Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book serves as a reference to and brief historiography of Austroasiatic linguistics, the study of around 150 languages that are spoken in South and Southeast Asia. In the introduction, Sidwell discusses the emergence of Austroasiatic as a distinct language family and how constituent branches relate to each other. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part looks at the language group as a whole historiographically. The second part looks at each branch of the family in detail and surveys the literature devoted to each branch.

The section ‘The Austroasiatic phylum’ starts with a look at the first stage of scholarship on the language group in the years 1850-1950 with early works by James Richardson Logan, Francis Mason, Friedrich Max Müller, Robert Needham Cust, Augustus Henry Keane, Charles Forbes, and others. These grammarians wrote the first grammatical sketches of languages spoken in the region, by which they were the first to recognize their common characteristics and group them into a family, initially termed the Mon-Anam family.

A neogrammarian approach arose in the period 1900-1950 with the work of Wilhelm Schmidt, who proposed a classification of Austroasiatic composed of three main groupings: group 1 with Semang and Senoi; group 2 with Khasi, Nikobar, Wa, Palong, and Riang; and group 3 with Mon-Khmer, Munda, and Tscham. Schmidt’s ideas were not well received at the time, most notably by Charles Blagden, who proposed a different classification with Mon-Khmer dominating. Others, like George Grierson, were more sympathetic to Schmidt’s proposals and adopted his classification.

Comparative studies emerged in greater numbers in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the first classifications in this period came from Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow, who proposed nine main groups for the family. The new field of lexicostatistics also appeared during this period, which led field workers to collect survey word lists. They applied these lists to lexicostatistic methodologies that relied on arbitrary universal sets of meanings and ignored geography. The results obtained indicated a new way of dividing the larger groups into subgroups and caused a new wave of classification attempts based on statistical data. Thus, Gérard Diffloth published a classification in the 1974 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica recognizing the three main groups of Munda, Nicobarese, and Mon-Khmer, each with a number of subgroups. As S summarizes, the field is far from settled as scholars continue to revise the classifications

The second part of the book discusses in more detail each of the branches that are widely accepted. There are long sections on the Aslian, Bahnaric, Katuic, Khasian, Khmeric, Khmuic, Monic, Munda, Nicobaric, Palaungic, Pearic, and Vietic branches. Each section discusses the languages that are held to belong to the branch, their geographical distribution, and the scholarship dedicated to these specific languages. It also provides maps and color plates that illustrate the geographical organization of the branch and its internal classificatory structure.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the linguistic diversity of South and Southeast Asia, the Austroasiatic family, or any of the different subgroups or individual languages within the family. The literature review is thorough and researchers can find their way easily amid the rich work in the field.