Publication of the week: Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics

Stephen Pax Leonard, Some Ethnolinguistic Notes on Polar Eskimo (Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics 37) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015). 275 pp.  ISBN:  978-3-0343-1947-8.

The series Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics, which publishes a broad range of linguistics work, is edited by Buckingham professorial research fellow Dr Graeme Davis and research fellow Mr Karl Bernhardt.  They are also the editors of the Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics.

Stephen Pax Leonard’s book is on a North Greenlandic language on the brink of extinction, spoken by about 770 people in the world’s northernmost permanent non-military settlement. The book is a dictionary with language notes using the orthography established by the author in conjunction with the local Inugguit community, an extremely difficult task for a language made up of such an aberrant phonology and with no written tradition.