The Language of Hunter-Gatherers

Description

Hunter-gatherers are often portrayed as 'others' standing outside the main trajectory of human social evolution. But even after eleven millennia of agriculture and two centuries of widespread industrialization, hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist. This volume, using the lens of language, offers us a window into the inner workings of twenty-first-century hunter-gatherer societies - how they survive and how they interface with societies that produce more. It challenges long-held assumptions about the limits on social dynamism in hunter-gatherer societies to show that their languages are no different either typologically or sociolinguistically from other languages. With its worldwide coverage, this volume serves as a report on the state of hunter-gatherer societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and readers in all geographical areas will find arguments of relevance here.

Tom Guldemann is Professor for African linguistics and sociolinguistic at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. He specializes in African linguistics with a particular focus on languages subsumed under 'Khoisan' in the Kalahari Basin area of southern Africa as well as on Bantu and wider Niger-Congo. Patrick McConvell has worked on Australian Indigenous languages especially in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. He has published extensively on the social history of Hunter-gatherer languages in general, and language shift, code-switching and mixing of languages. Richard A. Rhodes is Associate Professor of Linguistics at University of California, Berkeley and an internationally recognized expert in Algonquian studies. His recent work has focused on descriptive syntax and nineteenth-century-Ojibwe/Ottawa documents.

'Overall, this is a fascinating volume that presents many inter-related case studies of how language histories are shaped by HG lifeways, and especially their interaction with neighbouring food producers.' John Mansfield, LINGUIST List