California Indian Languages [Hardcover]

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basic structural features of more than two dozen language types, and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languagesfrom the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the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

Victor Golla, a leading expert on the native languages of California, is Professor of Anthropology at Humboldt State University. He is the editor ofThe Sapir-Kroeber Correspondnce: Letters Between Edward Sapir and Alfred Kroeber, 19051925and of several volumes ofThe Collected Works of Edward Sapir.

Victor Golla has been the leading scholar of California Indian languages for most of his professional life, and this book shows why. His ability to synthesize centuries of fieldwork and writings while bringing forward new ideas and fresh ways of looking at Californias famous linguistic diversity will make this the primary text for anyone interested in California languages. --Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley and author ofHow to Keep Your Language Alive

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