This book is the first in a planned series that will form a multi-fascicled Handbook of Comparative Bahnaric offering a reconstruction of the phonology and lexicon of each sub-group of the Bahnaric family (West Bahnaric, Central Bahnaric, North Bahnaric), and a consolidated reconstruction of Proto Bahnaric and discussion of its place within the Mon-Khmer family. The West Bahnaric sub-branch is the smallest with perhaps 100,000 speakers living in the three southern Lao provinces of Champassak, Attapeu and Sekong and adjacent areas of Cambodia. Historically it has been heavily influenced by Khmer and Katuic languages such as Ta'Oi. These days most speakers are bilingual in Lao, and there is a serious danger that Lao will replace the West Bahnaric languages entirely. The historical reconstruction offered here includes 1094 sets of lexical comparisons, with reconstructed proto-forms and extensive etymological commentary. Special attention has been given to the effects of language contact and borrowing in the formation of Proto West Bahnaric.

The Handbook of the Austroasiatic Languages is the first comprehensive reference work on this important language family of South and Southeast Asia. Austroasiatic languages are spoken by more than 100 million people, from central India to Vietnam, from Malaysia to Southern China, including national language Cambodian and Vietnamese, and more than 130 minority communities, large and small. The handbook comprises two parts, Overviews and Grammar Sketches: Part 1) The overview chapters cover typology, classification, historical reconstruction, plus a special overview of the Munda languages. Part 2) Some 27 scholars present grammar sketches of 21 languages, representing 12 of the 13 branches. The sketches are carefully prepared according to the editors’ unifying typological approach, ensuring analytical and notational comparability throughout.

Original Scholarly Monograph

This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

The handbook will offer a survey of the field of linguistics in the early 21st century for the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. The last half century has seen a great increase in work on language contact, work in genetic, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics, and since the 1990s especially documentation of endangered languages. The book will provide an account of work in these areas, focusing on the achievements of SEAsian linguistics, as well as the challenges and unresolved issues, and provide a survey of the relevant major publications and other available resources. We will address: Survey of the languages of the area, organized along genetic lines, with discussion of relevant political and cultural background issues Theoretical/descriptive and typological issues Genetic classification and historical linguistics Areal and contact linguistics Other areas of interest such as sociolinguistics, semantics, writing systems, etc. Resources (major monographs and monograph series, dictionaries, journals, electronic data bases, etc.) Grammar sketches of languages representative of the genetic and structural diversity of the region.

The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietnamese coast. Written by specialists in history, archaeology, anthropology, art history, and linguistics, these essays reassess the ways that the Cham have been studied.