Reviewed by Melanie McComsey, University of California, San Diego

Amerindian languages have long enjoyed a prominent place in linguistics, but too often they are studied without regard to their long history of contact with European languages. The present book offers rigorous scholarship on Amerindian typology that is also firmly rooted in the region’s history of linguistic contact.

A brief introduction by the editors situates the book in contact linguistics literature. The first chapter, ‘“Sticky” discourse markers in language contact between unrelated languages: Tojolab’al (Mayan) and Spanish,’ by Mary Jill Brody, illustrates how both Spanish and Tojolab’al discourse markers combine in indigenous discourse structure, reinforcing a linguistic ideology that values repetition. Cristina Buenrostro’s chapter, ‘Some typological differences between Chuj and Tojolabal’, presents morphosyntactic evidence that those two Mayan languages are more typologically distinct than was supposed, due to loss of contact with each other and influence from other languages. Una Canger’s chapter, ‘(Changing) word prosody in Nahuatl’, compares sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth century descriptions of Nahuatl pronunciation, as well as old and new Spanish loan words to illustrate how Nahuatl may be losing phonemic vowel quantity and developing a pattern of word stress on the penultimate syllable. Claudine Chamoreau’s chapter, ‘On the development of analytic constructions in Purepecha’, examines analytic constructions that have developed alongside synthetic constructions without supplanting them; speakers can use either the analytic or the synthetic construction to different pragmatic effects.

The chapter ‘Typological differences among middle constructions in some Uto-Aztecan languages’, by Zarina Estrada Fernández and Rolando Félix Armendáriz, compares middle voice constructions in Yaqui, Warihio (Taracahitan), Pima Bajo, and Southern Tepehuan (Tepiman). In their chapter, ‘Language contact and language typology: Anything goes, but not quite’, Ewald Hekking, Dik Bakker, and Jorge Gómez Rendón, investigate the role of typological differences in Otomi, Quichua, and Guarani in how each borrows from Spanish. Anita Herzfeld, in ‘An evaluation of the linguistic vitality of contact languages: The English-based Limonese Creole of Spanish-speaking Costa Rica’, illustrates that the strong ideological link between language and identity contributes to the survival of Limonese Creole in contact with Spanish. Yolanda Lastra, in ‘Paucity of loans in Jonaz-Chichimec’, describes a situation in which this Oto-Pamean language has borrowed surprisingly little from Spanish, despite widespread bilingualism in the population. ‘Differences in incorporation of Spanish elements in Guarani texts and Guarani elements in Spanish texts in Paraguayan newspapers’, by Lenka Zajícová, examines the social, cultural, and pragmatic versus the typological factors that differentiate patterns of Spanish loans in Guarani from Guarani loans in Spanish.

Together, these chapters approach language change in America with sensitivity to both language-internal and contact phenomena. The chapters focus on change at the morphosyntactic and prosodic levels, but also address sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars of contact linguistics, of Amerindian languages, and of typology.