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A Minority South Ryukyuan Language of the Miyako Islands
Spoken on Kurima, a miniscule island in the Miyakojima municipality in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, Kurima-Miyako is a South Ryukyuan topolect, a regional variant of the Miyako language. With most fluent speakers aged 80 or older and the island’s depopulation progressing, the topolect of Kurima faces imminent extinction, a reflection of a common pattern in the Ryukyus, whereupon the vernaculars of small islands and isolated remote areas have been facing multifold minorization for decades on the part of the dominant variety/varieties of the area (Shimoji and Hirara in the case of Kurima), Okinawan, and standard Japanese. Responding to the urgent task of producing a comprehensive description while it still has native speakers, the present volume is the first ever attempt at a systemic presentation of the Kurima topolect in any language. It also uses comparative evidence from Ryukyuan and Mainland Japonic languages to provide new proto-language reconstructions and offer insights into the history of Japonic languages.
Editor-in-Chief:
This series deals specifically with contact languages, i.e. new languages that emerged out of contact between two or more ethnolinguistic groups, and includes pidgins, creoles, pidgincreoles, and mixed languages. It welcomes comprehensive grammatical descriptions and collections of grammatical sketches of hitherto undescribed or underdescribed varieties. Creoles and pidgins with both European and non-European lexifiers are of interest. In the case of mixed languages, it is desirable that the components from the different source languages are indicated graphically.

We encourage a unifying typological approach, so that these volumes are both accessible to typologists coming from different theoretical backgrounds and intelligible to the wider linguistic readership. Authors are expected to follow Leipzig glossing rules and IPA conventions. The editors may specify the TOC structure and the list of abbreviations; these will be discussed with authors at the book proposal stage.

This is a peer-reviewed series; the editors will work with authors to ensure high standards. Interested scholars should contact the series editor Dr Peter Bakker. Please direct all other correspondence to Associate Editor Elisa Perotti.
The Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte / Word Atlas of Arabic Dialects (WAD) intends to provide an unprecedented survey of the lexical richness and diversity of the Arabic dialects as spoken from Uzbekistan to Mauretania and Nigeria, from Malta to Sudan, and including the Ki-Nubi Creole as spoken in Uganda and Kenya. The multilingual word atlas consists of four volumes in total with some 500 onomasiological maps in full colour. Each map presents a topic or notion and its equivalents in Arabic as collected from the dialectological literature (dictionaries, grammars, text collections, ethnographic reports, etc.), from the editors’ own field work, from questionnaires filled out by native speakers or by experts for a certain dialect region, and also from the internet. Polyglot legends in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian accompany the maps to facilitate further access. Each map is followed by a commentary in German, providing more details about the sources and the individual forms, and discussing semantic and etymological issues. All quotations are in their original language. The maps mainly show lexical types, detailed and concrete forms are given in the commentaries. An introduction is provided in Volume 1 in both German and English. Indices of all lexemes in the atlas will be available for each volume.
The first volume Band I: Mensch, Natur, Fauna und Flora / Volume 1: Mankind, Nature, Fauna and Flora contains subjects such as ‘family members’, ‘professions’, ‘human qualities’.
The second volume, Band II: Materielle Kultur, deals with material culture (‘house’, ‘utensils’, ‘food’, ‘clothing’, ‘vehicles’, etc.).
The third volume Band III: Verben, Adjektive, Zeit und Zahlen focuses on verbs, and adjectives.
The forth volume Band IV: Funktionswörter und Phraseologisches contains functionwords and some phraseological items.
The atlas is indispensable for everyone interested in the modern spoken Arabic language, as well as for dialectologists and for semanticists.
Author:
This book combines in-depth grammatical analysis with dialectology and typology. It presents important features of Jewish Neo-Aramaic from Dohok (Iraqi Kurdistan), a previously undocumented dialect that is now on the verge of extinction. The first Neo-Aramaic grammar to offer data glossing, this book is accessible for and highly relevant to Semitists, language typologists and historical linguists. It focuses especially on phonology, verbal morphosyntax and syntax. The monograph also highlights features that characterise the wider lišana deni dialect group, which is the most widespread Jewish Neo-Aramaic today. The book leverages the staggering microvariation persisting within North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic to reconstruct the grammaticalisation of some key Neo-Aramaic constructions. It also includes a text sample of prime historiographic value (Jews of Iraq during the Second World War).
Author:
Volume Editors: and
Haim Blanc’s Communal Dialects in Baghdad is one of the most influential works ever written on the on the linguistic diachrony of vernacular Arabic. Based on original fieldwork conducted during the years 1957–1962, this book portaits the extensive regional continuum of modern spoken Arabic stretching across parts of Mesopotamia and N. Syria, evinced by the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian speech communities in Baghdad.
Typos and other mistakes have been corrected in this reprint, which is accompanied by an Editorial Preamble by Alexander Borg and a Foreword by Paul Wexler, and contains references to the original page numbers.
The development of the prosodic system from Indo-European to Balto-Slavic is dominated by two major innovations: the rise of mobility and the rise of acuteness. This book provides a new account of the latter. It stands out from previous works for being informed by recent advances in phonological typology and tonogenesis and, especially, for its comprehensiveness. All matters related to the rise of acuteness are treated in detail. As a result, the book includes new insights on several issues of Balto-Slavic historical phonology and morphology as well.
Cerea, madamin, andoma bin? Less than a century ago, this was one of the most frequent greetings heard in Piedmont, a region in northwest Italy. Today, however, Piedmontese is severely endangered.
This volume presents the first widely accessible and comprehensive grammatical description of the contemporary koine, covering its phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics and typology, and drawing examples from both oral and written sources. Data on the history of the language and the local dialects and notes on revitalization efforts are also included.
Language revitalisation continues to gain importance as communities across the world seek to protect and revitalise languages under pressure from histories of colonisation, imperialism and globalisation. Language revitalisation practices and outcomes also provide researchers with new perspectives on language at many levels because of the deliberate and politicised engagement participants have in the processof (re)developing their languages.

Language Revitalisation and Language Development explores a range of issues connected to language revitalisation and language development from a community- and speaker-centred perspective with a particular focus on investigating relationships among a variety of social factors identified by language users, who are significant drivers of decision-making, as well as the results of these processes. This allows researchers to identify patterns of influence, decision-making, authority and aesthetics that on a daily basis lead to the re-emerging forms of revitalised languages. Books in this series also report on the analysis of language revitalisation data to address key questions within the field across areas such as sociolinguistics, language change, language contact, language variation, and acquisition.

This is a peer-reviewed series; the editors will work with authors to ensure high standards.
Volume Editors: and
What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited.
This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.