Kategoria BISAC: Foreign Language Study >> Indigenous Languages of the Americas

This is the first full-length reference grammar of Mam, a Mayan language spoken today by over 400,000 people in the western highlands of Guatemala and the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The result of over three years of extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, A Grammar of Mam, a Mayan Language is based on the dialect of Mam spoken by 12,000 people in San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan in the department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala.

England organizes A Grammar of Mam according to two complementary principles: to analyze Mam following basically traditional levels of grammatical...

The Inka empire, Tawantinsuyu, fell to Spanish invaders within a year's time (1532-1533), but Quechua, the language of the Inka, is still the primary or only language of millions of Inka descendants throughout the southern Andes. In this innovative study, Bruce Mannheim synthesizes all that is currently known about the history of Southern Peruvian Quechua since the Spanish invasion, providing new insights into the nature of language change in general, into the social and historical contexts of language change, and into the cultural conditioning of linguistic change.

Mannheim first...

Collected in this book are the personal life histories of four female St?at?imc elders: Beverley Frank, Gertrude Ned, Laura Thevarge, and Rose Agnes Whitley. These elders are among the last remaining fluent speakers of St?at?imcets, a severely imperilled Northern Interior Salish language, also known as Lillooet and spoken in the southwest interior of British Columbia. Their stories are presented in the original St?at?imcets as well as in English translation. A morpheme-by-morpheme gloss is provided for the purposes of linguistic analysis.

These texts are among the longest oral...

This work contains a comprehensive description of Kwaza, which is an endangered and unclassified indigenous language of Southern Rondonia, Brazil. The Kwaza language, also known in the literature as Koaia, is spoken by around 25 people today. Until recently, our knowledge of Kwaza was based on only three short word lists, from 1938, 1943 and 1984. Like the language, the culture and the history of its speakers are undocumented. The Kwaza people as an ethnic group have been decimated by increasing ecological, physical, social and cultural pressure from Western civilisation since contact in...