Languages and Their Status

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Along with the other volume in the series, "Languages and their speakers," this is one of the top 10 books on linguistics. The book consists of a set of articles/chapters on various languages. For each language, it walks the reader through an analysis of some grammatical aspect of that language, and it also talks about the social environment of that language and its speakers. For instance, in the chapter on Mohawk, it walks you through an analysis of polysynthetic morphology. (If you're not a linguist: that's a way of forming words that seems very exotic if your native language is English.) It also talks about the near-death of the Mohawk language in Canada, and how an effective language maintenance program was instituted for Mohawk there.

The book is very, very readable. I've often used chapters from it as extra-credit assignments in introductory linguistics courses, and I've read it for fun more than once myself.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Along with the other volume in the series, "Languages and their speakers," this is one of the top 10 books on linguistics. The book consists of a set of articles/chapters on various languages. For each language, it walks the reader through an analysis of some grammatical aspect of that language, and it also talks about the social environment of that language and its speakers. For instance, in the chapter on Mohawk, it walks you through an analysis of polysynthetic morphology. (If you're not a linguist: that's a way of forming words that seems very exotic if your native language is English.) It also talks about the near-death of the Mohawk language in Canada, and how an effective language maintenance program was instituted for Mohawk there.

The book is very, very readable. I've often used chapters from it as extra-credit assignments in introductory linguistics courses, and I've read it for fun more than once myself.