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The Michif language - spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada - is considered an "impossible language" since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses historical research and fieldwork data to present the first detailed analysis of this language and how it came into being.

Documents Easter Island's enigmatic script, Rongorongo, Oceania's only known pre-20th-century writing system. This study of this eloquent graphic achievement shows full transcriptions of all the 25 surviving Rongorongo inscriptions, with detailed photographs of nearly all the incised artefacts.

Social and ethnic identity are nowhere more enmeshed with language than in Israel. Words and Stones explores the politics of identity in Israel through an analysis of the social life of language. By examining the social choices Israelis make when they speak, and the social meanings such choices produce, Daniel Lefkowitz reveals how Israeli identities are negotiated through language.

Using 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Mopan Maya in Belize, the author examines the semantic complexity of particular kinship terms used among Mopan women and children, showing that a culture-specific analysis of their terms is superior to other non-ethnographically-based methods.

This collection of previously unpublished papers explores various indigenous Andean languages and cultures in the context of new anthropological thinking about `texts' and textuality. The contributors focus on the ways socially subordinated cultural groups construct distinctive historical identities.

An analysis of grammar which claims that grammaticalization theory has advanced to the point that it can be used with the comparative method to reconstruct the grammar of Proto-Languages, illustrated by the Cariban language family of South America. The text is volume 18 in the OXFORD STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS series.

Illiteracy problems are worldwide, and growing. Taking "The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education", as their starting point, in this volume the authors assess the nature and significance of the events that have taken place since then, providing a global overview.

This volume contains eight essays that are at the intesection of two important areas within linguistics: conversational analysis, and the use of narrative in the creation, mediation, and resolution of conflict. The contributors explore these issues in a variety of cultures and languages.

Puckett takes a new look at the relationship between language, society, and economics, by examining how people talk about work in a rural Appalachian community. Through analysis of conversations in casual yet commercial contexts, she finds that the construction and maintenance of this discourse is essential to socio-economic relationships.

This volume describes a method for interpreting oral literature that enables dialogue between insiders and outsiders of a tradition. Seitel illustrates this method with lively examples from Haya (from Northwestern Tanzania) proverbs, folktales, and heroic verse.

This work demonstrates that every language has its "key concepts" (expressed in key words) and that these concepts reflect the core values of the culture in question. It shows that cultures can be revealingly studied, compared and explained to outsiders through their key concepts.

Studying the language of judges in courtrooms, the author of this text demonstrates that they are not impartial arbiters of due process, but are influenced by their own political-ideological stance and interpretation of the law. The effect on their interaction with defendants is shown.

Kronenfeld aims to present a comprehensive understanding of the process by which we use words in speech to refer to things in the world, and to develop a theory of the semantics of natural language which can account adequately for native speakers' intuitions regarding word meanings and their word usage.

Nuckolls studies the occurrence of sound-symbolic words - words that bear resemblance to phenomena they attempt to describe - in an Ecuadorian dialect of Quechua, a major South American language. She explores how the speakers describe everyday experience and how sound-symbolism is integral to their way of thinking and speaking.

Uncovering the structures and functions of conversational narratives uttered within natural social networks, the author shows how working-class Javanese women discursively construct identity and meaning within the constraints of a hierarchical social order through silences, or the "unsaid".

This volume contains eight essays that are at the intersection of two important areas within linguistics: conversational analysis, and the use of narrative in the creation, mediation, and resolution of conflict. The contributors explore these issues in a variety of cultures and languages.

This text challenges theories on the nature of social stratification. The author went to Pohnpei and studied how people use language and other semiotic codes to reproduce and manipulate status differences. The result is this view of how language works to create power and social inequality.

This text examines ethnicity and discourse in Southwestern Alaska, and should be of interest to linguists and anthropologists.

Native American languages are spoken from Siberia to Greenland. Campbell's project is to take stock of what is known about the history of Native American languages and in the process examine the state of American Indian historical linguistics.

The Athabaskan language family, which constitutes the largest group of Amerindian languages, and includes languages like Navajo and Apache, poses linguistic challenges. This is a collection of articles on syntax, semantics, and morphology as well as a look at the languages' struggle to survive.

A study of the complaints of medical patients in rural Bangladesh, and how they are connected to and reveal the patient's social world, social relations, sense of self, ideology of language and his/her relation to power. It also focuses on the troubles besetting genres of complaint in Bangladesh.

This collection of previously unpublished case-studies of a number of Austronesian and Papuan languages illustrates the means that these languages offer to their speakers for referring to space. Understanding the differences between the various systems of spatial reference requires not just linguistic, but also cultural, historical, and geographical knowledge.

"Language ideologies" refers to the representation (explicit or implicit) of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. These essays examine definitions and conceptions of language focusing on how such activity organizes individuals, institutions and their interrelationships.

The author of this study explores the nature of acculturation in the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans. Specifically, he examines how Native American languages adjusted to the introduction of foreign objects and concepts after 1492, discerning patterns of linguistics.

"Language ideologies" refers to the representation (explicit or implicit) of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. These essays examine definitions and conceptions of language focusing on how such activity organizes individuals, institutions and their interrelationships.

This is a compilation of basic linguistic and anthropological information about the Korowai of Irian Jaya (the western half of New Guinea). Remote and untouched by the modern world, they are threatened by the larger Indonesian society. Their language, oral literature, and ethnography are examined in a systematic and integrated manner.

This study examines the system of classificatory particles - the divisions of the noun lexicon into distinct classes - in Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobrian Islanders of Papua New Guinea. The author uses data gathered in field research.