Reviewed by Harald Hammarström, Chalmers University

The Tamang number over a million and are Nepal’s fifth largest language group. The dialect of Dhankute has considerably fewer speakers, around 10,000 to judge from census figures, and almost all are bilingual in Nepali. The Dhankute dialect has not been previously described, but there are dictionaries and grammar sketches of other Tamang varieties (by Westerners as well as natives). The present work appears to be based on interviews with native speakers, but the location is not specified.

Tamang belongs to the Tamang-Gurung-Thakali-Manang subgroup of Tibeto-Burman. The debates concerning the relationships of the various Tibeto-Burman subgroups are not entered into and, though a few passages from ethnographic works are cited, the contribution of this work is a synchronic sketch of the Dhankute variety.

The book sets off with a fairly extensive phonological description. There are ten vowels, eight diphthongs, and thirty-seven consonants reflecting the fact that all consonants (except h) have an aspirated counterpart. Stress is not phonemic and there is no phonemic tone. The absence of tones is quite interesting given that other varieties of Tamang have been described as having four tones (cf. Matisoff, J. A. Genetic versus contact relationship: Prosodic diffusibility in South-East Asian languages. Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance, ed. by A. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon, 291–327. Oxford University Press, 2001; Noonan, M. Chantyal. The Sino-Tibetan languages, ed. by G. Thurgood and R. J. LaPolla, 315–335. Routledge, 2003).

Following the phonology section, there is a lexicon section that contains notes on the lexical make-up and information on morphophonological processes. The next chapter, ‘Syntax’, presents syntax and morphology. Although the order of presentation is not always what one would expect, all major morphosynctactic aspects—word classes, phrases, clause combinations, and the tense/aspect system—are covered. On all of these matters Dhankute Tamang looks like a typical Tibeto-Burman language of this region. The demonstratives (and locative adverbs) encode not only distance but also three levels of physical location, that is, low ‘this-down-here’, level ‘this-at-the-same-level-as-us’, high ‘this-up-here’.

The grammar should be of interest to Himalayists and typologists alike. The author is committed to a modern functional description style with interlinear examples. There is a more than fair amount of spelling, typesetting, and reference errors but nothing serious.