Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University in L’viv

The present volumes are the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth yearbooks published by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists under the auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies of UNESCO. The 2002 volume is the last to have been compiled at the National Library of the Netherlands; the 2003 volume was compiled at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology. The bibliographies contain substantial references (19107 titles in 2002 and 14792 titles in 2003) with a particular focus on less described and lesser known languages.

Many scholars will find the structure of the books very helpful, much like the appendix to an encyclopaedia of linguistics. The volumes open with published bibliographical guides and reviews, proceedings of conferences, chronicles, Festschriften, and other collections. The compilers’ assiduous attention to the biographical data of linguists is evident in Section 0.2.3 of ‘General linguistics and related disciplines’.

The section for general linguistics starts with a thematic bibliography. What follows is the history of linguistics that is based on the territorial division, i.e. Western and Non-Western traditions, the latter concerning Indian and Arab linguistics. Within the Western tradition, the chronological division is applied (Antiquity, Middle ages, Renaissance, the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century), followed by linguistic theory and methodology, philosophy of language, semiotics, interlinguistics, and applied linguistics. Afterwards follow thirteen sections concerning the main branches of linguistics: phonetics and phonology; grammar; lexicon (lexicology and lexicography); semantics and pragmatics; stylistics; metrics and versification; translation; scripts and orthography; psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics (including origin of language); sociolinguistics and dialectology; historical and comparative linguistics; mathematical and computational linguistics (including machine translation); and onomastics. These sections cross-reference the special ‘languages’ part of the bibliography.

The bibliographies cover thirteen language groups (including pidgins and creoles), along with Nostratic and sign languages, in which languages are listed according to genealogy (e.g. Indo-European, Hamito-Semitic, Dravidian languages) or territory (e.g. Asianic, Mediterranian, Caucasian languages). Two language isolates receive their own sections, Basque and Burushaski. The exact number of all languages listed in these volumes is ambiguous in any case because of difficulties in distinguishing between languages and dialects.

The Indo-European family is the most extensive group, covering a vast territorial and chronological space. The coverage is very variable in size: A rich literature is devoted to such languages as French, German, English and Polish, while other languages have much smaller entries reflecting lesser scholarly attention. Specialists might quibble with some of the distinctions drawn by the editors. Thus, Kashubian and Rusyn are listed as Slavonic languages: the former is often considered a dialect of Polish, and the latter has not been proven to differ from Ukrainian.

This issue sometimes carries political overtones. The Moravians are strongly regarded as Czechs. Similarly, as the only surviving form of the Pomeranian language, Kashubian may be seen as a full-fledged language and it is taught in state schools. However, the Rusyn language does not possess any divergent features in syntax and morphology that would not have originated from the Ukrainian vernacular.

Another terminological confusion might sow misconceptions concerning the ‘Old Russian’ language, which might be taken as referring to a direct ancestral form of contemporary Russian, whereas in fact it refers to the Kyivan recension of Church Slavonic, for which the proper term is the Old Rus’ language.

Simultaneously, the bibliographies do not register the Moldavian (Moldovan) language among other Romance languages. While the question of whether Moldovan is a separate language from Romanian is hotly disputed and fraught with political overtones, as it is the state language of the Republic of Moldova, it deserves a wider presentation in the reference literature. In short, the reader should bear in mind that the names of languages in different subdivisions and cross-references reflect the decisions of the authors of the articles listed and should therefore be viewed critically.

The principal virtue of these bibliographies is their length. The periodicals included alone amount to 2778 and 2726, respectively, exclusive of books and non-periodical collections. This work is possible due to the cooperation of bibliographers from more than twenty countries and the strenuous job of four editors. Especially noteworthy is the high-quality, reader-friendly name index, which represents immense labor on the part of the compilers

The bibliographical description includes all the obligatory components in accordance with the rules of the International Standard Bibliographic Description of the International Federation of Library Associations. The alphabetical order does not treat letters with diacritics separately, but lists them with the simple English/French letter. Some titles are given with an English-language translation in addition to a transcription of the original, a practice that would be desirable for a wider range of languages, but which is motivated by the policy of giving the English version only when it was present in the original publication. Additionally Greek-language titles are granted the privilege of appearing in the original script; all other scripts are Latinized. Perhaps it would be reasonably convenient to start entries with an English-language title and retain the original title in the original script if the software allows.

Researchers will greatly benefit from the editors’ stress on papers published outside Western Europe and North America. The criteria of representativeness and bilateralness (multilateralness) cross here to aid contemporary international linguistic cooperation, adding much to current Internet-oriented unsystematized search. These bibliographies provide an invaluable resource in language studies.