Grammar highlights 2022

This year LT’s Grammar Highlights differs from those in the past, in that it includes an explanatory note which outlines the decision-making process that results in what grammars or grammar sketches are included in this section of the journal. It also serves as a brief explanation about the general information that is included for each language. I inherited the Grammar Highlights section from LT’s previous book review editor, Tatiana Nikitina, and I thank her for passing on her knowledge of how to prepare each year’s Grammar Highlights. Certain steps in the process outlined below follow from her instructions; other steps and inclusion criteria were adopted after I came on as grammar review editor for the journal in 2022.

Each Grammar Highlights is organized by macro-areas (see Hammarström and Donohue 2014) and these macro-areas are listed alphabetically. Within each macro-area heading, there are one or more entries with grammars or grammar sketches published in the previous year, all organized alphabetically by the first letter of the title. For each entry, additional information for the language described in the grammar or grammar sketch is provided. This includes: Glottocode, ISO code, vitality status, and genetic affiliation. Three steps of the writing/preparation process for each Grammar Highlights require some clarification.

The initial step concerns finding information about new grammars or grammar sketches. This process has been done in one of two ways in the past: (1) by going to the websites for different linguistics publishers and checking their recent publications and (2) by using Glottolog (Hammarström et al. 2023). I initiated the latter approach in 2022 and it is what I follow now. This includes doing a search of the Glottolog References, filtering by year to capture all the publications that appeared in the relevant year (for this year’s Highlights, the filtering was done for 2022) and then filtering those by choosing “grammar” and “grammar_sketch” under the Doctype field in Glottolog. This has one main advantage over the first approach in that it captures publications by minor publishers or non-linguistics publishers (such as the sketch of Cuoi published by the University of Hawai’i Press included in this year’s Grammar Highlights) without it being a time-consuming task that relies on the knowledge of a single person (in this case, the grammar review editor) about what publishers should be searched. This said, the first year this method was trialed (2021), the lists from both methods were remarkably similar.

Once this initial list is compiled, each reference is further carefully considered before it is included in the Highlights. The process to determine inclusion follows a few simple criteria:

1. Is it a grammar or grammar sketch? Glottolog largely relies on software that scrapes the Internet for new publications and tags them for language and document type. This process is not done by a human and as such, it is prone to errors. For instance, in this year’s list, there were several publications marked as “grammar” or “grammar_sketch” that were neither.

2. Is it a published grammar or grammar sketch? Determining the publication status of a particular reference ensures that the grammar or grammar sketch has undergone some form of peer review. This of course has a clear disadvantage: no dissertation/thesis grammars or grammar sketches are included in the Grammar Highlights. However, given the imbalance concerning which universities have online repositories or an online presence that would allow their students’ dissertations/theses to be captured by the Glottolog software in the first place (mostly those in the Global North), this strategy creates a more level playing field. This criterion also filters out self-published books or manuscripts in repositories such as Open Science Framework which have not undergone peer review.

3. Is the grammar or grammar sketch comprehensive enough to be informative/useable for typologists? This is a rather subjective question but one that can be answered based on the topics covered (some phonology and some morphosyntax at a minimum) and the length of the sketch. A minimum length of 100 pages has been set as the threshold for inclusion, and while this number is somewhat arbitrary, it filters out shorter sketches that, while excellent, might not constitute a reference work that can be relied upon to answer a particular typological research question. In 2022, for instance, the edited volume An introduction to the Japonic languages (Shimoji 2022) included short sketches for ten Japonic varieties and The Oxford guide to the Uralic languages (Bakró-Nagy et al. 2022) included 32 sketches. In neither case were these sketches included in the present Grammar Highlights. Similarly, sketches that are less than 100 pages and appear as part of a larger volume are not included (for instance, Boerger’s 2022 71-page sketch of Natqgu which serves as an introduction to her text collection; or the 78-page sketch of Kanashi by Saxena et al. 2022).

The second and third steps that bear clarification both concern the information included for each language. As mentioned above, for each entry, the Glottocode, ISO code, vitality status and genetic affiliation for the language are listed after the bibliographic information. This information comes primarily from Glottolog. The Glottocode and ISO code are included in order to help disambiguate which language a particular reference concerns, since a given language may be known by various names in the literature or may share a name with other languages. A concrete example can be found in this year’s Grammar Highlights: Saxena’s sketch of Kinnauri Pahari (Glottocode: hari1246, ISO 639-3: kjo) concerns a language that shares its name with two other languages, namely Kinnauri (Glottocode: kinn1249, ISO 639-3: kfk) and Pahari Potwari (Glottocode: paha1251, ISO 639-3: phr). The genetic affiliation also follows Glottolog, which clearly indicates where the information came from by citing a reference under “Comments on subclassification” for each language or language variety.

Glottolog also includes information on vitality status by providing what they call an Agglomerated Endangerment Status (AES) which is derived from three major endangerment databases as explained in Hammarström et al. (2018: 366–369) and which has the advantage of having more complete coverage than any one single database by itself. The labels used by Glottolog are: not endangered, threatened, shifting, moribund, nearly extinct and extinct. These follow an earlier approach of using metaphorical labels associated with species endangerment, the last three of which can be distressing to speakers and communities (see discussion in Grenoble 2011: 41). Given the potential, perceived and real impacts of such negative terms—clearly articulated by Hill (2002), Leonard (2008, 2023 and Davis (2017)—starting with this Grammar Highlights (2022), an additional step has been taken to check the vitality status of any language labeled on Glottolog as “moribund”, “nearly extinct” or “extinct” on the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat). I use the ELCat labels “severely endangered”, “critically endangered”, “dormant”, and “reawakening” instead. This second set of labels avoids the death- and extinction-related metaphorical labels mentioned above. It also captures more fine-grained distinctions, separating languages that have ceased to be spoken but are being reintroduced into their communities (reawakening) and languages that are not currently spoken or being reintroduced but for which a heritage community exists and can therefore be potentially reintroduced (dormant) from languages that have ceased to be used in a more permanent way (e.g., Etruscan).^[1]