Southeast Asia is a region of high linguistic diversity and dynamic multilingualisms. The complex histories of language contact and the associated processes of convergence have marked out Southeast Asia as a linguistic area of global interest and importance. The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area employs a systematic framework to delve deeply into the entanglements of areal language interactions. Through more than 700 pages, this volume provides a detailed illustration of the linguistic area as a whole, and also deepens our understanding of what a language is in this region.
The languages examined in this volume were selected to present several angles on the diversity of the area, in addition to the Mainland Southeast Asia geographical core from which features are believed to have diffused outwards to more peripheral areas. The volume includes several lesser-known languages such as Bangladeshi Khumi (Sino-Tibetan; related varieties in Myanmar), Pwo Karen (Sino-Tibetan; Myanmar and Thailand), Na/Mosuo (Sino-Tibetan; Yunnan, China), Mong Leng (Hmong-Mien; Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and China), Wa (Austroasiatic; Burma and China), Eastern Cham (Austronesian; Vietnam) and Min Chinese (Sino-Tibetan, diaspora communities). Well-known languages with significant historical and social status in the region include Austroasiatic Khmer, Vietnamese and Mon, Tai-Kadai Thai and Austronesian Malay. As James Matisoff suggests in the Preface, the areal forces driving change in this region include both the pull of large Indic and Sinitic languages as well as other languages with strong, but more localized cultural influence such as Tibetan and the Tai languages.
The 13 chapters navigate three intersecting themes. First, several of these languages are minority languages and are losing ground to dominant national and regional languages. In addition to the threat of eventual disappearance, this situation accelerates the pace of linguistic convergence, further eroding linguistic diversity as the languages are transformed to resemble each other. The second theme is the state of the art of areal typology, focusing on the geographic extent delineated by shared linguistic features. Third is the question of whether features of a language can be understood as the result of genetic inheritance or language contact. This work differentiates itself from major previous works, for example The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art (Enfield and Comrie (eds) 2017, Pacific Linguistics) which undertakes a more thematic and comparative exploration of structural features that cannot be explained by genetic models of relatedness, by shifting the focus to empirical evidence in descriptive sketches of specific languages in order to offer “new information about the limits of the contact-induced convergence area in Southeast Asia” (p. 5).
The volume also makes a welcome contribution by adopting a common format across chapters to facilitate systematic comparison of typological features across the languages described. The first section, Phonology, provides a survey of vowel systems, tone/register systems, restricted coda inventories and limitations on consonant clusters. The second section on Morphology deals with the word structure, the presence of sesquisyllables and the tendency towards monosyllabicization, as well as the lack of inflectional morphology, prevalence of compounding and other types of reduplication. The third section on Grammar and Syntax treats the nominal, verbal and the clausal domains, introducing characteristics such as elaborate classifier systems, forms of grammaticalization and serial verb constructions, and sentence word order. The final section of each chapter looks at Semantics and Pragmatics, including sentence-final particles and the encoding of politeness. These common descriptive sections, which offer sufficient flexibility for the authors to highlight the most salient features of their languages, are followed by a glossed text and a summary table of the areal features. A set of 24 maps at the end of the book helps visualize the extent of some of the salient areal features.
It should be noted that the framework encourages several fascinating topics that have typically received little attention in the literature. For example, under Morphology, authors give information on “expressives” – in this volume, psycho-collocations and elaborate expressions – as well as reduplication paradigms, drawing attention to linguistic mappings of body-mind-world and aesthetic use of redundancy, rhyme, and parallelism. Useful information on semantic domains, including food terminology, expressions of “cutting” and other common verbs, as well as idiomaticity, are included in the Semantics and Pragmatics section. These underscore the shared cultural foundations that exist across the region.
The Southeast Asian area sketched out in this book is primarily the mainland of a larger region that includes diverse island cultures and languages. The Austronesian languages Malay and Cham provide a link to the a broader maritime world, but the theoretical and empirical implications of this delineation are not discussed in depth. To its credit, the geographical framework includes languages, such as Khumi and Min Chinese, that are associated with nation states outside of the region as commonly defined by political borders. In the future it would be exciting to have a volume dedicated exclusively to less described languages, accompanied by an analytical-synthetic discussion drawing on available work on larger national languages. In any case, the “Appendix: Guidelines for writing a Southeast Asian language description” provides tools for bringing in data on smaller, endangered languages better to reflect the region's diversity, as well as the extent and depth of areal features.
This volume makes a substantive contribution to the study of areal linguistics; the editors are successful in their intent to put Southeast Asia more firmly on the scholarly map of areal linguistics. Additionally, this book touches on some areas outside of descriptive grammar that are crucial to understanding the social history (and present) of the linguistic area. These salient questions of multilingualism, literacy, social register, and language policy as integral aspects of the linguistic area should be taken up more prominently if linguistic insights are to be communicated to a broader audience of scholars. The engaging material of this volume suggests that there is great scope for linguists to engage in more dialogue across disciplines concerned with language, culture, and history.
