The Languages of East and Southeast Asia: An Introduction

by Cliff Goddard

This book introduces readers to the remarkable linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It combines serious but accessible treatments of diverse areas not usually found in a single for example, word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families and typology, key syntactic structures, writing systems, communicative style. Written with great clarity and an eye for interesting examples, the book is a textbook for students of linguistics, Asian languages, and Asian studies.

Genres: Nonfiction, Linguistics, Language

336 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2005

Reviews

[emmy]

I think its boring as fuck to cover a HUGEEEE sprachbund but barely touch on historical linguistics. guys u cannot go on and on and on abt areal classification without at least peppering in some of how geographic closeness affects language characteristics vs genetic closeness. I got a little bit bored and started just skipping to all of the sections on sinitic languages bc that is one of my favorite language families <3 dont ask why im reading textbooks for fun

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cliff Goddard's THE LANGUAGES OF EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA is a textbook examining the general features of the languages of this part of the world. Chinese, Lao, Thai, Malay, etc. all share many things in common, such as tone, lack of inflection, (in some cases) non-alphabetic writing systems, honorific pronouns, and so forth. The material is divided into six sections. "Language families, linguistic areas and language situations" is an overview of genetic affiliation and areal convergence. "Words: origins, structures, meanings" discusses the formation of the lexica of these languages, through such things as borrowing, derivation, and compounding. "Grammatical topics" is mainly about aspect, and marking of sentence elements. "The soundscape of East and Southeast Asia" is, as the title makes clear, about phonology and beyond the phoneme inventory covers (over three pages) tones and tone sandhi. "Writing systems" contests the common sentiment that writing is not part of "pure" linguistics and shows how systems such as that of Chinese is bound tightly with the spoken language. Finally, "The art of speaking" examines what eloquent speech means here, such as the use of proverbs and sayings, honorific forms, and "cultural scripts".

As THE LANGUAGES OF EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA is a textbook, each chapter closes with a list of linguistic terms meant to be memorised, and at the end of the book are exercises and their solutions linked to each exercise, as well as a general glossary.

I was disappointed to find that the perspective is purely synchronic, historical linguists will find little of interest here. There are many places where the author could have many revelant diachronic points. For example, lexical tone is very common in these languages, but each language developed at different times, with Chinese generating tones from now-lost final consonants only during the Middle Chinese period. For students interested in these languages as they are now, this book will nonetheless provide some enjoyable reading.

[Leon Braun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to SEA and Asian languages.