Lyle Campbell, American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 4.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 512. Hb $75.00.

Abstract

For more than a decade, Americanists have been working in the shadow of Greenberg's Language in the Americas (1987) and the hemisphere-wide classification of American Indian languages proposed there. Greenberg's work, based for the most part on naïve comparisons of lexical data with which he was largely unfamiliar, was met with considerable skepticism by scholars familiar with the problems of American linguistic classification. But Greenberg, a senior linguist who is widely recognized as the father of modern linguistic typology, aggressively defended his methods and results, and he made allies among geneticists and archeologists who found that his tripartite classification (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “Amerind”) dovetailed with some of their own ideas. Moreover, his book was published by a leading university press. Mainly for these reasons – certainly not for its critical acceptance – Language in the Americas has become a standard reference work. It is in most academic libraries in North America, and in many it is given a place of honor on the reference shelf – together with Merritt Ruhlen's Guide to the world's languages, I: Classification (published by the same press, 1987), which, at least for the Americas, does little more than uncritically recapitulate Greenberg.