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Routledge Language Family Series

About the Book Series

Each volume in this series contains an in-depth account of the members of some of the world's most important language families. Written by experts in each language, these accessible accounts provide detailed linguistic analysis and description. The contents are carefully structured to cover the natural system of classification: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, semantics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics.

Every volume contains extensive bibliographies for each language, a detailed index and tables, and maps and examples from the languages to demonstrate the linguistic features being described. The consistent format allows comparative study, not only between the languages in each volume, but also across all the volumes in the series.

17 Series Titles


The Tungusic Languages

The Tungusic Languages

1st Edition

Edited By Alexander Vovin, José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente, Juha Janhunen
May 06, 2025

The Tungusic Languages is a survey of Tungusic, a language family which is seriously endangered today, but which at the time of its maximum spread was present all over Northeast Asia. This volume offers a systematic succession of separate chapters on all the individual Tungusic languages, as well ...

The Uralic Languages

The Uralic Languages

2nd Edition

Edited By Daniel Abondolo, Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi
November 29, 2024

The Uralic Languages, second edition, is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Uralic family. The Uralic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching ...

The Turkic Languages

The Turkic Languages

2nd Edition

Edited By Lars Johanson, Éva Á. Csató
October 04, 2024

The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from southern Iran to the Arctic Ocean and from the Balkans to the great wall of China. There are currently 20 literary languages in the group, the most important among them being Turkish with over 70 million speakers; ...

The Indo-Aryan Languages

The Indo-Aryan Languages

1st Edition

Edited By George Cardona, Danesh Jain
July 01, 2021

The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old ...

The Languages of Japan and Korea

The Languages of Japan and Korea

1st Edition

Edited By Nicolas Tranter
May 24, 2017

The Languages of Japan and Korea provides detailed descriptions of the major varieties of languages in the region, both modern and pre-modern, within a common format, producing a long-needed introductory reference source. Korean, Japanese, Ainu, and representative members of the main groupings of ...

The Celtic Languages

The Celtic Languages

2nd Edition

Edited By Martin J. Ball, Nicole Muller
November 24, 2015

The Celtic Languages describes in depth all the Celtic languages from historical, structural and sociolinguistic perspectives with individual chapters on Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Breton and Cornish. This second edition has been thoroughly revised to provide a comprehensive and ...

The Munda Languages

The Munda Languages

1st Edition

Edited By Gregory D.S. Anderson
August 12, 2014

The Munda group of languages of the Austroasiatic family are spoken within central and eastern India by almost ten million people. To date, they are the least well-known and least documented languages of the Indian subcontinent. This unprecedented and original work draws together a distinguished ...

The Iranian Languages

The Iranian Languages

1st Edition

Edited By Gernot Windfuhr
August 27, 2012

The Iranian languages form the major eastern branch of the Indo-European group of languages, itself part of the larger Indo-Iranian family. Estimated to have between 150 and 200 million native speakers, the Iranian languages constitute one of the world’s major language families. This comprehensive ...

The Tai-Kadai Languages

The Tai-Kadai Languages

1st Edition

Edited By Anthony V. N. Diller, Jerold A. Edmondson, Yongxian Luo
October 04, 2011

With close to 100 million speakers, Tai-Kadai constitutes one of the world's major language families. The Tai-Kadai Languages provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions in the area. It presents an important overview of Thai that includes ...

The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar

The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar

1st Edition

Edited By Alexander Adelaar, Nikolaus Himmelmann
June 09, 2011

Some 800 Austronesian languages are spoken in the area extending from Madagascar to eastern Indonesia and to the north to Taiwan and the Philippines. They vary greatly in almost every possible respect, including the size and social make-up of the speech communities and their typological profiles. ...

The Oceanic Languages

The Oceanic Languages

1st Edition

Edited By John Lynch, Malcolm Ross, Terry Crowley
May 26, 2011

The Oceanic Languages form a closed subgroup within one of the world’s largest language families, Austronesian. There are between 1000 and 1500 Austronesian languages (estimates vary), with so much structural diversity that they are best handled in two volumes, one on the Oceanic and one on the ...

The Mongolic Languages

The Mongolic Languages

1st Edition

Edited By Juha Janhunen
May 17, 2011

The Mongolic Languages represents the first comprehensive treatment of the Mongolic language family in English. The Mongolic languages form a linguistically well defined but geographically widely dispersed family of more than a dozen separate languages, distributed from East and North Asia (...

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