Despite the fact that Miao-Yao (or Hmong-Mien) is one of the major language families of East and Southeast Asia, this work is only the second full-length descriptive grammar of any Miao-Yao language published in English. It focuses on Xong, a language belonging to the Miao branch of the family. Xong has approximately 900,000 speakers, the vast majority lives in Hunan and Guizhou Provinces in South-Central China. In particular, this description concentrates on several fully mutually intelligible Xong varieties spoken in Fenghuang County, located in the Hunan Province. In producing this work,...

This grammar provides the first modern, comprehensive description of Coastal Marind. It is a Papuan language spoken by the coastal-dwelling Marind-Anim, formerly expansionistic head-hunters of the Southern New Guinea lowlands. Like the other languages of the poorly known Anim family, Coastal Marind features astonishingly complex verb morphology and a range of unusual phenomena, including indexing of up to four arguments on the verb, verbal marking of focus (the 'Orientation' system), engagement prefixes tracking the attention of the addressee, and a system of four genders realised by...

Eyak (dAXunhyuuga’) is the traditional language of the Copper River Delta region of the Gulf of Alaska. Smallest of the Alaska Native languages, Eyak had nearly been forgotten by the scientific community by the early twentieth century. In 1963, recognizing both the severely endangered status of the language and its critical importance to the linguistic prehistory of Alaska, Michael Krauss began a systematic effort to document every aspect of the language, working with each of the few remaining speakers. Drawing on more than fifty years of research, this grammar provides the first...