• DOI:10.1146/ANNUREV.AN.19.100190.001521
• Corpus ID: 146205659

Studies of North American Indian Languages

@article{Mithun1990StudiesON,
  title={Studies of North American Indian Languages},
  author={Marianne Mithun},
  journal={Annual Review of Anthropology},
  year={1990},
  volume={19},
  pages={309-330}
}

• M. Mithun
• Published 1990
• Linguistics
• Annual Review of Anthropology

The study of North American Indian languages has been shaped by several circumstances. Since its beginning, most research has been based in fieldwork: Data have come from direct contact with speakers, usually in their own cultural settings, rather than from secondary sources. Although the number of languages indigenous to North America is large, several hundred, the number of scholars working with most of them has been relatively small, often only one or two individuals per language. A center of scholarly interaction has thus been the community of those studying languages all over the Americas, languages that are quite diverse genetically and typologically. These factors, the grounding in fieldwork and the composition of the scholarly community, have affected the kinds of work undertaken, the theoretical issues addressed, the nature of the explanations sought, and the applications made. The field is in many ways highly anthropological: strongly contextualized linguistically, culturally, and typologically. The researcher who works directly with speakers of a little-documented language needs basic proficiency in all areas of linguistic structure. It is seldom possible to achieve insights about syntax, for example, without sufficient phonetic skill to hear accurately, sufficient understanding of phonology to construct a usable transcription, and sufficient knowledge of morphology to be aware of the grammatical functions signaled within words. The importance of broad competence has shaped the kinds of description and explanation that have come out of the field. Structures are usually considered in the context of other structures in the language rather than in isolation.