The Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Lyle Campbell, PhD is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawai'i Manoa. His specializations include Indigenous languages of the Americas, historical linguistic documentation, fieldwork, and language typology. He has held appointments in Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Linguistics, and Spanish.

• Preface Acknowledgements Phonetic symbols AbbreviationsChapter 1. IntroductionChapter 2. North American Indian Languages North of MexicoChapter 3. Middle American languages (Mexico and Central America) Chapter 4. Indigenous Languages of South American Chapter 5. Unclassified and Spurious LanguagesChapter 6. Distant Linguistic RelationshipsChapter 7. Linguistic Areas of the Americas Chapter 8. Contact LanguagesChapter 9. Loanwords and other New Words in the Indigenous Languages of the AmericasReferences

Campbell's book is a comprehensive guide to the Indigenous languages of North, Central, and South America and should be of use to any interested reader. It particularly covers the history and current state of the classification of these languages into families, subfamilies, and superfamilies, with updated evaluations of various traditional and recent methods for doing this and of claims of distant relationships. Linguistic areas and the diffusion of words and features between and among related and unrelated languages are also treated, as are contact languages. Particular attention is paid to ambiguous and confusing language and language-group names that appear in the literature.