36.1037, Reviews: The Indigenous Languages of the Americas: Gregersen (2025)

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Subject: 36.1037, Reviews: The Indigenous Languages of the Americas: Gregersen (2025)

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Date: 24-Mar-2025
From: Sune Gregersen [s.gregersen at hum.ku.dk]
Subject: Historical Linguistics, Language Documentation: Gregersen (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2023

Title: The Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Subtitle: History and Classification
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-indigenous-languages-of-the-americas-9780197673461?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Lyle Campbell

Reviewer: Sune Gregersen

SUMMARY
The Indigenous Languages of the Americas by Lyle Campbell is a
comprehensive handbook on the history of American Indigenous
languages. It contains a survey of the languages and language families
of the Americas, a critical discussion of some hypothesized distant
language relationships, and an account of various language contact
phenomena involving American Indigenous languages. According to the
introduction, the book aims both “to survey what is known” about this
topic and to discuss some of the remaining unresolved issues and
knowledge gaps (p. 2). It consists of nine chapters, an extensive
bibliography, and indices of languages, names, and subjects. It also
includes more than thirty maps as well as nested lists showing the
structure of the language families under discussion.
In the introductory Chapter 1, Campbell presents his overall aims and
discusses a number of terminological and methodological issues which
play a role throughout the book. These include problems concerning
language names and identification – such as the numerous Middle
American languages historically called ‘Popoluca’ (with spelling
variants) – the endangerment of American Indigenous languages, and the
use of lexicostatistical methods in language classification. Campbell
also discusses the problem of relating historical linguistic findings
to genetic and archaeological evidence, noting that the linguistic
diversity of the Americas – with c. 170 recognized language families
and isolates – is consistent “with any of a large number of possible
hypotheses about the possible first peoples in the Americas” (p. 20).
Chapters 2 to 4 survey the language families and isolates of the
Americas from north to south: Chapter 2 covers “North American Indian
Languages North of Mexico”, i.e. the Indigenous languages of
Greenland, Canada, and the United States; Chapter 3 deals with “Middle
American Languages (Mexico and Central America)”; and Chapter 4 is
about the “Indigenous Languages of South America”. Uto-Aztecan
languages are treated in Chapter 2 (pp. 82–92), except the Nahua
(Aztecan) branch, which is discussed in Chapter 3 (pp. 163–165); three
language families which extend from South America into Middle America
– Arawakan, Chibchan, and Chocoan – are treated in Chapter 4 (pp.
189–194, 207–212, 214–215). For each language family, Campbell gives
an overview of its internal structure, discusses the most important
historical linguistic work and hypotheses about external
relationships, and – where such work has been done – lists the
phonemes reconstructed for the proto-language. For almost all of the
language families, the overview also gives basic information on each
individual language, such as its (historical) location and documentary
status. Exceptions to this include the large Otomanguean,
Pano-Takanan, Tukanoan, and Tupían language families (pp. 157–163,
244–248, 258–267), where the overview focusses on the entire family
rather than the individual members. The overall structure also differs
between the three survey chapters. The North American language
families in Chapter 2 are discussed in rough geographical order,
approximately from north to south and west to east. In Chapter 3 on
Middle American languages, Campbell first treats the language families
belonging to the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, a large Sprachbund
extending from central Mexico to northwestern Costa Rica.
“Non-Mesoamerican” language families are then discussed, i.e.
languages of Middle America not belonging to this Sprachbund. In
Chapter 4, finally, the language families of South America are treated
in alphabetical order.
Chapter 5 is devoted to “Unclassified and Spurious Languages” in the
Americas, i.e. languages which are “so poorly attested that it is
impossible to classify them” (p. 280) as well as various kinds of
linguistic “phantoms”. Campbell first gives an overview of
unclassified languages in North, Middle, and South America, many of
them only known from short wordlists or not recorded at all. He then
discusses various non-existent languages which have been thought to
exist, some of them due to deliberate hoaxes (e.g. Taensa, pp.
330–331), others to misinterpretations of linguistic evidence (e.g.
Aksanás, p. 333) or simple misreadings (e.g. Membreno, p. 332, in fact
the name of an author; cf. also Campbell 1988: 609). The chapter ends
with a brief discussion of made-up languages encountered by the author
in his own fieldwork and some of the possible motivations behind such
fakes (a topic also discussed at greater length in Campbell 2014).
Chapter 6, “Distant Linguistic Relationships”, deals with a number of
proposals for larger language families, also referred to as ‘stocks’,
‘phyla’, or ‘macro-families’ in the literature (Campbell advises
against these terms; cf. pp. 9–10, 340). The chapter begins with a
brief discussion of some recent “success stories” where linguistic
relationships have been established or at least shown to be probable,
such as the Pano-Takanan family combining Panoan and Takanan and the
Plateau family linking Klamath-Modoc [kla], Molala [mbe], and the
Sahaptian languages. Not all of these are reflected in the
classification presented in Chapters 2–4, however; for instance, while
Campbell describes Mora-Marín’s (2016) evidence for Mayan–Mixe-Zoquean
as “very encouraging” (p. 366), Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean are listed as
separate families in the chapter on Middle American languages, and I
found no mention of the hypothesis in that chapter (pp. 148–157).
After the success stories follow some methodological remarks on the
importance of identifying regular sound correspondences between
languages, not just surface similarities. Campbell questions the value
of lexicostatistical methods like the Automated Similarity Judgment
Program (ASJP; see Holman et al. 2008; Wichmann et al. 2022) because
such methods do not distinguish between real cognates and similarities
due to contact or chance. The main part of the chapter then discusses
a number of long-distance relationships which have either recently
been proposed or received renewed interest. Campbell pays particular
attention to proposals which he judges to be unconvincing based on
standard historical-comparative criteria. Among these are the Hokan
hypothesis (Dixon & Kroeber 1913; Kaufman 2015), the proposed
Dene-Yeniseian family linking Na-Dene with the Yeniseian languages of
Siberia (Vajda 2018), and a “Chitimacha-Totozoquean” proposal linking
Chitimacha [ctm] (southern Louisiana) with the Totonacan and
Mixe-Zoquean families of Mesoamerica (Brown et al. 2014). Other
proposals, such as Yok-Utian (p. 358) and the aforementioned
Mayan–Mixe-Zoquean (p. 366), are reviewed more favourably and only
discussed briefly. The chapter also includes two appendices, one
reviewing the evidence for Greenberg’s (1987) “Macro-Panoan”
hypothesis, the other containing a list of some of the many
long-distance relationships that have been proposed since the 19th
century.
The final three chapters deal with various aspects of language contact
involving American Indigenous languages. In Chapter 7, “Linguistic
Areas of the Americas”, Campbell reviews some thirty proposed
Sprachbünde, again moving roughly from north to south. For each
putative linguistic area, Campbell surveys the most important
literature and some salient linguistic features characterizing the
languages involved. In some cases a more detailed discussion is
provided, such as the Northwest Coast linguistic area running from
Alaska to Oregon (pp. 389–393), the Southeast linguistic area covering
most of the American South (pp. 409–413), and the Mesoamerican
linguistic area already mentioned above (pp. 413–422). Chapter 8,
“Contact Languages”, deals with pidgins, línguas gerais, lingua
francas, mixed languages, and some of the sociocultural factors that
have played a role in language contact in South America. Some of these
contact languages, such as Chinook Jargon (Chinook Wawa) [chn] are
fairly well-known, whereas others are entirely undocumented. ‘Línguas
gerais’ in this context refers to two Tupían languages, Nheengatu
[yrl] and Língua Geral do Sul (also Língua Geral Paulista, cf. p.
261), which developed in Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries under heavy Portuguese influence.
The section on lingua francas gives a brief overview of languages
which sources indicate were used for interethnic communication; most
of these are also discussed in Chapters 2–4. The section on mixed
languages discusses the rare cases where different components of a
language have different sources, such as Michif [crg], which combines
a French-based nominal system with a verbal system from Plains Cree,
and Media Lengua [mue], which combines Spanish vocabulary with Quechua
grammar. Campbell also discusses some of the sociocultural factors
that have influenced patterns of language contact in South America,
most importantly the prevalence of linguistic exogamy in some areas.
Finally, Chapter 9 is devoted to “Loanwords and Other New Words in the
Indigenous Languages of the Americas”, i.e. the lexical effects of
language contact. Among the topics covered are Wanderwörter, calques,
borrowing between American and European languages, and the loanword
avoidance that has been observed in many American languages. This last
phenomenon is particularly interesting because the languages involved
often show clear structural evidence of language contact, meaning that
lexical influence is not a prerequisite for structural influence.
EVALUATION
Campbell’s handbook is a very useful guide to the state of the art of
American historical linguistics. It surveys what is currently known
about American Indigenous languages and their classification and
contains many interesting discussions of controversies and unresolved
questions in the field. Campbell notes in the preface (p. xii) that
the book is not meant as a second edition of his 1997 handbook, and
despite some obvious overlap the two books do not cover exactly the
same topics. Whereas Campbell (1997) includes a detailed survey of the
history of American linguistics, this topic receives little attention
in the present book, presumably because there is relatively little new
to add. By contrast, the new book has more chapters dealing with
language contact, reflecting the considerable activity in this
linguistic subfield in the last few decades. These differences appear
well-motivated, as does Campbell’s decision to only focus on recent
proposals and reassessments in the chapter on possible distant
linguistic relationships, referring the reader to older work where
relevant.
The book is written in a lucid and engaging style and lays out its
arguments and evidence in a transparent way. Specialist terms are
explained throughout the book, making it accessible not just to
linguists, but also to students and interested readers from other
fields. Still, some aspects of the book could have been more
user-friendly. In Chapters 2 and 3, which are not ordered
alphabetically, it is somewhat cumbersome to look up information on an
individual language family or isolate. While the language families
under discussion are indicated with boldface, they are not included in
the table of contents or the running head. Hence, to look for the
discussion of a specific family, one either has to leaf through the
relevant chapter until one finds it or consult the index of languages.
In the index, in turn, no distinction is made between the main
treatment of a language family and pages where it is only discussed in
passing; it would have been helpful to highlight the reference to the
principal discussion, e.g. with boldface. Different font styles or
other typographical means would also have been useful in other places.
In Chapter 4, the overviews of language families mention where
individual languages are (or were) spoken, but this information is not
visibly set off from the language names, occasionally resulting in
unwieldy entries like “Ecuador-Colombia Ecuador, Colombia” and
“Northern Bolivian Quechua (Bolivian Quechua) Bolivia” (p. 251);(by
contrast, geographical information is italicized in Campbell (1997).
Tables would have been a more reader-friendly solution in some places,
e.g. for the list of isolates or small families at the bottom of p.
187, the obsolete language names on p. 330, and the typical Amazonian
linguistic traits on p. 424.
Occasionally, Campbell hints at interesting phenomena where some more
detail would have been welcome. Readers not already familiar with the
history of Kickapoo [kic], originally spoken in the Midwestern United
States, may wonder under what circumstances a group of speakers
settled in Mexico (p. 128); a partial answer is given in Campbell
(1997: 402). Similarly, one might wonder why some Onondaga [ono]
speakers moved to Ontario after the American revolution, as mentioned
in passing on p. 118. The decipherment of Epi-Olmec is said to be a
“stunning” achievement (p. 157), but a bit of information on this
writing system would help the reader appreciate why this is the case.
The existence of Indigenous sign languages is mentioned in a few
places (pp. 25, 107, 176), but the only one discussed explicitly is
Plains Sign Language [psd] (p. 449). Some more information could also
have been provided on the history of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic)
[kal]. While it is formally correct that “Greenland officially became
Danish territory in 1814” (p. 34), it is worth adding that
Dano-Norwegian (re)colonization of Greenland began almost a century
earlier, with the establishment of a mission in present-day Nuuk in
1721. This is linguistically relevant because it led to the
development of a writing system and the first linguistic studies of
the language (Dorais 2010: 113, 173; Bergsland & Rischel 1986). In the
list of (partially) ergative languages in the Northwest Coast
linguistic area (p. 391), Alsea [aes] and Siuslaw [sis] are missing,
and one might have added that the ergative marker in these languages
appears to have been borrowed from Coosan (Mithun 2000), thus
underscoring the significant historical language contact in this area.
Finally, in some places a few glossed examples would have been helpful
to illustrate the phenomena under discussion, such as the complex
verbal templates in Na-Dene and Yeniseian (pp. 363–365) or the
similarities between passive constructions in Tewa and Apachean (p.
404).
Another useful addition would have been more consistent
cross-referencing to Glottolog (Hammarström et al. 2021) and
Ethnologue (Eberhard et al. 2023). While Campbell does refer to both
of these works, especially in the overview of spurious languages, ISO
codes for the languages are not generally provided (Truká [tka] on p.
326 is an exception). Given the many problems involved in referring to
languages – different names for the same language, the same name for
different languages, differences in spelling, and so on (cf. pp. 4–8)
– this would have been an obvious way to avoid potential ambiguities.
Points of disagreement with Ethnologue are occasionally mentioned in
Chapters 3 and 4, but not with the – also widely used – Glottolog
classification. Some differences between Campbell’s classification and
the version of Glottolog he refers to (Hammarström et al. 2021)
include the following: Whereas Campbell recognizes a Plateau language
family (pp. 56–58) consisting of Klamath-Modoc [kla], Molale [mbe],
and the Sahaptian languages, this is not recognized by Glottolog;
Campbell recognizes a Ritwan branch of Algic (pp. 124, 132), while
Glottolog treats Wiyot [wiy] and Yurok [yur] as family-level isolates;
and while Campbell considers Gününa Küne (Puelche) [pue] to be a
member of the Chonan family (p. 216), Glottolog calls the observed
parallels “interesting but not conclusive”.
An important point which becomes clear while reading Campbell’s book
is how dependent historical linguistics and language classification
are on adequate documentation. This is most obvious in the case of
dormant languages which remain unclassified because the documentation
is too limited, but also from the telling examples of languages which
were only documented from the last fluent speaker or speakers (e.g.
Kitsai [kii], p. 105, and Chitimacha [ctm], p. 107). As hinted at in
the introduction, the loss of linguistic diversity is particularly
tragic in the case of poorly documented languages because “we cannot
classify them nor understand their histories, ever, and the peoples
involved can do nothing to recover their languages” (p. 11).
Throughout the book, Campbell makes several suggestions for future
historical linguistic work, but it would have been interesting to also
see some concrete recommendations from a language documentation
perspective – for instance, are there cases of entire (hypothesized)
language families being especially poorly documented and in urgent
need of documentation (cf. Hammarström 2010), or are there unanswered
questions which the documentation of a particular language might help
resolve? In a number of places, Campbell also refers to already
dormant languages where unpublished documentation exists, such as
Mutsun [css] (p. 64) and Natchez [ncz] (p. 108). Here one could also
have offered some suggestions for future philological and descriptive
research, for instance for linguists who, for whatever reason, are not
able to carry out language documentation themselves.
There is an unfortunate number of misspellings and misprints in the
book, including in quotations and language and author names. Examples
include “custer” (p. 59), “vaariaties” (76), “Swizz-born” (96),
“Jeoffrey” for Geoffrey (111) and “Lin” for Linn (114), “dialecst”
(126), “Mapdungun” (187), “sparce” (236), “11000 CE” (252), “Amazaon”
(265), “exited” for existed (299), “lisited” (311), “sate” (325),
“Wandewort” (357), “comarrison” (360), “vegismal” for vigesimal (420),
“Apalalchee” (444), and “Delancey” for DeLancey (passim). Typos in
language names are also found in some of the maps, e.g. “Nomlak” (Map
2.6), “O'Odham” (Map 2.7), “Tekelma” (Map 7.1), “Flarthead” and
“Salishans” for Salishan (Map 7.2). The bibliography contains quite a
few typos in titles and publisher names (e.g. under Baegert 1771;
Berman 1996; Bolaños Quiñonez 2016) as well as some duplicate entries
(Bengtson 1991a and 1991b; Elliot 1994 and Elliott 1994). While such
mistakes do not interfere with the understanding of the content, they
do leave one with the impression that this otherwise well-written and
informative book would have benefitted from more careful copy-editing.
REFERENCES
Bergsland, Knut & Jørgen Rischel (eds.). 1986. Pioneers of Eskimo
grammar: Hans Egede’s and Albert Top’s early manuscripts on
Greenlandic (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 21).
Copenhagen: The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.
https://lingvistkredsen.ku.dk/udgivelser/travaux/arkiv/tclc_21/
Brown, Cecil H., Søren Wichmann, and David Beck. 2014. Chitimacha: A
Mesoamerican language in the Lower Mississippi Valley. International
Journal of American Linguistics 80. 425–474.
https://doi.org/10.1086/677911
Campbell, Lyle. 1988. Review article of Greenberg (1987). Language
64(3). 591–615. https://doi.org/10.2307/414535
Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian languages: The historical
linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Campbell, Lyle. 2014. How to “fake” a language. Estudios de
Lingüística Chibcha 33. 63–74.
Dixon, Roland B., & A. L. Kroeber. 1913. New linguistic families in
California. American Anthropologist 15(4). 647–655.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/659723
Dorais, Louis-Jacques. 2010. The language of the Inuit: Syntax,
semantics and society in the Arctic. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons & Charles D. Fennig. 2023.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 26th edn. Dallas: SIL
International. http://www.ethnologue.com
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Hammarström, Harald. 2010. The status of the least documented language
families in the world. Language Documentation & Conservation 4.
177–212. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4478
Hammarström, Harald, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath & Sebastian
Bank. 2021. Glottolog, v. 4.4. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4761960
Holman, Eric W., Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Viveka Velupillai,
André Müller & Dik Bakker. 2008. Explorations in automated language
classification. Folia Linguistica 42(3–4). 331–354.
https://doi.org/10.1515/FLIN.2008.331
Kaufman, Terrence. 2015. Some hypotheses regarding proto-Hokan
grammar. Unpublished manuscript. Revised version of a paper presented
at the Hokan-Penutian Workshop, 4-5 July 1989, University of Arizona.
Mithun, Marianne. 2000. Ergativity and language contact on the Oregon
Coast: Alsea, Siuslaw and Coos. Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 26:
Special Session on Syntax and Semantics of Indigenous Languages of the
Americas, 77–95. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v26i2.1172
Mora-Marín, David F. 2016. Testing the Proto-Mayan-Mije-Sokean
hypothesis. International Journal of American Linguistics 82(2).
125–180. https://doi.org/10.1086/685900
Vajda, Edward. 2018. Dene-Yeniseian: Progress and unanswered
questions. Diachronica 35(2). 277–295.
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.18001.vaj
Wichmann, Søren, Eric W. Holman & Cecil H. Brown (eds.). 2022. The
ASJP Database, v. 20. https://asjp.clld.org/
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sune Gregersen (he/him) is a descriptive and comparative linguist
currently working as a research fellow at the Department of Frisian
Studies at Kiel University, Germany. His research interests include
language contact, language documentation, the history of linguistics,
and TAME categories in the world’s languages.



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