Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes

This volume presents the most comprehensive overview in English of the languages of the Central Andes, spoken primarily in Peru and Bolivia. Efforts to describe and document Central Andean languages, as well as philological research into colonial documentation and texts, have blossomed in recent decades; here, the major protagonists and drivers of these exciting developments are given the opportunity to showcase their research achievements in one volume.

Following an introductory part providing background information on the region and its cultural and linguistic diversity, chapters in Part II provide extensive descriptions of individual languages that not only reflect current knowledge, but also add to our understanding of their phonological and grammatical structures. The third part offers substantial typological comparative analyses that reflect the pivotal role Central Andean languages have played in investigations into topics of current theoretical interest, such as the notions of linguistic complexity and evidentiality. Part IV explores topics relating to the history of the language from early prehistory to the colonial period, while chapters in the final part shed light on the cultural, geographic, and sociolinguistic settings in which Central Andean languages are spoken, and discuss language contact situations and language ideologies. The Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes will be of interest not only to students and researchers specializing in Andean languages, but also to typologists, comparative linguists, and linguistic anthropologists.

Matthias Urban, Researcher, CNRS laboratory ’Dynamique du langage’

Matthias Urban is Researcher at the CNRS laboratory ＂Dynamique du language＂, where he directs an ERC project on historical dynamics in language geography. He has held prior appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the universities of Leiden, Marburg, and Tübingen, where he was principal investigator of the Junior Research Group ＂The Language Dynamics of the Ancient Central Andes,＂ hosted by the University of Tübingen and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)’s Emmy Noether Programme. His research interests include historical linguistics, in particular of the Andes, language contact, and linguistic typology.