, reflecting the considerable activity in this linguistic subfield in the last few decades. These differences appear well-motivated, as does Campbell’s decision to only focus on recent proposals and reassessments in the chapter on possible distant linguistic relationships, referring the reader to older work where relevant.

The book is written in a lucid and engaging style and lays out its arguments and evidence in a transparent way. Specialist terms are explained throughout the book, making it accessible not just to linguists, but also to students and interested readers from other fields. Still, some aspects of the book could have been more user-friendly. In Chapters 2 and 3, which are not ordered alphabetically, it is somewhat cumbersome to look up information on an individual language family or isolate. While the language families under discussion are indicated with boldface, they are not included in the table of contents or the running head. Hence, to look for the discussion of a specific family, one either has to leaf through the relevant chapter until one finds it or consult the index of languages. In the index, in turn, no distinction is made between the main treatment of a language family and pages where it is only discussed in passing; it would have been helpful to highlight the reference to the principal discussion, e.g. with boldface. Different font styles or other typographical means would also have been useful in other places. In Chapter 4, the overviews of language families mention where individual languages are (or were) spoken, but this information is not visibly set off from the language names, occasionally resulting in unwieldy entries like “Ecuador-Colombia Ecuador, Colombia” and “Northern Bolivian Quechua (Bolivian Quechua) Bolivia” (p. 251) (by contrast, geographical information is italicized in Campbell (1997). Tables would have been a more reader-friendly solution in some places, e.g. for the list of isolates or small families at the bottom of p. 187, the obsolete language names on p. 330, and the typical Amazonian linguistic traits on p. 424.

Occasionally, Campbell hints at interesting phenomena where some more detail would have been welcome. Readers not already familiar with the history of Kickapoo [kic], originally spoken in the Midwestern United States, may wonder under what circumstances a group of speakers settled in Mexico (p. 128); a partial answer is given in Campbell (1997: 402). Similarly, one might wonder why some Onondaga [ono] speakers moved to Ontario after the American revolution, as mentioned in passing on p. 118. The decipherment of Epi-Olmec is said to be a “stunning” achievement (p. 157), but a bit of information on this writing system would help the reader appreciate why this is the case. The existence of Indigenous sign languages is mentioned in a few places (pp. 25, 107, 176), but the only one discussed explicitly is Plains Sign Language [psd] (p. 449). Some more information could also have been provided on the history of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) [kal]. While it is formally correct that “Greenland officially became Danish territory in 1814” (p. 34), it is worth adding that Dano-Norwegian (re)colonization of Greenland began almost a century earlier, with the establishment of a mission in present-day Nuuk in 1721. This is linguistically relevant because it led to the development of a writing system and the first linguistic studies of the language (Dorais 2010: 113, 173; Bergsland & Rischel 1986). In the list of (partially) ergative languages in the Northwest Coast linguistic area (p. 391), Alsea [aes] and Siuslaw [sis] are missing, and one might have added that the ergative marker in these languages appears to have been borrowed from Coosan (Mithun 2000), thus underscoring the significant historical language contact in this area. Finally, in some places a few glossed examples would have been helpful to illustrate the phenomena under discussion, such as the complex verbal templates in Na-Dene and Yeniseian (pp. 363–365) or the similarities between passive constructions in Tewa and Apachean (p. 404).

Another useful addition would have been more consistent cross-referencing to Glottolog (Hammarström et al. 2021) and Ethnologue (Eberhard et al. 2023). While Campbell does refer to both of these works, especially in the overview of spurious languages, ISO codes for the languages are not generally provided (Truká [tka] on p. 326 is an exception). Given the many problems involved in referring to languages – different names for the same language, the same name for different languages, differences in spelling, and so on (cf. pp. 4–8) – this would have been an obvious way to avoid potential ambiguities. Points of disagreement with Ethnologue are occasionally mentioned in Chapters 3 and 4, but not with the – also widely used – Glottolog classification. Some differences between Campbell’s classification and the version of Glottolog he refers to (Hammarström et al. 2021) include the following: Whereas Campbell recognizes a Plateau language family (pp. 56–58) consisting of Klamath-Modoc [kla], Molale [mbe], and the Sahaptian languages, this is not recognized by Glottolog; Campbell recognizes a Ritwan branch of Algic (pp. 124, 132), while Glottolog treats Wiyot [wiy] and Yurok [yur] as family-level isolates; and while Campbell considers Gününa Küne (Puelche) [pue] to be a member of the Chonan family (p. 216), Glottolog calls the observed parallels “interesting but not conclusive”.

An important point which becomes clear while reading Campbell’s book is how dependent historical linguistics and language classification are on adequate documentation. This is most obvious in the case of dormant languages which remain unclassified because the documentation is too limited, but also from the telling examples of languages which were only documented from the last fluent speaker or speakers (e.g. Kitsai [kii], p. 105, and Chitimacha [ctm], p. 107). As hinted at in the introduction, the loss of linguistic diversity is particularly tragic in the case of poorly documented languages because “we cannot classify them nor understand their histories, ever, and the peoples involved can do nothing to recover their languages” (p. 11). Throughout the book, Campbell makes several suggestions for future historical linguistic work, but it would have been interesting to also see some concrete recommendations from a language documentation perspective – for instance, are there cases of entire (hypothesized) language families being especially poorly documented and in urgent need of documentation (cf. Hammarström 2010), or are there unanswered questions which the documentation of a particular language might help resolve? In a number of places, Campbell also refers to already dormant languages where unpublished documentation exists, such as Mutsun [css] (p. 64) and Natchez [ncz] (p. 108). Here one could also have offered some suggestions for future philological and descriptive research, for instance for linguists who, for whatever reason, are not able to carry out language documentation themselves.

There is an unfortunate number of misspellings and misprints in the book, including in quotations and language and author names. Examples include “custer” (p. 59), “vaariaties” (76), “Swizz-born” (96), “Jeoffrey” for Geoffrey (111) and “Lin” for Linn (114), “dialecst” (126), “Mapdungun” (187), “sparce” (236), “11000 CE” (252), “Amazaon” (265), “exited” for existed (299), “lisited” (311), “sate” (325), “Wandewort” (357), “comarrison” (360), “vegismal” for vigesimal (420), “Apalalchee” (444), and “Delancey” for DeLancey (passim). Typos in language names are also found in some of the maps, e.g. “Nomlak” (Map 2.6), “O'Odham” (Map 2.7), “Tekelma” (Map 7.1), “Flarthead” and “Salishans” for Salishan (Map 7.2). The bibliography contains quite a few typos in titles and publisher names (e.g. under Baegert 1771; Berman 1996; Bolaños Quiñonez 2016) as well as some duplicate entries (Bengtson 1991a and 1991b; Elliot 1994 and Elliott 1994). While such mistakes do not interfere with the understanding of the content, they do leave one with the impression that this otherwise well-written and informative book would have benefitted from more careful copy-editing.

REFERENCES

Bergsland, Knut & Jørgen Rischel (eds.). 1986. Pioneers of Eskimo grammar: Hans Egede’s and Albert Top’s early manuscripts on Greenlandic (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 21). Copenhagen: The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. https://lingvistkredsen.ku.dk/udgivelser/travaux/arkiv/tclc_21/

Brown, Cecil H., Søren Wichmann, and David Beck. 2014. Chitimacha: A Mesoamerican language in the Lower Mississippi Valley. International Journal of American Linguistics 80. 425–474. https://doi.org/10.1086/677911

Campbell, Lyle. 1988. Review article of Greenberg (1987). Language 64(3). 591–615. https://doi.org/10.2307/414535

Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Lyle. 2014. How to “fake” a language. Estudios de Lingüística Chibcha 33. 63–74.

Dixon, Roland B., & A. L. Kroeber. 1913. New linguistic families in California. American Anthropologist 15(4). 647–655. http://www.jstor.org/stable/659723

Dorais, Louis-Jacques. 2010. The language of the Inuit: Syntax, semantics and society in the Arctic. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons & Charles D. Fennig. 2023. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 26th edn. Dallas: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com

Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hammarström, Harald. 2010. The status of the least documented language families in the world. Language Documentation & Conservation 4. 177–212. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4478

Hammarström, Harald, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath & Sebastian Bank. 2021. Glottolog, v. 4.4. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4761960

Holman, Eric W., Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Viveka Velupillai, André Müller & Dik Bakker. 2008. Explorations in automated language classification. Folia Linguistica 42(3–4). 331–354. https://doi.org/10.1515/FLIN.2008.331

Kaufman, Terrence. 2015. Some hypotheses regarding proto-Hokan grammar. Unpublished manuscript. Revised version of a paper presented at the Hokan-Penutian Workshop, 4-5 July 1989, University of Arizona.

Mithun, Marianne. 2000. Ergativity and language contact on the Oregon Coast: Alsea, Siuslaw and Coos. Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 26: Special Session on Syntax and Semantics of Indigenous Languages of the Americas, 77–95. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v26i2.1172

Mora-Marín, David F. 2016. Testing the Proto-Mayan-Mije-Sokean hypothesis. International Journal of American Linguistics 82(2). 125–180. https://doi.org/10.1086/685900

Vajda, Edward. 2018. Dene-Yeniseian: Progress and unanswered questions. Diachronica 35(2). 277–295. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.18001.vaj

Wichmann, Søren, Eric W. Holman & Cecil H. Brown (eds.). 2022. The ASJP Database, v. 20. https://asjp.clld.org/

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sune Gregersen (he/him) is a descriptive and comparative linguist currently working as a research fellow at the Department of Frisian Studies at Kiel University, Germany. His research interests include language contact, language documentation, the history of linguistics, and TAME categories in the world’s languages.